Updating Email via Journey Builder not changing at All Subscriber Level

Question

I've created a test that takes an updated email address and joins it with an existing Salesforce contact. I create a journey that updates the email address via a Salesforce activity. The email does get updated in Sales Cloud for the contact. It then comes back in through the synchronized data extension and I do see that the change has been reflected in the sync DE. However, when I send to the filtered DE with the updated email, it still sends to the old email address.

I thought that once I sent to the new synced DE that the email would also be updated in all subscribers. I am using the right send relationship as well.

Did I miss a step here?

Answer 1

If an email address for a Lead or Contact Object is updated in Sales Cloud or Service Cloud, the corresponding email address is not updated in the All Subscribers list.

What's more, sending to a sendable data extension also won't update the email in All Subscriber's list. The send relationship you establish in the data extension will look up the email address from All Subscribers list based on the Subscriber Key and it will send to the email found in All Subscribers.

See here how to synch updates from Sales/Service Cloud to Marketing Cloud: https://markus.codes/2017/07/14/how-to-sync-email-changes-from-service-cloud-to-all-subscribers-list

Answer 2

The location of the (filtered) DE is important. If you would place the DE in the Salesforce Data Extensions (sub) folder, and perform a send using this DE, the email address from the DE will be used. Also the Contact/Subscriber will be updated in All Subscribers with the email address as used for the send.

This works fine if the Contact (SubscriberKey) occurs once in the data. If this is not the case and the Contact exists in the DE with multiple different email addresses (typical scenario for B2B contact persons linked to different accounts), the 'first' email address found will be used to send all emails to. In this case switch to Journey Builder to send the emails.