Delayed email -- change of email address?

Hi,

The distributions are created when the workflow runs, but the emails aren’t actually sent till the send date. You can modify the contact’s email address in the XM Directory and the upcoming distributions will take the change into account.

UPDATE: Changing the email in the contact list did not result in the next email invitation being sent to the new address (it still went to the old address). I think that they are all triggered and “sent” at the completion of Survey A but that they sit there as outgoing emails with a delay date to be actually sent and thus moving from outgoing to sent. 

I’m thinking that there’s probably not a way to change an email address with the way that we have set them up with completion of Survey A triggering invitations for B, C, D, E, etc each with a different delay -- Unless anyone has any other suggestions???

Hi ​@Mattalica1972 

Without seeing the actual setup of your workflows it's hard to say for certain, but the directory edit should redirect upcoming invitations. That behavior applies to both XM Directory and Lite (changing the recipient email sends no new email, but all future invitations and reminders go to the updated address).

Since yours didn't, there are two likely explanations.

The first is that the new address went in as a separate contact rather than an in-place edit of the existing one. If so, your queued sends are still bound to the original row, which is untouched.

The second is that the invitations aren't addressed to the contact at all, but to an email value piped in from Survey A. If your workflow grabs the respondent's email from the Survey A response (e.g. a piped field from the completed survey) and uses that as the recipient, then each invitation is locked to whatever address was captured at the moment Survey A was completed. The contact list isn't being read at send time. So editing the contact afterward changes nothing, because the queued sends were never pointing at the contact record; they were pointing at a static address baked in weeks earlier.

I think I may have figured it out. I changed the “email” line in the contact list, but did not change the “userEM” line in the embedded data (which gets carried over from survey to survey) -- the email triggers are set to use “userEM” from the embedded data as the email address. Now both email and userEM have been changed, so we’ll see whether or not the participant gets their next invitation sent to the new email. Thanks for all your help Vincent.