What is their reasoning behind wanting to send marketing emails to non-customers through a Customer Success platform?

While there are workarounds you can do, this sounds like a tool for a marketing platform. If there are important data points from the comms captured in the marketing tech stack that CS needs to leverage later on when those prospects become customers, you could then look at bringing that data in.

@MelissaC I agree with Bradley. We had a recent discussion on the GS Slack Community, and the general consensus (although not everyone’s thoughts) was that JO was to be used for Customer communications (customer success, or maybe a little more broadly).

It’s got to start with answering some questions, but even before that, it’s got to start with a well-defined map of what tools for what purpose governance.

As the great @TMaier once said, JO is a loaded email gun, and as such it’s probably best not to use it for the wrong feat. Using it for marketing purposes is risky and in my opinion, inappropriate. It puts your other engagements at risk (loss of credibility)

• Why do they want to use JO? @matthew_lind suggests to ask the WHY several times to get to the bottom of what is motivating the team.
  • Do they want to bypass some restriction in the marketing tool (that’s a bad reason)?
• What is the legal basis for communication?
  • How will you honor or write preferences back to your marketing tool but clearly, JO preferences don’t integrate well with other systems, and using JO for what seems to be marketing outside of your marketing tool is dangerous in my opinion.
• Is Customer Success the sender? Or if not, who?
  • Will you not harm/discredit your other JO communications by using it for non-customers? 
• How will you track engagement (JO isn’t a marketing tool - attribution won’t work well, you don’t have half the tracking and let’s not talk about writing people into campaigns for touch attribution)?

There is probably a ton more questions to ask before agreeing to this, but here are some thoughts.