Overview
The All Subscribers list is a master list of all people who can receive email communications from your organization. In this video, I explain how email address changes are applied to Subscriber records at send time, based on different scenarios.
Transcript
Hello and welcome back to mcChat. In this episode, we’ll look at the platform behavior of how email address changes are applied to Subscriber records at send time.
In Salesforce Marketing Cloud, the All Subscribers list is a master list of all people, or Subscribers, who can receive email communications from your organization. When an email is sent from the platform and the Subscriber does not exist in the All Subscribers list, they are appended to it as a new record.
Now, Subscriber email addresses can change. In most scenarios, the platform applies email address changes to the Subscriber record at send time, but in certain scenarios, you may need to update Subscribers email addresses in the All Subscribers list before sending an email, to ensure that it’s sent to the correct email address.
The following table indicates the behavior when an email address is updated on the All Subscribers list and when it’s not.
In the first two scenarios where the send is initiated from Sales Cloud, the email address in the All Subscribers list will be updated at send time, but based on the current email address for the Lead or Contact in the Synchronized Data Extension, so you need to ensure that the synchronization interval is sufficient to allow for any email address changes on Lead or Contact records to be reflected in Marketing Cloud. By default, this is every 15 minutes.
For Data Extension based sends, the email address used to send an email to a Subscriber will not be updated based on the value of your email address field in your Data Extension. That’s because by default, this email address is only used when creating a new Subscriber record at send time.
If your Sendable Data Extension contains different email addresses for Subscribers who exist in the All Subscribers list, then you should consider sending the email from a Journey. Alternatively, you can update the email address of the affected Subscribers in the All Subscribers list before sending, or contact Salesforce support and request the default behaviour to be overridden, to allow the Email Address field in a Sendable Data Extension to update the Subscriber record at send time.
Note that if you are sending to a Salesforce Audience from Content Builder Send Flow, either a Salesforce Report, Campaign or a Salesforce Data Extension, then the email address will be updated at send time.
Also when an email address is updated from a Triggered Send, for example a Sales Cloud Triggered Send, an API-based Triggered Send, or a Journey Builder Send Email Activity (which uses a Triggered Send Definition behind the scenes) and the Subscriber status is ‘Held’, then it will be automatically reset to ‘Active’ when the email is sent. Note, this ‘status reset’ behaviour does not currently apply for triggered send definitions created using the Transactional Messaging API.
For other scenarios, you will need to either import a file to update these records in the All Subscribers list or configure an automation to update the email address and Subscriber status, otherwise the Status and email address will not be updated, and your email will not be sent to these Subscribers.
Well, thanks for watching and please visit mc.chat for more tips in working with Salesforce Marketing Cloud. See you next time!