Is there an 'enterprise' email id for your contacts?
One side - primarily IT folks - argued that the email id for an individual should be single and mastered at the enterprise level; and the same id should be used for all communication purposes like Campaign emails, Invoice / Billing communication, Service issues, etc. This is similar to the way one would master the other attributes of a customer like name, address, etc. The rationale was that email is a communication channel like mailing addresses and phone numbers and typically we have a 'primary' address or phone numbers to 'best' reach the customer.
The other side - consisting of Sales & Marketing teams - argued that each department should maintain its own version of the email id for the same individual. Sales did not want Marketing to overwrite the data gathered by Sales reps; Marketing did not believe that Sales gathered any meaningful data in the first place. In short, both Sales & Marketing believed what they each had was the best and was wary of losing it to the other team.
It is an interesting debate, isn't it?
My opinion is this:
- Email ids serve very different purposes to different teams and hence can be different for different teams. Marketing sees email ids as a vehicle primarily for distributing commercial content like advertising, promotions, etc. through campaigns, whereas other departments see them as a vehicle primarily for transactional or relationship content.
- Because of this key difference, different teams treat emails differently. For instance, Marketing would not think twice to switch to a different email id if it sees a better chance of reaching the contact through that email. Sales and other teams, however, would probably want to stick to what the contact provided as the 'official' communication id for sending content related to billing, invoicing, etc.
- And there are legal implications (CAN SPAM laws, for instance) that one has to keep in mind for distributing commercial vs transactional content.
Hence, I believe that there is no such thing as 'Enteprise Email Id', in this context. Trying to force fit a one-email-fits-all solution will likely not work. Of course, one can come up with other ways of handling the problem like, for instance, leaving the ownership of the single email id with the Marketing team when the contact is still a prospect and transfering that to the Sales team once Sales starts talking to the contact.
What do you think? Will be glad to hear if you have a different view point.
