SAP Marketing Suppression Rules and Communication Limits

[bartwito]

Hello,

We have a unique situation that we are trying to deal with.
Our contacts can share an email address and we have many contacts that will share the same email address. For example a head of a household and 3 household members will all be different contacts all using the head of household email address.

We would like to start using Rules/Limits to control the number of emails being sent instead of Segmentation because our solution is complicated and contains different brands, promotions, recalls, etc.

We want to limit that only 1 email communication will go out to 1 email address. For example if we have a recall and we send it to john@example.com but, we have that email 5 times in the system that email address will only get 1 email and not 5.

Here is the scenario we are trying to limit:

1 email per day

3 emails per week

10 emails per month

Emails above a certain priority will get all of the rules/Emails of a certain Campaign will ignore rules

We had different thoughts on how to achieve the above but, all of them potentially won't work because email is not a unique identifier - which we still need to test

1) Set the Communication Limits to tackle the "1 email per day" rule for each campaign

a) Either by setting different Categories for example Cat 1 = 1 per week, Cat 2 = 2 per week, etc... Or by having 1 limit that will apply to all campaigns

2) Set Suppression rules to tackle the 3 emails per week

a) Not sure how or if you can use the "number of" under the decision table column Suppression Parm.

b) We can also use rules

3) Will need to check how to address the "10 emails per month" as well

4) Excluding a certain priority or campaign from the rules seems to be straight forward

Does anyone have experience on our two issues?

1) Limit 1 communication email per one email address. So john@example.com will only get 1 email instead of 5 without using Segmentation

2) Setting up suppression rules to deal with the limit of "3 emails per week" or "10 emails per month"

Thanks,

Bar

[steffens]

Hi Bar,

I did not implement the same yet but I would like to point out that the segmentation, the limits on communication categories AND the suppression rules all work based on specific contacts. Even if these various options would allow to define your intended limits, they would only work on a per-contact base instead of your desired per-email-address base.

Therefore, I think your only option is the suppression rule BAdI which is intended as an additional option to implement suppression rules manually.
In this BAdI it should be possible to implement your limits by reading 'EMAIL_OUTBOUND' interactions and filtering only on the email address (and not on the contact) and on the respective timeframe.

Enhancement Spot: CUAN_MARKETING_PERMISSIONS
BAdI Definition: CUAN_MKT_SUPPRESSION_RULES

Kind regards,
Steffen

[bartwito]

Hi Steffen,

I will look into the BAdI.

Do you have any thoughts about achieving what i have described without creating a BAdI? Is it possible to create the following using the out of the box Suppression Rules? I know that we don't have the ability to call last interaction date but, hoping there is a workaround.

If IA_Type = 'EMAIL_OUTBOND' and CPG_Action = 'SEND_EMAIL' and last interaction date = today to yesterday then Suppression Param. = -1
Thinking that the above will block all emails that are sent if an email was already sent in the last 24 hours

If IA_Type = 'EMAIL_OUTBOND' and CPG_Action = 'SEND_EMAIL' and last interaction date is between 4 days ago and today then Suppression Param. = 1
Thinking that the above will check if an email was send in the last 4 days which mean will only allow an email to be sent on day 5.

What about number of CMKTSRVOCABS and IA_Timestamp of the CMKTRSVOCAB condition expressions. Can those be used to create the above rules?

Thanks,

Bar

[steffens]

Dear Bar,

The described suppressions are possible with the standard suppression rules.

However, please note that the rules work a little differently than you seem to think. The suppression parameter is added to the timestamp of the respective interactions (in days).
Therefore, you would only need to design a single rule as follows to achieve what you're looking for:
If IA_Type = 'EMAIL_OUTBOUND' and CPG_Action = 'SEND_EMAIL' then Suppression Param. = 5
This rule means that such an interaction suppresses any email for five days. Your first proposed rule would be covered by this as well.

Kind regards,
Steffen