Email Frequency Management

When sending email as part of an online dialog, a marketer might want to keep track of how many emails have been sent to a given person during a given time period, to avoid annoying recipients with too many emails in too short a time. Email frequency management lets you set thresholds for number of emails allowed to be sent in a specified time period. Counters keep track of how many emails have been sent to each recipient, and when the threshold for a recipient is reached the system queues up the remaining emails and holds them until time has passed and the previously sent emails age out of the counters.

For example, suppose you have specified that recipients should receive no more than 3 emails in 7 days, and that the 7 days begins on May 20. If, on May 20, 5 emails are intended for a recipient, 3 of these will be sent (and that person's counter will be increased incrementally for each email) and the other 2 will be queued and sent on May 28 (after 7 days the first emails will have aged out of the counters). That person can then receive one more email between May 28 and June 4 (the next 7-day period).

Email frequency management also includes a Process Scheduler batch job that runs on a schedule to decrement the counters as sent emails age out of the delivery window. You can specify that if an email ages beyond a certain point (for example, if the email announces a seminar and the date of the seminar has passed by the time the recipient can receive more emails), the email is removed from the queue and logged as not delivered.