Ability to send an email to a different email address field custom field

[Michelle_Tizian]

I want the ability to be able to send email to a custom email field.  We have publication subscribers who prefer to have their assistants receive the publications or emails and the only way for us to do this is to create a record for the assistants too.  We simply can't replace the main contact person with the assistant's email address because the main people we have to market to are not the assistants.  

If anyone has a work-around to this that would be great--please let me know.  I contacted support and they said it can't be done. 😞

[Anonymous]

Typically this would be achieved by converting leads to accounts, creating multiple contacts within the account, and tagging the assistants as the contact for specific communications.  Are you already doing this?

[Michelle_Tizian]

Hi Steven,

Nope we're not doing as you suggested.  So they are actually not leads they are contacts to receive subscription or publication emails.  How will it work?  Thanks for responding by the way. 

[Anonymous]

You'd need to convert these leads to contacts and accounts; each company(account) would have at least two contacts, and you might add them to SFDC Campaigns to identify who should receive the emails.

[Anonymous]

Steven's approach would definitely work if you a field that would have values like "Boss" and "Assistant", maintain the tags on the assistants and their bosses Contact records and ensure that your smart campaign to send the email has the logic to include the tagged assistants not include the tagged bosses.

Also, you could potentially add a Change Data Value flow action before and after the Send Email flow action that would change the email address to an alternative email address if it exists (or if you have a special checkbox field checked) and then change it back after the Send Email flow action.  You would need to have two fields to hold the alternate email address and the permanent email address and an additional Change Data Value flow action step before the ones above that would copy the regular email address to the permanent email address field if there was a value in the alternative email address field.

[Michelle_Tizian]

Thanks Steven and Elliott,

I'm going to check with my circulation director if this is going to work.  After I  mentioned what Steven suggested above first this is what she said:
No, this won’t work. This was the issue with the subscription apps (Aria and Zuora) we explored. They base things on the account (org in our case), but not on the contact. We need it to be based on the actual contact because several people at an organization can have a subscription. 

Also the emails we send it, it's a daily email.  I actually thought that your suggestion Elliott might work, but the editors might not like it if they have to do this each time they schedule an email broadcast to go out. 

[Anonymous]

Elliott
I like your solution, If the permanent address contains custom data fields, is that data held constant from the permanent record and only the alternate address is changed in the send.  Or is the alternate address stored in the permanent addresse's data record and only used when needed?

[Anonymous]

Steven's approach would definitely work if you had a field with values like "Boss" and "Assistant", maintain the tags on the assistant's and their boss's Contact records and ensure that your smart campaign to send the email has the logic to include the tagged assistants and not include the tagged bosses.

Also, you could potentially add a Change Data Value flow action before and after the Send Email flow action that would change the email address to an alternative email address if it exists (or if you have a special checkbox field checked) and then change it back after the Send Email flow action.  You would need to have two fields to hold the alternate email address and the permanent email address and an additional Change Data Value flow action step before the ones above that would copy the regular email address to the permanent email address field if there was a value in the alternative email address field.

[Anonymous]

Jerry, not sure that I completely understand your question, but if you are going to swap out the permanent email address with an aleternate email address, they would need to be on the same record.  Also sorry for the strange duplication of my original comment.  I've notified Liz about this,so she cha have the developers look into it.