I have a BI data warehouse which is feeding Marketing Cloud with a unique ID for contacts. I am considering using this ID as my Subscriber Key in Marketing Cloud but unsure if I would be able to have a different email address for the same individual in different business units. Eg. ID = 1234 BU1 Email = [email protected] BU2 Email = [email protected]
Note that we do not have Salesforce CRM. Would appreciate some insight into this. thanks.
No, this is not possible. The All Subscribers list for each business unit is shared, meaning any changes made to the record within one business unit is automatically applied to the other business unit. The only exception to this rule is the Status field, which you can have remain independent within each business unit.
You can in theory have independent Data Extensions in each business unit that store a different email address for that subscriber, but at send time it will only send to the email address that is associated to the subscriber at the All Subscribers level. An exception to this is Journey Builder which could in theory overwrite the email address on each send, but at that point things are getting a bit unpredictable.
I doubt this even is possible. All Subscribers list is a global list, going across all business units on the same account.
If you have sent an email to [email protected] using ID 1234, from BU1, subsequently sending emails from BU2 to [email protected], using ID 1234, will actually make them arrive at [email protected]
Briefly speaking, the Email Address-Subscriber Key relationship defined in All Subscribers overrides the email address defined for the same Subscriber Key in a sendable DE.
