The Email Frequency Policy

You define the email frequency policy on the Global Options page.

When it is enabled, the global frequency policy governs all emails that Online Marketing sends, for all online dialogs. It specifies the defaults for whether the counter should be incremented with each email, the maximum number of days that emails should remain in the queue before being removed, and how the queue should behave.

Once it has been enabled, disabling the global frequency policy results in the loss of all prior logging of email. No historical data is retained. Further, it also results in the immediate sending of all the waiting emails that are currently in the email frequency queue. If you do not want this to occur, you must delete all messages from the queue using the Control Center's Email Frequency Queue page.

You can override the global frequency policy on the Broadcast Email and Single Email pages in the dialog flow—in this case, the system will use the settings you specify for that email only, but the global policy will continue to be in effect for all other emails.

See Setting Global Options.

See Understanding Control Center.

See Understanding Dialogs.

Email frequency policies specify the number of emails that can be sent to a recipient in a specified time period. Each email frequency policy can contain four policy rules.

Each contact has four aggregated counters to keep track of how many emails the contact has been sent. These counters correspond to four counter rules, which consist of a maximum email count and a time duration. For example, you might specify a one-day count, a seven-day count, a 30-day count, and a 90-day count. You can set each rule independently to Active or Inactive; only the counters corresponding to rules that are in the Active state will be updated.

Rolling counter policy rules are used to age out messages that are reflected in counters. Each time an email is sent, the recipient's counter is incremented. Each night, a batch job runs to decrement the rule counters for those messages that are older than the rule calendar window. When these counters have been decremented, any emails that are queued can be sent (provided that they comply with any other rules set for that recipient).

By default, four global calendar counter rules are included: 1 day, 7 days, 30 days, and 90 days. You can change these rules globally, or you can change them by individual email.

When emails cannot be sent to a recipient because he or she has already received the maximum allowable emails for that time period, the remaining emails are placed on the email frequency queue, where they remain until one of four things happens:

• They age out of the policy rule and become eligible for sending, at which point they are sent.

• They reach their expiration date (the date after which they should no longer be sent) and they are removed from the queue.

• The global email frequency policy is deactivated, at which point the system attempts to send all the waiting emails in the queue.

• They are manually deleted from the queue.

You can specify (on the global or individual email level) whether the email should be queued if it cannot be sent—if you choose the Do Not Queue option, emails that cannot be sent because they violate the frequency policy will simply be discarded.

You can also specify whether or not to count an email task with the frequency counter. If you specify Do Not Count, the mail service does not increment the frequency counter for that email. Like Do Not Queue, you can specify Do Not Count at the global or individual level.

If you have specified that emails should be queued and that the frequency counter is active, then each time a contact's frequency counter is decremented, the system scans the email queue to see if there are any pending emails for that recipient. Any emails that can be sent (according to the policy) are sent until the recipient's counter once again reaches the maximum allowed by the policy rules.