Oracle^® Marketing Segmentation Guide > Using Marketing Segments and Segment Trees > Manage Marketing Contact Planning Rules >

About Contact Planning Rules

Contact planning rules are enterprise-wide rules that encompass recency, frequency, volume and channel constraints.

Contact planning rules allow a company to place volume, frequency and recency rules on all forms of communication across customer, channel, and program dimensions. Examples of contact planning rules include:

• Channel Volume Limiting;
  • 1,000 Outbound Calls per Day
  • 250,000 Emails per Week
  • Maximum of 100,000 direct mails
• Program Volume Limiting;
  • Maximum of 1,000 product downloads per day
  • Maximum of 500 total product giveaways
• Channel Frequency Limiting (on Customers);
  • Maximum of 1 Sales Calls per Month
  • Maximum of 5 Sales Emails per Month
• Program Recency Limiting;
  • Must wait 60 days following a retention message to deliver another sales message
  • Do not talk about other mortgage products when one is already in the works

A channel is a logical partition of a physical customer touch point. For example, the email touch point may have a Revenue/Cross Sell E-Mail Channel and a Servicing E-Mail Channel. There may be Enterprise Contact Planning (ECP) rules in place for sales e-mails, but there are no rules to restrict account administration emails (such as confirming address updates).

Volume rules can restrict channels and programs to a maximum period volume (such as daily) and lifetime volume. If a program participant transitions to a state such as Queue Outbound Call and the call center has been saturated for the day, the participant will not be queued for the call until the next day. Volume rules can also be placed on programs to control expenses. For example, a cost can be associated to each participant who passes through a free automobile test drive program, and participants can be limited to a certain number for each month.

Frequency limiting controls how often a customer can receive communication on the same channel. For example, a company may limit a customer to only two sales channel emails for each week. A program participant who has been limited on a particular channel would have to wait until the limit has passed before the next channel communication is delivered.

Recency rules coordinate competing programs across different marketing departments. For example, a company's credit card department, personal loans department, and mortgage department all have sales programs. Rather than bombard the customer with sales messages from the same company, a blocking matrix can specify the minimum time period between programs of the same category. For example, a matrix could require at least 110 days to pass before a customer is eligible for another sales program.

All customer attribute-based rules can be designed as a suppression segment. Table 16 gives an example of each type of contact planning rule and its segment suppression criteria. Note that contact planning rules use inclusion criteria.

NOTE:  If a global rule is present, it is always applied.