The "Email CC" option is finally here!

[Karan_Hari3]

I just noticed that the option to CC in an email is finally available! Marketo recently launched this feature. Here is the URL to the product docs for Email CC​ . Just putting this information out so that its accessible to anyone who might be searching for it!

Best Always,

Karan Hari

[Alex_Baumgarten]

Could this new feature be a way to ensure an inbox or email address received at least 1 copy of every particular email?

I asked this question in the community a few months ago at the link below, and it seemed like at the time that the BCC function was the best fit for the task. However, this resulted in of every email being sent to the inbox BCC'ed, rather than just one copy of the email.

Would the Email CC feature be a better solution to this problem? If an email used dynamic content or tokens, will the recipient be CC'ed on each individual version or send?

Link: How to ensure every email sent is delivered to a single email address

[SanfordWhiteman]

[I]t seemed like at the time that the BCC function was the best fit for [ensuring a mailbox was copied on every email].

Would the Email CC feature be a better solution to this problem?

No, it wouldn't.

The only way to use CC to accomplish this would be to ensure that one (and only one) person who qualified for every send had a certain secondary email field filled in. All others in every send would have to have that field empty. Obviously, this isn't any easier to manage than the old "make sure your CC mailbox qualifies for every send" method!

The CC feature is for a much narrower use case: to create, in essence, a group message wherein all links are owned by a single recipient. For example, sending to an executive, their assistant, and their sales owner and keeping all in the loop during a subsequent Reply-All thread. I'm not too taken with the idea because of link tracking, as you can see above.

[Alex_Baumgarten]

This is how I thought the new Email CC feature worked, but I was hopeful that maybe this would help me with this request. Thank you for the clarification.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Now that you've "stickied" the feature we're going to have to actually discuss it.

We're advising our clients not to use this feature because it's clearly destructive to analytics and subscription management . 

It's the last nail in the coffin of click tracking, for example: now not only do you have to to consider the original recipient's mail scanner, you have to consider the CC recipient's mail scanner and the human CC recipient themselves clicking the link, which will be attributed to the original recipient.

It also disrupts proper unsubscribes.  If the CC recipient follows an unsubscribe link and doesn't click Not You? (if that option is even available on your unsubscribe page), they will unsubscribe the original recipient.

This doesn't mean the feature was poorly implemented, though. It's actually a perfect implementation of CC as the entire SMTP body is copied verbatim to additional envelope recipients. It's just that people probably shouldn't have been asking for "CC" because they didn't think about the consequences.

[Karan_Hari3]

Very Insightful addition to the discussion. Thanks for sharing!

[Justin_Cooperm2]

Interesting discussion, but a few points:

• Most folks aren't doing "one-click auto unsubscribe" in their Marketo emails or the Known User functionality I think Sandy is referencing. The unsubscribe form will generally be setup to clearly show a user what email address they are unsubscribing and it should be clear if the address is not their own (this can be an issue today in general with Marketo forms for computers that are public, like at a local library).
• If you are using CC and the email is using Marketo's default unsubscribe footer, I do believe we have implemented it such that the unsubscribe landing page will not pre-fill forms with the "to" line recipient's info. Test it out and let me know what results you find. This of course won't matter if you are putting in the link manually so this is just a minor callout about the functionality.
• Many of the requests we get from customers is for a "true CC of the email".
  • In these use cases, they actually do want someone to be able to act as a proxy for the "to" line recipient. For example, sending CEO of a company an email and actually wanting the executive assistant to be able to take actions, register, sign up, etc. on behalf of the recipient and have it logged against the Marketo Lead.
  • Another request we've received about making sure it is a "true CC of the email" is so that you can include account owners on critical communications with your customers. The idea here is that the UX of responding to a thread is greatly superior than some other approach where you send a separate email, and these customers are willing to instruct internal teams not to click on links in emails they are CC'd on with their own customers. Sure, opens are impacted, but opens aren't accurate anyway so these customers are ok with this consequence.
• Good transition into the other general email reporting topic. In today's world, email metrics and activities are simply not accurate. So, while it is true that this feature may skew your opens/clicks if other folks are interacting with the email, it's not recommended in industry to put tons of weighting on a single email's engagement (especially opens). You all know and have seen how these email scanners are becoming more popular (and sophisticated) and we may be moving to a world where it will be very difficult to make sure these metrics are accurate, regardless of using CC or not.

[Steven_Vanderb3]

Justin Cooperman wrote:

• You all know and have seen how these email scanners are becoming more popular (and sophisticated) and we may be moving to a world where it will be very difficult to make sure these metrics are accurate, regardless of using CC or not.

Heck, I read and dismiss a lot of emails on my watch or lock screen now without ever loading tracking pixels or clicking links.

[SanfordWhiteman]

• If you are using CC and the email is using Marketo's default unsubscribe footer, I do believe we have implemented it such that the unsubscribe landing page will not pre-fill forms with the "to" line recipient's info. Test it out and let me know what results you find.

I did.

[Justin_Cooperm2]

Try as if you are an anonymous, non-cookied individual. Are you saying when you tested it, you saw that clicking Marketo's default unsub link caused you to reach the page cookied as the known lead AND with form-prefill happening? What were the results you saw? I will dig into this more but I do believe we added a small enhancement to try to avoid that situation.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Try as if you are an anonymous, non-cookied individual.

Of course, you know I know how to test such things!

Using {{system.unsubscribeLink}} the form is Pre-Filled as the original recipient. (Kinda has to be, it's the same mkt_tok.)

[Justin_Cooperm2]

The logic for the product populating {{system.unsubscribeLink}} value differs from our default experience of auto-appending to the end of the email what the customer has specified in Admin > Email. From your note, it's not clear if you're saying you tried out both cases?

[SanfordWhiteman]

From your note, it's not clear if you're saying you tried out both cases?

Yep, both cases, explicit use of the {{system.token}} and the admin-entered snippet have the same result.

The links are exactly the same for all copies of the message -- which of course makes sense if it's a real CC -- and all identify the original recipient, not the CC recipient.  (The messages have the same Message-ID, so by RFC they're supposed to have the same content!)

[Justin_Cooperm2]

I just took a look and it was not delivered with this initial v1 release. I have a future enhancement filed. Anyway, even if the email is the same for everyone, we can make it so that, just for these unsubscribe links where Marketo is automatically embedding the link into emails, an end user would get re-directed from our tracking server to the destination. The tracking server would be where mkt_tok is generated for the destination page. We could modify it to not represent the original email recipient on the to line (something similar to as if you had class="mktNoTok" on the link)

Justin

[SanfordWhiteman]

Hey, any more flexibility would be better. I'd definitely blog about it.

[Dan_Stevens_]

I found this to be a more preferred way of how this feature should work (I think you actually included the link in one of your prior posts, Sandy): https://customer.io/docs/documentation/fake-bcc.html