Configure business rules - Frequency capping

Hey there, I’m Aaron Forrest, a product manager on the Adobe Journey Optimizer team, here to provide you a demo of business rules. I specifically want to share how you can set frequency capping rules to avoid over soliciting and bombarding your customers with too many messages.

Let’s say you’re a marketer who wishes to set a cap on your daily outbound communications, such as email. Let’s say you want to create a cap of no more than one email per day, so that your customer will receive a maximum of one email per day. I’ll navigate over to the business rules area of the product to walk you through the setup.

Here in the left-hand navigation as I scroll down, you’ll see business rules in the left-hand navigation, and I’ll select that button here.

Notice here that what I see is an inventory of rule sets. You can think of a rule set as a folder which contains all of the rules within it. Notice that there is a global rule set as I scroll down in this list here, and this comes pre-configured and is available to you out of the box. Any rules that you add inside this folder will automatically by default be applied to all of your messages. For our use case, we wanted to set a cap of one email per day across all emails going out from the platform. For this reason, I’ll create the rule within this global rule set. You’ll see here on the top right this option to add rule. I’ll select the button here and create this rule. Notice here below all of the required fields prior to saving. You have three options available to you for duration. You have daily, weekly, or monthly. For our use case, we wanted to go with one per day.

Notice here below that you have the options of selecting which outbound channel, and we do support all native outbound channels from the platform. So email, push notifications, SMS, and direct mail.

Another callout is that you can actually select multiple of these channel communications as well.

I’ll go ahead and hit save, and the last step is for me to go ahead and activate this rule that I’ve just created.

Once this rule is activated, your customers will no longer receive more than one email per day.

Now let’s get a bit more specific with our frequency capping use case. Let’s say that as a marketer, I want to set a cap of no more than one promotion-like email per day. Emphasis here on my desire to set a cap for a subset of communications that are promotion-like in nature. For this, I’ll want to create a custom rule set. So I’ll navigate back to my rule set inventory, and you’ll see this option to create a rule set on the top right.

I’ll go ahead and create this folder.

Calling it promotion communications.

And just as I did in the first example, I’ll go ahead and add a rule here on the top right.

I’ll follow the same steps of one email per day. But again, the emphasis here is that I’m adding it within this promotion communications folder, and I’ll show that last step in the process, which is the assignment of this rule set to the promotion-like communications. So we’ll do daily cap of one for email.

It’s important to go ahead and activate this rule, and additionally, it’s also important to make sure that we activate the rule set.

Here on the top right.

Now I’m ready for the last step in the process, which is the application of this rule set to those promotion-like communications. So I’ll jump over to the campaigns area of the product, and I will set up this promotional email communication. And to save us some time, I’ve already gone ahead and drafted a campaign, which is this promotional email. And what I’ll do from here is I’ll hit the edit content button. And you’ll notice at the top tab here that there’s this option to add business rule. I’ll select that icon, and here we can see the rule set folder containing that frequency-capping rule within it to select here.

We can see it’s successfully been applied, and now I can review to activate this campaign. You’ll also notice it here within the properties section, confirming that we have successfully applied that promotion communications rule set.

We’ll notice that this status goes from activating to live in just about a minute or so here. But at this point in time, what’s going to happen at message runtime, at the point at which this email is to be delivered, we will update the profile counter value. So the system will recognize that this specific profile has received this promotion-like communication, increase the counter value by one, so that we can rest assured as a marketer that they will not receive more than one promotion-like email. So if there’s another one scheduled to go out later in the day, we would suppress that communication as the system would recognize that profile that counter value has already been maxed out. So in summary, business rules enables you to create both global and local frequency-capping rules to help you better manage customer fatigue. You should now have all the information that you need to begin setting up your very own frequency-capping rules. Thanks.