Frequency Decisioning

With Iterable’s Frequency Management, you can cap the number of email, SMS, and push notifications you send to help ensure that you don’t over message users in an Iterable project. Caps can be set for campaigns and message types, with messages sent until a user reaches the daily, weekly, or monthly limit you specify.

But what if you want to optimize those caps based on your users’ personal preferences? With Frequency Decisioning (part of Iterable's AI Suite), Iterable considers each user's unique historical engagement data and chooses how many messages to send (within a range that you define) so users get the right number of messages for each message channel and type.

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# Frequency Decisioning considerations

As you use Frequency Decisioning (formerly, Frequency Optimization), keep in mind that:

• It optimizes sends for marketing messages. Transactional messages aren’t included in the message caps you specify.

• After enabling it for a period of time that you choose (either a week or a month), you'll be able to see a breakdown of the frequency caps Iterable AI has selected for your users. You can then segment lists of users based on their user-specific frequency caps.

• Frequency Decisioning selects a frequency for sending messages that's based on project-specific data. It does not analyze cross-project data for the same user.

• A maximum of 10 optimizations can be set for any project at one time. The number of currently used optimizations is reported on the bottom of the Frequency Management page.

• If a user hasn't received messages recently, there isn't enough data to choose a personalized cap, so Iterable uses the maximum cap you set. After you start sending messages to that user, Frequency Decisioning adjusts the cap based on engagement. Users who open and click messages can receive a higher cap, while users who don't engage can receive a lower cap that's closer to the minimum you set.

• For best results, set your range to reflect how often you actually send messages to this audience. A very wide range (for example, 1-99) can place many low-engagement users at the minimum.

# Enable Frequency Decisioning

To enable Frequency Decisioning, you need Manage Settings project permissions.

When managing the message frequency, you can specify an optimized frequency for each message channel (email, push, and SMS) and for each message type based on users' historical engagement data.

1. Go to Settings > Current Project > Frequency Management.

2. To specify a range of values for Frequency Decisioning to consider when selecting an optimal value for each user, select the appropriate tab, then choose Optimize for the channel setting.

3. Specify a minimum and maximum number of messages for this message channel (between 1—99). Each user’s cap will vary, within the defined range, based on their historical engagement data.

4. Specify the period of time (week or month) that Iterable AI should evaluate data before assigning a frequency value. After this period of time, you can view the audience distribution for a specified range. The time you select is also the period for which capping is applied before it’s reevaluated.

5. To specify an optimized frequency value for a specific message type, repeat steps 2–4 for the desired type—the value you specify, here, overrides other channel-specific values you’ve provided.

6. Click Save Changes.

# Review Frequency Decisioning audience distribution

To generate an optimized frequency value for each of your users, Iterable AI analyzes user data for the period of time you specify (either a week or a month). Iterable then spends some time determining the appropriate optimizations for your users.

Following Iterable's evaluation, go to the Frequency Management page and under Audience Distribution by Optimized Frequency, view the number of optimized sends Iterable selected and the percentage of the audience that received each.

Alternatively, you can view each user’s frequency cap in their user profile under itblDS: frequencyOpt.

# Segment users by their Frequency Decisioning value

You can segment your users based on their unique channel or message type preferences, as follows:

• To create user lists for users with a specific message-type optimization value or range of values, use itblDS.frequencyOpt.caps.messageType<ID>.

• To segment users with a specific channel optimization value or range of values, use itblDS.frequencyOpt.caps.<channel>.

For example, if you set a range of 7–11 messages per week for a message type with an id of 343235, and you want to create a list of the users who are most likely to engage with a number of messages in the higher end of that range, create a segment like this:

For more information, see Segmentation Overview.

# Frequency Decisioning Insights overview

After you’ve sent messages with Frequency Decisioning enabled, you can learn a lot about how your optimized messages are performing by reviewing Frequency Decisioning Insights. You can:

• Learn how key performance indicators (Open Rate, Click Rate, or Unsubscribe Rate) are performing over time.

• Learn how many optimized users were sent messages for a given channel (email, SMS, or push).

• View various lift metrics to learn how a treatment group (those who received optimized messages) performed when compared to a control group (those who received only unoptimized messages).

• Analyze the lift, unsubscribes, and send skips for each message type by channel.

# Review Frequency Decisioning Insights

To review how your message sends are being optimized:

1. Go to Insights > Intelligent Insights to open the Frequency Decisioning Insights page.

2. At the top of the page, filter message sending optimizations to display data for the past 30, 60, or 90 days. A 30 day view allows you to focus on the impact of a specific campaign, while a 90 day view may help you evaluate how well optimizations are performing more broadly.

3. In the Performance Over Time chart, view how optimized message sends performed for a specific metric over a period of time, the average number of sends, and which performance metric had the biggest lift and change since the previous period.

   

4. In Breakdown by Channel, click the tab for the channel you want to view (email, SMS, or push). You can view a detailed analysis of the lift for the optimized sends for the selected channel and message type.

# Export Frequency Decisioning engagement details

To access information about how frequency optimized sends that have completed or are underway for the past three months. On the top of the Frequency Management page, click Export CSV to view:

• Configuration details for each optimized send

• What caps were defined and how many users were associated with each value

# Want to learn more?

For more information about some of the topics in this article, check out these resources. Iterable Academy is open to everyone—you don't need to be an Iterable customer!

Iterable Academy

• Frequency Management
• Product Bite: Frequency Capping
• Product Bite: Frequency Optimization

Support docs

• Frequency Management