Engagement rules & categories

The options at Settings > Channels > Engagement Rules & Categories allows you to control limits on messages sent to subscribers.

Engagement rules

Disable broadcast messages

By default, campaigns can be sent to all subscribers within a project with no segmentation applied. Users can disable this option by toggling the Disable broadcast messages slider; once disabled, a segment must be chosen for all campaigns before they are sent.

Require audience count on campaign approval

Off by default. This setting enforces an audience calculation at campaign approval step before a scheduled send so a final check can be made to see expected send numbers. Calculating the audience will always be required regardless of the settings if SMS or Whatsapp are one of the selected channels for the campaign.

Require engagement category

By default, assigning an Engagement category to campaigns is optional. Enabling this slider will make it mandatory. This may be important to enforce any messaging limits set in your engagement categories.

Enable targeting application

By default, campaign messages are sent using all the available apps & sites that are available for user profiles selected for the campaign. This option allows campaign editors to choose to further target the campaign to specific apps. This can be useful if you have multiple brands in a single project and want certain messages to only be displayed on specific apps.

Click Save to confirm any changes.

Engagement categories

Engagement categories can be applied to campaigns when they are created. Categories can be used to regulate how many messages a single user can receive.

📘

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.

To create a new engagement category, click Create Category.

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).

❗️

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.

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. The lowest cap will always be applied, so, for example, there is no point in setting a daily limit of 10 if your weekly limit is 5, as the daily limit will never be reached.

Limit per channel defines how the limits are counted. If counted per channel and the limit is set to three per day, that could be three SMS and three emails. If the Limit per channel slider is disabled 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.

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

📘

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.

Global Include Condition

Global Include Conditions supersede all other rules, such as engagement categories and campaign level segmentation. When enabled, these conditions must be met for any communication to be sent from the platform. It allows you to exclude users who don't meet these attribute-based conditions.

For instance, if you want to exclude users who have deleted their account, you could configure global include conditions by adding a condition that the attribute account_deleted is not equal to true. This means that any recipients that have account_deleted with a true value or don't have this attribute set won't receive campaigns.

If you want to also include users that don't have this attribute set in your campaigns, you would need to add another condition that the attribute is not set, joined with an OR condition. See screenshot: