The Hidden Caveat of Marketo's Send Alert Flow Step: What You Need to Know?

Send Alert flow steps are useful for notifying team members or stakeholders of important events or updates in your marketing campaigns. Marketo's robust automation capabilities make it quite easy to set up alerts, ensuring your team is always informed and up-to-date.

A Send Alert flow step

For the sake of completeness, the “To Other Emails” option in the Send Alert flow step is used to send an alert email to additional recipients not associated with a specific lead or contact record.

You can add recipients in the “To Other Emails” field, separated by a comma. Alternatively, for token enthusiasts (my favorite type of people), you can set up a custom “{{my.token}}” or use a “{{lead.token}}” with the comma-separated recipients' email addresses and include the token in the “To Other Emails” field.

So far, so good!

However, it's important to note that tokens in the “To Other Emails” option only work in the flow steps present in trigger campaigns. In batch campaigns, tokens don't resolve, leaving only the option of hard-coding email addresses in the flow step.

In practice, most of the time, Send Alert flow steps are trigger-based, meaning they send an alert as soon as a specific event occurs. This is one of the reasons why many users aren’t aware of this caveat!

Check out the quick demonstration below:

Send Alert flow step with a token in the “To Other Emails” field

When a person runs through a trigger campaign flow with the above Send Alert flow step, the following Send Alert activity gets logged in their activity log:

For the trigger campaign, the token did resolve to the set value, and Marketo sent out the alert email to these email addresses as expected

And, when the person runs through a batch campaign with the exact Send Alert flow step, the following Send Alert activity gets logged in their activity log:

For the batch campaign, the token didn’t resolve to its set value, and hence the alert email was never sent to the intended recipients ({{my.Alert Recipients}} isn’t a valid email address!)

Notice the highlighted difference in the “Send To List”! In the latter case, the token didn’t resolve to its set value. 🤯

Usually, in the real world, marketers create a single token with all the recipients’ email addresses and use it everywhere in the Send Alert flow step; this works flawlessly for trigger campaigns but doesn't work for batch campaigns (as explained above).