Successfully BCC'ing Salesforce in outgoing Marketo emails | Community
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Alexandra_Grass
Alexandra_Grass
Level 2
December 28, 2015
Question

Successfully BCC'ing Salesforce in outgoing Marketo emails

  • December 28, 2015
  • 1 reply
  • 4653 views

Hello!

Would any of you have sucessfully implemented the Marketo BCC option using an Email-to-Salesforce email address in the BCC field?

We have requested that the option be activated, and the Salesforce account we are using for this purpose is receiving the emails. However, all the emails are landing in the "Unresolved items" folder, instead of being associated to the right lead/contact, although Email-to-Salesforce is configured to automatically associate the activity to the leads/contacts, and all the leads/contacts necessarily already exist in Salesforce (since we're doing a complete sync of the two databases).

One thing we noticed is that, in the activity created by Salesforce from the BCCed email, the 'To' field is missing, and the Email-to-Salesforce address appears in an 'Additional-To' line (as opposed to a BCC line). But we don't have the access to either Marketo or Salesforce that we would need to figure out where the problem comes from.

Thanks in advance for any insight you might have on this issue!

Cheers!

Alexandra.

1 reply

SanfordWhiteman
SanfordWhiteman
Level 10
December 28, 2015

First question: are you doing this because Marketo's email activity sync isn't granular enough (i.e. only one send per lead per day)?  Or because of API usage concerns? Or... ?

Anyway, Email-to-Salesforce looks in the To: and Cc:, as you have seen. If you embed the lead information somewhere else in the email (like "This email was sent to {{Lead.Email Address}}" in the footer, or something faux-cryptic like "LID: {{Lead.SFDC Id}}") you could use Apex code to resolve the unresolved emails. (If Apex can read the SMTP headers of an Email-to-Salesforce task, that would be even easier, but I have severe doubts that this is possible).

Alexandra_Grass
Alexandra_GrassAuthor
Level 2
December 29, 2015

Marketo's limit at one activity per lead per day is part of the reason we are looking to implement this.

Another reason is that the emails we send are very highly personalised (not just in the greeting or the signature, but the actual content of the email, keywords, tone etc.), and it is not uncommon to receive replies or follow-ups to emails sent a year or 18 months before. To maintain consistency between our automated and human-to-human communication with our database, we need to keep a record of the exact emails that were sent. But systematically rewriting the "Add Task" flow step for each email we send while ensuring that it can handle both classic dynamic content and scripted tokens sounds like the perfect recipe for a nightmare!

I'm amazed that I actually thought of a similar retreatment of the unresolved items through Apex coding! (we're very new users of Marketo, and I'm not really supposed to be a dev/techie) I'm just a bit wary of going into custom coding like that, because not everybody on the team is a geeky as I am, so I'm not sure how maintainable such code would be.

In any case, thank you very much for your post! It's great to connect with other advanced users of Marketo!

SanfordWhiteman
SanfordWhiteman
Level 10
December 29, 2015

I was curious about one thing you said and had one of my clients open a case. The To: header should include the original lead's email address. If it doesn't for you, contact Marketo support.  I presume you've made sure your sender addresses are Email-to-Salesforce approved senders?

I would not be overly concerned about long-term reliability of the Apex code, if that proves necessary.  But all custom code should have a "living" owner, it's true (whether contract or in-house).

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