Email sent to phone as text message?

[Jeff_Smith3]

I recently had a customer get upset, saying that we should never have sent an email to his cell phone as a text message. As I understand it, Marketo does have the functionality to send text messages, but it requires the use of a webhook and third-party vendor. Is that right? At any rate, this isn't something that we have or do. I looked at his activity log and saw that he received the email, and it was sent to his work email address. Does anyone have any thoughts on what he might be referring to? I imagine he has something said up on his end, and he's confused about how he received the message.

[Kenny_Elkington · Accepted solution]

The only thing I could think of is if you're using MME and sent a push notification to the user's phone.  Other than that, there's no native functionality for sending SMS or MMS, those capabilities are only provided through Launchpoint partners and Webhooks.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Jeff,

Indeed, sending emails as a text message to a phone is not a good idea, but Marketo alone is not able to do this. This email has necessarily sent to an email address, not to a mobile phone number, since you have checked it in the activity log. All emails are sent by Marketo in both formats and the client system decides whether to use the text version or the HTML one. Si may be he has been using a weird system that rerouted the email to the SMS inbox.

In order to send SMS, you will need to integrate an SMS solution. There are quite a few of these in the launchpoint.

-Greg

[Robb_Barrett]

You can easily do it if you set up an email address as such.  For example, to send to Verizon you use <number>@vtext.com

Here's a list of all of them:

How to Send Text Messages (SMS) Via Email

It's possible he autofilled a form and had this saved for some reason.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Yep, I have my "urgent" messages forwarded to my email-to-SMS address. Something a little too general in the string matching rules and he could get a low-priority message sent to his phone.

[Jeff_Smith3]

Thanks Robb! I had seen that before (but I knew that wasn't a practice with us), which is why I double-checked to see that it was indeed his work email address. It seems that this was something that he must have arranged somehow on his end.