Day 20
25 Days of Sitecore EXM!
Managing the Unsubscribe
On the 20th day of 25 Days of Sitecore EXM, we continue Part 4 of the mini-series Managing the Unsubscribe. Today we’re going to take a closer look at Sending Limits, which is another new feature available in Sitecore 9.1.
Sending Limits
Another interesting new feature of Sitecore 9.1 is the introduction of Sending Limits within Email Experience Manager. Sending Limits is a way for Marketers to set a limit on how many messages a Contact receives on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. These settings are specific for each EXM Manager Root and can be configured in the EXM UI under the Administration menu.
Regardless of whether sending limits are activated or not, Sitecore tracks how many messages a Contact has been sent within the daily, weekly, and monthly period, using the EmailSent element of the ExmKeyBehaviorCache Contact Facet. Continuing our example using Test User 5 we see the following count of messages sent.
In this example, we could enable sending limits and set a cap of 2 emails per day, week, and month, and this contact would not receive any more emails from Email Experience Manager, even though they have opted into subscriptions. This is because the Monthly limit would be hit, even though the Daily period is for December 13th (the last time an email was sent) and the last week an email was sent was week 50 (and as of this blog post we are currently in week 51). However, in the month of December, we have already sent two emails, and therefore the limit would exclude this contact from receiving any more messages.
These limits are the same across all Contacts when set. There is currently no functionality that enables Contact to set their own sending limit preferences. However, I could easily see that as a future feature of Sitecore EXM.
Service Messages
As with any great tool that can provide responsible email management, there is always an exception. Also new in Sitecore 9.1 is the introduction of a new Message Classification called Service Message. This can be found on the Delivery Tab of any message.
As the help text explains, selecting the Service Email Campaign checkbox will deliver this email message as a service message, which means all recipients on the included lists (if Regular message) or the contact (if an Automated message), regardless of the any defined consent settings.
This also means, that if the recipient is on the suppression or global opt-out list, or if they have met or exceeded the Sending Limits, they will still receive the message.
This is called out because this provides immense power to the author providing them a way to create an email campaign that would ignore all opt-out lists. Great care should be taken when creating services messages like this.
Use cases where these services messages make sense are emails like password reset emails or account notification emails. These types of messages are almost always Automated messages.
Part 5 Tomorrow
We conclude our series Managing the Unsubscribe series tomorrow with Part 5 where we’ll take a look at the EXM Client API. Notable changes are included in Sitecore 9.1 that we’ll explore how to use.
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