Subscriber Key recommendation?

Question

We've setup 5 different BU's each reflects one of our brands. We've connected all 5 BU's to one single Sales Cloud instance and also collecting data from our website using REST API.

Are there any common best practices you can recommend on how to manage Subscriber Key? I've read a lot about it, bust most articles basically tell you how important it is to be aware of your subscriber key.

Where to generate the subscriber key? Can you share your experience how you solved it?

And is there anything that needs to be activated to use Subscriber Key function?

Answer 1

When using Sales Cloud I recommend using the Id of the Subscriber's Contact record in Salesforce. You don't need to handle anything regarding unique id generation, etc. in that case.

However, if you have multiple contact records per email address, you need to be aware, that unsubscribing, changing profile settings and so on won't be per email but rather by contact record unless you handle this differently in a custom profile, preference and subscription center. The positive thing about this behavior is that you can address different customers that are using the same email address and send them personalized emails (using the correct salutation for emails regarding products the customer bought and not "the email address").

A helpful resource you might like to have a look at is the Contact Builder Best Practices article in the Contact Builder documentation.