Archival of Emails Sent For Compliance Purposes

[acouch]

I'm seeking input on how to best capture each email sent to individual recipients. I work in the financial services industry where we're required to retain any correspondence sent out to our membership. We were looking at adding a BCC field to each email program, but this is going to create a massive influx of emails to store. Does anyone have ideas, input, product suggestions? Thank you!

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

Using Marketo's CC feature is too manual for compliance purposes — it's impossible to make it mandatory.

What you want to do is enable — via Marketo Support — the universal BCC feature and then process all the incoming emails into your archive (Global Relay et al.).

n.b. There will be one BCC'd email for every outbound email + recipient, naturally, since the content may be different.

[acouch]

Thank you so much for your response. To make sure I'm understanding correctly, we would be able to use one email address in the BCC field across a variety of different platforms? 

[SanfordWhiteman]

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Thank you so much for your response. To make sure I'm understanding correctly, we would be able to use one email address in the BCC field across a variety of different platforms? 

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Right, it's one address. What do you mean by "platforms" though?

[tess_kelley]

Sanford,

I'm curious if you've seen this done any other way, besides the BCC? I am concerned about the fact that the distro list would effectively double, since using the BCC function sends a copy of every email to the BCC address. Any other creative options to send just 1 email??

[SanfordWhiteman]

Not sure what your concern is?

Yes, 2x the messages are sent by Marketo, but for Marketo this is effortless: if 1 of the messages is going to an always-up archive server, it's not an appreciable load unless you're already sending millions of messages per day.

The other way to do it is to have all Marketo emails go through your own server before reaching the outside world. This reduces (in the worst possible way!) the load on Marketo... and in turn puts all the archiving load, outbound email load, reputation management, uptime assurance, etc. on you. I'd never pursue this without a firm appreciation of what you're getting into.

[nhabischWings]

For what it's worth from someone also in the financial industry - here's what I do:

01) Send a single copy to my work email - the Compliance approved version
02) Save that in a spreadsheet with the date of send, total sent and delivered, criteria for the list, any exclusions

03) I also export lists of Leads sent the email and a delivered list

This way we have the Compliance-approved copy of the email, details for the list criteria, and also lists of Leads who received the actual email. In theory your filter criteria and lists cover the "variable content" for the email for the most part as you can say "Person A matched these criteria and was delivered the email.

To note: We also use custom object data pulled directly from our core data that updates daily so variable content data is always (most of the time) accurate.

[SanfordWhiteman]

I mean that’s good if your Legal team says it is, but it would never pass muster with our financial clients because it doesn’t represent the actual content sent to a person. Any segmentation, dynamic content, Velocity, etc. is not honored. When regulators say “You weren’t allowed to market this product to this person” showing them one non-offending version of the content won’t cut it!

(It also requires someone to manually add an address to every send, which is easily skipped.)