Tip of the Day: 4 Caveats when using Adobe Marketo Engage’s CC/BCC Feature

[Jon_Chen]

Adobe Marketo Engage Champion and Community Advisor @Darshil_Shah1 has a recurring series on LinkedIn where he highlights unique Adobe Marketo Engage tips that may help you with your programs. Check out a recent tip below on the CC/BCC feature!

💡 Adobe Marketo Tip of the Day 💡

A few years back, Marketo introduced the Email CC feature that allows users to include CC recipients in emails. Marketo can also enable the Email BCC feature for users upon request to the support team.

Email CC/BCC feature is excellent for small one-off campaigns if you'd like to keep your internal team/LDRs/Sales Owners in the loop and informed about the communication sent to people from Marketo, but it sure comes with its own caveats, including -

1. All the email activities by recipients in the CC/BCC would be logged under the activity log of the email’s main recipient. This could easily skew email performance reports and can trigger off campaign flows listening for email engagements even though the main recipient did not actually perform the specified activity.

2. Using CC/BCC options for large email campaigns can overwhelm the email server, as the copied person/people would receive a copy of every single email that is sent by the campaign to people.

3. Copied recipients may click through to a page with Marketo’s web tracking code (Munchkin.js) in the email, causing them to be cookied as the main recipient. This could easily throw off any web personalization if present, and all the web activities would also be logged under the activity log of the main recipient.

4. Marketo keeps a log of the preferences of copied recipients. Copied people who are listed as unsubscribed in your Marketo DB will not receive emails.

To avoid any surprises later, I'd highly recommend users to be cognizant of these little nitty-gritties of the Email CC/BCC feature before they use it.

If you have any questions or comments, please let Darshil Shah know in the comment section below!

If you’d like to see more, you can view all of Darshil’s tips on his LinkedIn profile, or look out for more of his tips on the Community!

[michellechopin]

These tips are great!

We've had a few requests to copy internal folks on longer email marketing campaigns and even nurture programming, and while we told them that they would get every copy of every email, every time, we also noted that it can throw off reporting results and individual activity logs (this is more of a MOps concern however). We find that it's often non-Marketing folks that like to be kept in the loop for visibility and we do the following so that they get what they need but it's kept separate/outside of Marketo:

• Host a kick-off call where all the details are shared and there is an opportunity for feedback/updates
• Provide a detailed campaign document that identifies content, audience, and goals
• Provide test/sample emails in a single message so that they can see the final look (with branding, links, design etc.) without needing a Marketo log in

Thanks for always providing great resources for MOps Teams to work with and share 😀

[Darshil_Shah1]

I'm glad you found this post insightful, @michellechopin!

And yes, I completely agree with you! As you said, in most cases, it's for the folks who aren't in the Marketo platform but want to be notified of/looped in for all the communication that is being sent to people by the marketing team. Thank you for posting the common use cases as well! Really appreciate it. 🙂

[Zoe_Forman]

@Darshil_Shah1 If a sales person and in a segmentation say for channel partners or staff , to include these people in CC would you need to send the email as operational to all to all these partners/staff to also receive the email?

So far I have avoided CC in sales team in email sends, mainly due to personalisation and dynamic content. I send a Sample or HTML file for their review.

[Chris_Saporito]

@Darshil_Shah1 for #2, what are the implications if the server is overwhelmed? Risk of emails not delivering to the CC address?