How do we force Email Studio to use the supplied email address in the data extension even with an existing Subscriber Key in the All Subscribers List?

Question

My question comes from the fact that when sending an email with a Data Extension as the source, Email Studio pulls up the related existing Subscriber Key in the All Subscribers list to get the email address that's actually going to be used (as expected).

However, since our SubKey identifies the customer, he/she can have multiple email addresses pointing to, say, specific products—which in turn have their own attributes—owned by that customer.

If we were to do product-specific sendouts by making a Filtered DE for example from the mother DE, how do we force Email Studio to use the different emails (and by extension, the different attributes)? Could this be done without creating a separate SubKey for each product and/or creating an AdHoc SubKey for that sendout?

So it's not so much that I'm looking for changes in a customer's email address, capturing them, and updating the All Subscribers list, but rather having multiple valid unique email addresses for a single, customer-level SubKey.

Here are some links that might be related:

1. Override email address in marketing cloud (has no answer, but OP's comment-reply mentioned something of note: "To all: There is another solution more straightforward: theres a business rule that just needs to be activated to achieve this behavior.")
2. Is the email in All Subscribers preferred to the one in the sendable Data Extension? (talks more about a subscriber changing his/her email address)

Any insight is very much appreciated!

Thanks!

Answer 1

Below will help you understand the email address behaviour in Marketing Cloud.

It's a screenshot from Eliot Harper's video which I highly recommend you watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puQ-cOQQu9U&feature=emb_logo

Source: https://mc.chat/subscriber-email-address-update-behavior/

As you can see from above, it's not possible to achieve this directly in Email Studio.

If you have access to Journey Builder, you could start sending emails from JB using a Data Extension as the Entry Event. This would enable you to send emails directly to the email address included in the Data Extension.

The business rule mentioned in one of the links you provided can be turned off by Salesforce support. Turning off this rule, however, can lead to tracking problems down the road along with a few other downstream issues.

Source: https://powerofus.force.com/s/article/SFDO-BP-Multiple-Email-Addresses-Marketing-Cloud