What is the Frequency Cap?
As a quick reminder, here is the onboarding video about Frequency Cap:
The frequency cap is the maximum number of emails that a contact can receive within the specified time period. If this limit is reached, the contact will receive no more emails and will be displayed in the Results Summary page as Frequency cap.
How does it work?
When a launch list is generated, the frequency cap checks each contact and sees how many emails they have been sent in the last n days. Those who have reached their limit are removed.
Notes:
- If an email campaign launch is spread over more than one calendar day, either due to versions being so scheduled or due to it being launched close to midnight, the frequency cap will think that each contact in the launch list received the campaign on both days. This can lead to contacts reaching their maximum limit sooner than expected.
- Frequency cap uses your account timezone. It might happen that contacts receive multiple emails regardless of your Frequency Cap settings due to timezone differences.
If you use Send Time Optimization, the Frequency Cap will apply to each child campaign at the moment of launch.
Activating the frequency cap
To turn this feature on, go to the Contacts menu and select Frequency Cap.
Then activate the check box and set the number of emails (max. 5) and the length of the time period (max. 7 days).
When the frequency cap is activated, all emails will check their launch lists for contacts who have reached their limit and remove them.
Frequency cap runs and checks the email campaigns in every 15 minutes. These checks run exactly on the hour, for example: 18:00 , 18:15, 18:30, 18:45, 19:00 , etc. In practise, this means that, if you send an e-mail at 18:05 and another e-mail at 18:10, the second email will NOT be stopped by the frequency cap.
How is the cap relevant for different types of emails?
Batch mails count towards the frequency cap and transactional emails do not. When the mail limit for the selected time period is reached
- with Transactional Opt-in is enabled, contacts do receive transactional mails even after that but only those, no batch mails.
- with Transactional Opt-in is disabled, the contact receives no emails after that - neither batch nor transactional.
Examples when limit is one mail per day:
- Contact receives 3 transactional mails and one batch mail → limit reached
- Contact receives 1 batch mail in the morning → limit reached
If you want to be sure that critical emails (e.g. your transactional mails) are still delivered, just activate the Ignore frequency cap option for individual campaigns on the Email Settings page. Emails from campaigns where the checkbox is ticked do not count towards the frequency cap.
This option only appears if the frequency cap is turned on. All contacts in the launch list will be sent this email regardless of their frequency count.
Note that the Ignore frequency cap setting cannot be modified after launching the relevant campaign.
What happens to the contacts that are excluded?
Those contacts who have already been sent the maximum in the last n days are excluded from the launch list and are listed under Frequency cap in the table of Number of emails not sent on the Results Summary tab of the email reporting.
What happens to BCC'd contacts?
If you send emails to recipients in the BCC field, then these messages will not increase their frequency count. However, if contacts have already reached their limit, then they will not receive any more messages even if they are in the BCC field.