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Pressure rules pressure-rules

Implementing sales pressure management enables you to avoid over-soliciting the population in the database, also known as marketing fatigue. To do this, you can define a maximum number of messages per recipient. It also lets you implement arbitration rules between campaigns, in order to send the best message to the targeted audience.

Pressure rules, to manage marketing fatigue, for example, to restrict the number of letters to be sent to a population to two, to select the communication which best matches the interests of a group of subscribers, to avoid sending an SMS to a dissatisfied customer, etc.

Campaigns are selected based on defined thresholds and message weight.

Arbitration consists in making sure scheduled campaigns whose weight is greater than the campaign in progress won’t lead to excessive profile solicitation: if this is the case, the profile is excluded from the delivery.

Arbitration criteria (message weight and/or threshold) can vary based on two types of information:

The arbitration rule for defining eligible messages is applied during the analysis stage. For each recipient and for the concerned period, the message will be sent if the following formula is true: (number of messages sent) + (number of messages with a greater weight) < threshold.

Otherwise, the recipient will be Excluded by arbitration. Learn more.

Create a pressure rule create-a-pressure-rule

To set up arbitration between campaigns using ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Campaign, start by creating campaign typologies and defining linked typology rules (Pressure rules).

To create and configure a Pressure typology rule, apply the following steps:

Define thresholds and weights define-thresholds-and-weights

Maximum number of messages maximum-number-of-messages

Each pressure rule defines a threshold, i.e. the maximum number of messages that can be sent to one recipient over a given time period. Once this threshold has been reached, no more deliveries can take place until the end of the period considered. This process lets you automatically exclude a recipient from a delivery if a message exceeds the set threshold, thus avoiding over-solicitation.

Threshold values can be either constant or calculated by a formula with variables. This means that for a given period, thresholds can vary from one recipient to another, or even for the same recipient.

Example:

You can index the number of authorized messages according to the segment to which the recipient belongs. This means that a recipient belonging to the web segment may receive more messages than other recipients. An Iif (@origin=‘Web’, 5, 3) type formula authorizes the delivery of 5 messages to recipients and 3 for other segments. Configuration will be as follows:

To define the threshold, you can use a dimension linked to the targeting dimension: for example, to include messages delivered to the recipient profiles stored in the visitors table or to avoid sending more than one message per week to the same household, (which may refer to several email addresses) identified in a dimension linked to that of the recipients.

To do so, select the Count messages on a linked dimension option, then select the visitor or the contact table.

Message weight message-weight

Each delivery has a weight which represents its level of priority. By default, the weight of a delivery is set to 5. Pressure rules let you define the weight of the deliveries which they will be applied to.

Weights can be either set or calculated via a formula to suit recipients. For example, you can define the weight of a delivery based on recipient interests.

Example:

In the following example, we want to link the weight of newsletters on music to the propensity score of their recipients. To do this:

Set the period setting-the-period

Pressure rules are defined in n-day rolling periods.

The period is configured in the Pressure tab of the rule. You can specify the number of days and, if necessary, select the type of grouping to apply (day, week, month, quarter, etc.).

The grouping type lets you extend the Period considered field to the whole day, calendar week, calendar month or calendar year for dates for the period.

For example, a pressure rule which defines a threshold of 2 messages per week, with a grouping to each calendar month, will prevent the delivery of more than 2 messages within the same week AND within the same calendar month. Warning, if the period overlaps two months, the calculation threshold will take into account deliveries from these two calendar months and could therefore prevent all new deliveries during the second month.

To restrict the deliveries taken into account to a 2-week period, enter 15d in the Concerned period field: deliveries sent up to two weeks before the date of the delivery which the rule is applied to will be taken into account in the calculation

The period start date depends on how the database is configured.

For instance, if you apply a 15-day pressure rule without grouping to a delivery dated 12/11, deliveries will be taken into account between 11/27 and 12/12. If the pressure rule takes the deliveries in the provisional calendar into account, all deliveries scheduled between 11/27 and 12/27 will be taken into account. Finally, if you configure a grouping per calendar month in the rule, all deliveries in November and December will be taken into account for calculating the threshold (from 11/1 to 12/31).

Frequent cases

To make sure that deliveries for the current calendar week are not taken into account, as well as not to risk also taking into account those from the previous week for the calculation threshold, specify the Period considered at ‘0’ and select ‘Grouping per calendar week’ as the Period type.

