In Brevo, custom objects let you go beyond standard contact data by representing more complex or tailored business information. They’re ideal for modeling real-world entities and relationships that are unique to your business needs.
For example, imagine you run a car rental company. You want to track every car rented by your contacts, including details like plate number, brand, and color. You can create a custom object called "Cars" to store this information for each car and link multiple cars to several contacts, accurately reflecting the real relationship between your customers and your services.
To access your custom objects page listing, go to Contacts > Custom objects.
Good to know
To learn how to create your own custom objects, check our dedicated article Create custom objects.
What are objects?
In Brevo, objects help you structure and organize your customer data. They represent what your contacts have, in contrast to what they do (events) or are (attributes).
Every contact in Brevo is defined by their:
-
Attributes: Basic information like name, age, or location.
For example, Sarah is 34 years old, lives in Amsterdam, and is a sales manager. -
Events: Actions they take.
For example, Sarah opened an email, clicked a link, or visited your website. -
Objects: Items or records associated with them.
For example, Sarah has a premium subscription, a loyalty card, and three recent orders.
Each object has attributes that describe it, such as an order’s ID, date, or total amount. Objects can also be associated with other objects or contacts, like a deal linked to a company and a salesperson. These attributes and associations are visible on the object's detail page and listing pages.
What is the difference between standard and custom objects?
In Brevo, objects are used to represent your customer data. There are two types of objects available: standard and custom.
Standard objects are pre-defined by Brevo to cover the most common business needs, such as deals, companies, and tasks. They come with built-in attributes and relationships to help you manage and analyze your data efficiently. While they are somewhat customizable through custom attributes, they follow a fixed structure that’s best suited for typical business processes. To learn more about custom attributes, check our dedicated article Create and manage custom attributes for deals and companies.
If your business has unique workflows or industry-specific requirements, custom objects offer more flexibility. You can create and define your own objects from scratch, fully tailoring them to match your processes, relationships, and terminology.
The following table highlights the main differences between standard and custom objects:
| Criteria | Standard objects | Custom objects |
|---|---|---|
| Definition | Pre-defined objects in Brevo | User-defined objects |
| Examples | Deals, Companies, Tasks | Anything matching your unique needs: car, subscription, booking, pet, etc. |
| Customization | Limited (custom attributes) | Fully customizable |
| Use case | Common business needs | Industry-specific or unique workflows |
| Relationships | Predefined and fixed | Defined by the user |
| Best for | Quick setup and standard analytics | Tailored processes and custom data models |
Do I need custom or standard objects?
Before creating custom objects, it's important to know if custom objects would fit your needs or if standard objects would be enough. Custom objects don't offer the same level of features, and rolling your data back to a standard object is time-consuming and costly.
The following table gives a few examples where custom objects should be used to answer business needs:
| Industry | Custom object | Attributes |
|---|---|---|
| Car-rental company | Car | Plate number, brand, color |
| Streaming service | Subscription | Plan, next billing date |
| Hotel | Booking | Booking dates, room type, number of guests |
| Pet-sitting | Pet | Name, pet type, breed, birthday |
✅ You should use a custom object if:
- You manage any assets, items, or entities linked to your customers.
- Your customers own or interact with multiple things that have distinct attributes.
- You need to track the history or status of items related to your customers.
❌ You should not use a custom object if:
- An existing standard object and its properties allow you to organize your data.
- There is overlapping or inconsistent data between a standard object and the custom object you want to create.
- You want to leverage features that are unavailable for custom objects (message personalization and detailed analytics).
Use custom objects in Brevo
You can use custom objects in Brevo in several ways.
✂️ Segmentation
Just like standard objects, you can filter your contacts using custom objects.
- Go to Contacts.
- Click Add filter.
- Select the folder with the name of your custom object.
- Select the attributes with which you want to segment your contacts.
You can filter your contacts depending on the number of custom object records associated with them and their attribute values. - (Optional) Click Save as segment.
You can also use the created segments and target these audiences in Campaigns and Automation.
➡️ To learn more about segmentation, check our dedicated section Filters and segments.
🤖 Automation
To be able to use custom objects in automations, you should create custom events attached to these custom objects.
➡️ To learn more about using custom objects in automation, contact your Customer Success Manager (CSM).
👤 Personalization
To personalize messages with object data in Campaigns, you need to configure a data feed for each object type. To learn more about data feed, check our dedicated article About data feeds in Brevo.
➡️ To learn more about using custom objects to personalize messages, contact your Customer Success Manager (CSM).
🤔 Have a question?
If you have a question, feel free to contact our support team by creating a ticket from your account. If you don't have an account yet, you can contact us here.
If you’re looking for help with a project using Brevo, we can match you with the right certified Brevo Agency partner.