Engagement categories

Engagement categories can be applied to campaigns when they are created. Categories serve the purpose of regulating the volume of messages a single user receives, can restrict a campaign to a specific segment and also allow to exclude users from a specific category within a predetermined timeframe.

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Example engagement categories

"Service messaging"—a category that can be used for important notifications that must be sent no matter what other notifications have been sent.

"Marketing messaging"—a category that has limits of 1 notification per day, 3 per week and 12 per month for end-users.

"Sports news"—a category that only allows sending messages to users included in a Sports News Subscriber segment.

"Lifecycle journey" —a category that permits sending messages exclusively from this category for a duration of one month.

To create a new engagement category, navigate to Campaigns > Engagement Categories and click Create Category.

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Engagement categories in multi-stage journeys

When an engagement category is applied to a multi-stage journey, its conditions only apply at the point of entering the journey. Individual sends within the campaign won't be affected by the engagement category. It's however possible to ignore subscription by applying a specific option within email or SMS nodes. Learn more.

Name

Give your category a Name that makes it easy to identify what the category will be used for.

Allow sending to

You can select one of your existing user segments and apply it to the category or send it to your whole user base (select Everybody from the dropdown menu). If you select a segment, only users in that segment will receive messages from campaigns if the engagement category is applied.

Ignore subscription

For urgent alerts, subscription status can be ignored, and the campaign will be sent to users regardless of their subscription status (subscribed, not subscribed users and users that don’t have a subscription status set).

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This should be used with extreme caution and in compliance with consumer data protection laws like GDPR.

No collapsing

Categories can also be used to prevent collapsing of Android, Chrome, Opera and Firefox push notifications. By default, multiple push notifications originating from the same app or website will be displayed in a stack on the end-user device, e.g. collapsed. If you send a campaign using an engagement category that disables collapsing, those messages will be shown individually on the end-user device.

Global exclusion

This allows you to exclude users from selected categories if they have received a message from that category within a specified timeframe.

Exclude from all categories enables the exclusion of users from all campaigns within a particular category.

Limit by engagement categories allows you to exclude users from campaigns within a selected category.

Limit by time frame allows you to define a specific time period for the exclusion. This field cannot be left blank, to ensure the feature is configured correctly.

Frequency capping

Limits can be applied optionally per day, week, and/or month. This will prevent too many messages from being sent to a user in any of those set time periods. Limits will be validated prior to saving. For instance, it wouldn't be logical to establish a daily limit of 10 when your weekly limit is set at 5, as the daily limit would never be reached.

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Limits' time periods

Message limits check the timestamp of the previous send, not the calendar day, week or month. For example, if you have a limit of 5 messages per week and you send all 5 on a Sunday, you won’t be able to send any more on Monday. You'll need to wait until the following Sunday.

Apply across all channels defines how the limits are counted. If it is not counted across all channels and the limit is set to three per day, that could be three SMS and three emails. If the Apply across all channels slider is enabled and the limit is set to three per day, the limits are counted across all channels, so two SMS and one email would reach the limit.

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Limits on journeys

In our platform, journeys are treated as individual channels. For instance, if the limit is set to three messages per day and this limit isn't applied across all channels, it means that one SMS, one email, and one journey can each reach the set limit.

Cooldown defines how long after sending a message until the end-user can be contacted again.

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Combining limits and cooldown

The order of operation when calculating limits and cooldown is for the cooldown to be applied first and then the limits to be applied after the total number of sends.

Therefore, it is important to check the two settings don't contradict each other.
For example, a cooldown of 1 day would mean setting a limit of 2 messages per day is pointless as the cooldown would effectively mean no more than one message will be sent in a 24 hour period.

It is advised to use either the cooldown or limits, but combining them for more complex rules is possible.

Click Save to create your new category.