Sending a journey email to a separate address, waiting a fixed amount of time, then sending to contact

Question

I have a journey on Marketing Cloud where there are 7 different endpoints for the contact to reach, and each endpoint has a different email required. What I'm trying to achieve at each endpoint is:

1. Send email containing journey contact information to hard-coded email address (e.g. [email protected]) this will be the same email for all 7 endpoints.

2. Wait a fixed length of time (e.g. 3 days)

3. Send tailored email to journey contact.

I'm aware you are able to bcc to journey emails but the hard-coded email will need it's own information and 3 days before the contact receives theirs. Thanks

Answer 1

If the time for a contact to get from the journey start till the end is the same for all 7 branches, you could achieve this using Automation Studio.

Before setting this up in Automation Studio, you would have to add a field in your journey Data Extension to mark when each contact got added: set up a timestamp field which defaults to the current date.

Here's an overview of the possible solution:

1. Set up an SQL query activity to run daily and search contacts that were added to the journey x days ago, for example if the total journey time is 7 days, you would look for contacts that were added 4 days ago to be able to send the notofication 3 days prior to the final send. Something like:

   SELECT * FROM [name of your journey DE] WHERE DateDiff(Day,getDate(),[timestamp in your journey DE]) = 4

Insert results to a separate Data Extension, using overwrite option.

2. Set up a Send Email Activity. First, create a sendable data Extension with the email that should get the notification and inside the email, do a lookup to the Data Extension populated by the query in Step 1.

Answer 2

This isn't directly possible in a single journey. You select the email address to use for the interaction in the Journey Settings and all emails are sent to the same address for the contact, whether it's the default email address from Contacts (All Subscribers effectively) or the email address in your entry data. You can't send to different addresses for the same contact within a given journey.

You could include your support address in your entry Data Extension and send to your support address in journey A and then use a combination of an Update Contact activity that upserts to some Data Extension and journey/automation B that uses this same other Data Extension as its entry source to send emails to the default email address in contacts. Also, you could create a custom Journey Builder activity to implement this business logic in a single journey. It's just not possible out of the box in a single journey using standard Journey Builder activities without hacking the All Subscribers email address for your contact (bad idea).