What is CC & BCC ?
CC stands for “carbon copy,” while BCC stands for “blind carbon copy”. People use this in day to day emails to send a copy to other members. But how does this work in Salesforce Marketing Cloud when you try to send mass / individual / Triggered emails?
Enable CC & BCC in Salesforce Marketing Cloud:
To enable CC & BCC feature in Marketing cloud, go to Setup > Feature settings > Email Studio > Email Optional Features > Enable BCC Emails.
Once you have enabled, you could see the CC & BCC options in Journey Builder, Transactional Email sends, Content Builder & Triggered Emails.
Apply CC & BCC using Personalization Strings:
If CC / BCC fields present in the send-able data extension then you can use those fields / attributes in CC / BCC section as a personalized strings.
If the fields are empty in data extension, then the CC will also be empty.
You can also add additional CC & BCC depending upon use case.
Apply Conditional CC & BCC using Ampscript:
You can also use ampscript to use conditional CC / BCC.
Let's say that only for certain B2B customers you would need to use CC/BCC feature.
In that case, you can use lookup functions to check if the customer is present in another data extension and if its present then fetch the CC / BCC email address.
%%=v(Lookup('CC Owner Mail','OwnerEmail','Kdnr',Attributevalue('kdnr')))=%%
But you cannot reference ContentBlockByID functions in CC / BCC as it will throw an error:
%%[ContentBlockByID("38394")]%% %%=v(@OwnerEmail)=%%
CC & BCC in Transactional Messaging APIs:
If you would like to use conditional CC / BCC using ampscript in Transactional messaging then make sure you use the option "create journey" using Transactional API - create send definition in the Payload.
You don't have to set anything BCC & CC option on definition API. Once it creates a Journey you can able to update directly in Journey builder.
Check out my previous blog to see how to create a Transactional Messaging API Email.
Once you get a success response in the API, SFMC will create a journey. Post that you can able to use ampscript in CC / BCC as shown below:
Additional Notes:
If you send to a targeted audience that contains 1,000 subscribers, 1,000 emails are sent to each CC and BCC recipient, in addition to the 1,000 emails sent to the targeted subscribers. For example, if a send goes out to 1,000 subscribers, with 1 CCed email address, 2,000 emails of your subscription would be used.
Using personalization strings or AMPscript impacts sending speed. Sends require more time to process when personalization strings or AMPscript is used. The length of the delay increases with the number and complexity of AMPscript functions and personalization strings used for CC and BCC.
The system doesn’t create a subscriber for CC or BCC email addresses. All tracking activity performed by a CC or BCC recipient relates back to the targeted subscriber. Emails sent to CC and BCC recipients aren’t included in Total Sent or Total Delivered numbers in tracking.
Opens and clicks track back to the subscriber key of the targeted subscriber. For example, if I send to example@nto.com, and CC exampletwo@nto.com and the email is opened by exampletwo@nto.com, tracking shows an open for the example@nto.com subscriber. There isn’t a note of the exampletwo@nto.com subscriber.
If the targeted subscriber never opens the email, they continue to be tracked as unengaged subscribers, even if the message is opened from the CC and BCC email address.
If CC or BCC recipients unsubscribe, it unsubscribes the actual subscriber.
Additional References:
Salesforce help link on CC & BCC .
Enabling CC & BCC Options for Email Sends in Salesforce Marketing Cloud by Eliot Harper.
Hope this gives you an idea of how to implement CC / BCC in Marketing cloud.
Please feel free to leave your feedback / queries in the comments sections.
Happy Learning!