Delivery Controls

Delivery Controls in Sortment allow businesses to regulate when and how often users receive messages, ensuring that users are not overwhelmed by communications or disturbed at inappropriate times. There are four critical functionalities to enhance user experience and manage message flow, which are covered here.

Quiet Hours

Quiet Hours lets you specify a time period during which no messages of any type (e.g., email, SMS, push notifications) are sent to your users. This ensures that users are not disturbed during specific hours, like late at night or early in the morning. These are set based on the workspace timezone.

How it Works

• During the configured quiet hours, no messages will be sent to users.

• In case a campaign is due or throttled and attempts to sends communications during quiet hours, the messages will not be attempted to send to the user.

• After quiet hours end, any scheduled messages that fall within that time window will resume.

Setup Steps

1. In Workspace Settings, go to the Delivery Controls.

2. In the Quiet Hours section, click on the Edit button.

3. Set the start and end time for quiet hours by selecting the desired time range (e.g., from 21:00 to 05:30).

4. Save the configuration.

Frequency Capping

Frequency Capping allows limiting the number of messages that are sent to each user within a specified timeframe in a workspace. This ensures that users are not bombarded with too many communications in a short span, improving engagement rates and preventing unsubscribes due to communication overload. The limit can be set at omnichannel communications or channel specific.

How it Works

• The system tracks how many messages of the defined type have been sent to a user within the specified time period.

• Once the cap is reached (e.g., 3 emails in 7 days), no further messages of that type will be sent to the user until the time period resets.

Setup Steps

1. In Workspace Settings, go to the Delivery Controls.

2. In the Frequency Capping section, click on the Edit button.

3. Specify the maximum number of messages (e.g., "Send no more than 3 emails").

4. Select the type of messages to cap (e.g., emails, push notifications, SMS, any type).

5. Define the time period (e.g., every 7 days).

6. Save the configuration.

Channel-Specific Rules

• SMS, MMS, and WhatsApp: Frequency capping is applied at the phone number level. If multiple users share the same phone number, they are treated as the same recipient under frequency capping.

• Email: Frequency capping is applied at the email address level. If multiple users share the same email, they are treated as the same recipient under frequency capping.

• Any Delivery: Frequency capping is applied at the user ID level. Even if two users share the same phone number or email, they are treated as separate entities under this setting.

Global Holdout Group

The Global Holdout Group allows you to assign a percentage of your users to be excluded from all messaging. This is useful for understanding absolute impact of your experiments and marketing communications – the global holdout group will not receive any communications but some percentage of these users would still convert or do relevant actions.

You can compare campaign statistics against these users to learn about absolute impact your marketing strategies have on business metrics like conversion or revenue.

How it Works:

• A percentage of your total users (e.g., 5%) will be randomly selected and added to the global holdout group.

• These users will not receive any messages, allowing you to compare against the treatment group.

Setup Steps:

1. In Workspace Settings → Delivery Controls, find the Global Holdout Group section.

2. Click Set up or Edit.

3. Enter the desired percentage of users to assign.

4. Save the configuration.

Once saved, this will also show you the size of the global holdout group with total number of users.

Suppression Rules

Suppression Rules prevent communications from being sent to specific user segments or audiences. These audiences will always be excluded before sending out a campaign. For example, an audience of internal users could be set as a suppression rule to prevent your team from receiving customer communications.

How it Works:

• You define rules to exclude users from messaging based on audience criteria (e.g., “Active Platform Users”).

• Rules apply across all types of messages or can be customised by message type (Email, SMS, or Whatsapp).

Setup Steps:

1. In the Suppression Rules section under Delivery Controls, click Add Rule.

2. Choose the message type to suppress (e.g., any type, email, SMS).

3. Select the user segment to suppress (e.g., “Beta Testers”).

4. Save the rule.

Best Practices

• Quiet Hours: Always align quiet hours with your audience’s behavior and preferences to avoid disturbing them during sensitive times (e.g., early mornings or late nights).

• Frequency Capping: Use frequency capping to manage communications effectively. For example, segment users by engagement levels to send fewer messages to less engaged users and more to active ones.

• Global Holdout Group: Use for campaign impact analysis.

• Suppression Rules: Apply exclusions to protect high-risk or sensitive user groups from over-messaging.