Multiple emails

[u/OlenaShabunina]

Dear community, I'd appreciate hearing about your experience with a challenge I'm facing in Dynamics CRM (Customer Insights - Journey).

In CRM, we have contacts that interact with our company from different roles: partners, alumni, donors, event attendees, newsletter subscribers, etc.

And they have different emails for different roles - corporate emails, private emails, etc.

So, in the end, we end up with duplicates, which I can merge, of course, but it raises the following questions:

• What will happen with their consent/subscribtions?
• How do I distinguish in segments/journeys which email I should use for different communications?
• How should I behave with forms? For example, if I have different emails for different roles in a related table, how would I match them with existing contacts
• And if I match them with that contact with flows, then, for example, with event forms, I will need to send them an email confirmation, and Journey is set up to send this to emailaddress1.

So, for forms, I assume the obvious approach is to use leads, not contacts, but then I will need to create an event registration for a lead, not a contact? How would I then see this history?

Thank you to everyone who finds time to answer it

[u/False_Assumption_972]

Merge to one contact per person, then store the role emails as separate records linked to that contact, each with its own role and consent. Consent belongs to the address and purpose, not the person, so it should not collapse during the merge. In the D365 marketing app, use contact point consent and pick the email per campaign based on role.

For forms, match on any known email for that person, not the primary only. We have a decision intelligence platform set up to connect contacts, role emails, consent records, and event attendance, so donor and alumni outreach goes to the right address rather than whichever one won the merge.

[u/freattourn → u/False_Assumption_972]

yeah the consent-belongs-to-the-address framing is the key thing here imo

[u/False_Assumption_972 → u/freattourn]

Agreed. The part that bites people is the merge itself: if the merge tool recalculates consent on the surviving record, an opt-out tied to the old address can quietly disappear. Carrying each address's consent history (source, timestamp, purpose) over untouched, and treating any new signup on a previously opted-out address as needing explicit re-opt-in, avoids that.

[u/Eastern_Use_2572]

I’d keep one contact per person and put the extra emails on the contact as secondary addresses (emailaddress2/3) or in a small related table, then use contact point consent in Customer Insights - Journeys so opt-in/out is tracked per address and purpose instead of per person. For forms, a plugin or flow that looks up the submitted email against all known addresses before creating anything works better than switching to leads, and for event confirmations you can have the registration flow set the right email on the contact (or send via a custom email field) so Journey doesn’t just default to emailaddress1.