Issues with Email Send on a DE, says 0 Emails Sent

Question

I am trying an Email Send through Email Studio on a Sendable DE which has 2 sample records. My email send completes successfully and when I check the status under tracking, it says Completed but "0 Emails Sent".

To debug this, I pulled out a tracking extract for "Not Send" and under the reason column it says "Missing Email Address".

Background on my Setup

My sendable DE resides within the shared DE folder and contains Contact records from salesforce which I update using an SQL query activity from the Synchronised Salesforce Contacts DE in the parent BU. It links to the Subscriber Key using the Id field on Contact record. Also, the sendable DE contains 4 email address fields (which I know is not recommended), with each field containing a alternate email addresses for the contact.

When it occurred to me that I have no where defined which email address to use for the email send, I tried to use the Channel Address Order (CAO) but my sendable DE didn't show up there. Then I learnt that I had to define this DE as a population for it to show up in the CAO, so I tried that as well, defined the CAO for the 4 email address fields but still no luck. My email send still says 0 emails sent.

Now this is the first time I am doing a send on this particular DE and hence the contact records do not yet exist in all subscribers.

Is there something else that needs to be done to be able to do an email send on a data extension? What am I missing or how can I debug this further ?

Answer 1

This is also the behaviour that I observe. When you attempt to send to a Sendable DE (or a Filtered Sendable DE) that contains more than one Email Address field, no records are sent.

Configuring the Channel Address Order or Population won't help you here. These are specifically applicable for sends that use the Contact Model (e.g. Journey Builder), not Email Studio.

There are a couple options that I can think of.

Option 1

I would suggest not storing the email addresses in your sendable DE (you actually don't need an email address in your Sendable DE, providing there is a Subscriber Record).

Then, I would import your Subscribers separately into the All Subscribers list, with the nominated the email address.

You could automate this process by configuring a scheduled automation to run at a defined frequency (e.g. daily) that includes:

1. a query activity to populate a target DE with the Subscriber Key and email address fields for updating.
2. a Data Extract activity to export data
3. a File Transfer activity to transfer the data file to your FTP account
4. an Import activity to Update records in the All Subscribers list.

These steps can also be put into Automation Studio and scheduled to run daily.

Option 2

In your Sendable DE, set the primary email address field with an email address type, and your alternative email address fields as a string type. If you need to send to an alternative email address, you would need to create a query to populate another target Sendable DE with the email address you want to use.

Note: please understand that if a Subscriber has previously been sent an email from a Sendable DE, then you want to send to a different email address, simply setting the new email address in the Sendable DE will not update the Subscribers' email address; the email will be sent to whatever record is in All Subscribers. You will need to update the Subscriber record instead.