What's the best way to handle secondary email addresses?

[Jasmine_Foruzan]

Hi there,

Does anyone have experience dealing with secondary email addresses? For example, we recently held a conference where the registration process was run through an outside vendor. Some of the individuals registered with an email address that was different from what existed in Marketo. Thus, when it came time to send out email communications for the event via Marketo we ran into the issue of not being able to see that particular email address for event correspondence. We contacted Marketo Support and they mentioned you can add a custom field for secondary email addresses, but Marketo still chooses the primary email address when sending emails so that doesn't fully solve our issue.

What's the best way to go about something like this? Do you just upload the new email addresses into Marketo and create duplicates?

Thanks!

[Dory_Viscoglio]

Hey Jasmine, if you're needing these secondary email addresses for emailing, then you will need to create an additional record. Marketo is only able to mail to the native email address field that they store.

[Rachel_Noble]

I believe you can use tokens in the "Send Alert" flow step (triggered campaigns only, I think, but you can always do the request campaign workaround).

I wouldn't recommend it. You'll loose all sorts of tracking/reporting info that way. But it would help you to not need the duplicates floating around your system. I'm the world's biggest advocate for data hygiene.

[Anonymous]

You can create a second field for alternate email address if it's different from the primary one. Then, you can run a report on leads that have an invalid email/hard bounce. If those leads with bouncing email addresses have a secondary email, I'd run a campaign to overwrite the invalid email address with the secondary email.

You can only send an email to the primary email, but keeping the secondary email as a replacement to the primary if it's invalid is a nice option to have.