When a period is higher than 0 (1 for example), the calculation threshold may take the previous day’s deliveries into account. Therefore, if the previous day corresponds to the previous calendar week and the period type selected is ‘Grouping per calendar week’, all of the previous week will then be taken into account for the calculation threshold.

Example:

We want to create a pressure rule which restricts solicitation to 3 messages per 2-week period, with a grouping to the calendar month.

Let’s take 6 newsletters with the same weight, scheduled for 05/30, 06/3, 06/8, 06/12, 06/22 and 06/30.

The deliveries scheduled for 12th and 30th of June will not be sent: the 06/12 delivery would exceed the threshold of 3 messages per 2-week period, and the 30th delivery would exceed the threshold of authorized communications per calendar month.

All recipients for these deliveries are excluded by arbitration during the analysis phase:

For the same rule, if you group deliveries per quarter, the recipients of newsletter no.5 will also be excluded, and it will not be sent.

Finally, if no grouping is selected, only newsletter no.4 will not be sent, since it was scheduled for the same 2-week period as the first three newsletters.

Exclusion after arbitration exclusion-after-arbitration

Arbitration is re-applied every night via the Forecasting technical workflow and the Campaign jobs workflow.

The Forecasting workflow pre-calculates the data for the period in progress (from its start date to the current date), which lets typology rules be applied during the analysis. It also re-calculates exclusion counters for arbitration every night.

Thus, for each recipient, ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Campaign checks that the number of messages to send does not exceed the threshold, taking into account the number of messages already sent for the concerned period. This information is an indicator, since all calculations are updated at the time of delivery.

If this number exceeds the threshold, the arbitration rules defined in the campaign typology are applied and recipients are excluded from campaigns with a lower weight.

Use cases on pressure rules use-cases-on-pressure-rules

Adapt the threshold based on criterion adapt-the-threshold-based-on-criterion

We want to create a typology rule to prevent the delivery of more than 4 messages per week to customers and 2 messages per week to prospects.

To identify customers and prospects, use the Status field, which contains 0 for prospects and 1 for customers.

To create the rule, apply the following steps:

Now link the rule which you have just created to a typology in order to apply it to deliveries. To do this:

To use this typology in your deliveries, select it in the delivery properties, in the Typology tab as shown below:

During delivery analysis, delivery recipients are excluded from the delivery if applicable, depending on the number of deliveries already sent to them. To view this information, you can:

Calculate the delivery weight based on behavior calculate-the-delivery-weight-based-on-behavior

You can define pressure rules based on recipient behavior: thus, the weight of a delivery can adapt to criteria which vary from one recipient to another. For instance, you can decide to send a message depending on whether or not a recipient visited your internet site, clicked in a specific section of the last newsletter, subscribed to an information service, or even based on answers to a survey, an online game, etc.

In the following example, we want to create a delivery with a weight of 5. This weight is enriched with propensity scores based on recipient behavior: customers who have already ordered from this site will have a score of 5, while customers who have never ordered online will have a score of 4.

To perform this type of configuration, you need to use a formula to define message weight. Information on propensity scores and survey answers must be accessible in the data model. In our example, the Propensity field has been added.

Apply the following configuration steps:

Send only the highest-weighted messages send-only-the-highest-weighted-messages

You want to send no more than 2 messages within the same week, with a limit of 2 messages per day, to each of your recipients, and you only want the messages with higher weights to be delivered.

To do this, you need to schedule several deliveries with different weights for the same recipient and apply a pressure rule to exclude the deliveries with lower weights.

First, configure the pressure rule.

Now create and configure a workflow for each delivery you want the pressure rule to be applied on.

When the nightly arbitration is applied, the deliveries with the lower weights for the same recipient will be excluded. Only the deliveries with the highest weight will be considered for send. Learn more.

Considering that an email has already been sent to the concerned recipients earlier during the week, the table below shows an example of the configurations that can be applied for two more deliveries.

After the extraction date is past for the two deliveries, the nightly arbitration is re-applied before the contact dates of both deliveries. This enables to find all deliveries already sent (recipients for whom a delivery is processed, recorded through the broad logs) or scheduled to be sent (recipients eligible to receive a delivery, recorded through the forecast logs).

Once all sent and potential deliveries have been listed for the period defined in the pressure rule, ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Campaign sorts them by weight, with the highest weighted first. When the threshold set in the pressure rule is reached (here no more than 2 emails within the same week), the recipients are excluded from the delivery.