TABLE OF CONTENTS
What is Frequency capping, and why is it important for marketers?
Steps to enable Frequency capping in Freshmarketer
Frequency capping best practices
What is Frequency capping, and why is it important for marketers?
Frequency capping is a technique that limits the number of times a marketing message(email, SMS, WhatsApp etc.) is sent to each contact.
While running multichannel marketing campaigns, your recipients might get too many marketing messages. This leads to lower engagement, higher unsubscribes, and increased spam rates. The frequency capping feature in Freshmarketer ensures that your customers get messages at a fixed frequency and prevents the risks of disengaging or spamming them.
Steps to enable Frequency capping in Freshmarketer
Navigate to Admin settings > Frequency capping
Here, you can limit the number of messages your contacts can receive over a specific period.
- Next, set up frequency cap values for each channel (email, SMS, and WhatsApp) or set a single frequency cap for all marketing channels.
- Enable the toggle next to the channel to set frequency capping and add the time period.
- For example, you want to ensure that your contacts should receive a maximum of 5 messages over a week across all marketing channels. Enable the toggle for all marketing channels; enter the no. of messages as 5 and the no. of days as 7.
- Similarly, if you want to set different frequency caps for different channels, enable the toggle for each channel and enter the no. of maximum messages and the time period for respective channels.
Note: Frequency capping will not limit transactional messages triggered by APIs, like password reset emails so that your customers don’t miss out on important communication.
- The time period for Frequency capping resets itself based on the time zone of each recipient. You can select a default time zone if the time zone details are unavailable for any recipients.
- Once you are done entering the details, click on Save. Frequency capping is now enabled for your account.
Frequency capping best practices
Your frequency caps will depend on your brand. There is no golden standard for frequency capping.
Low frequency might not deliver the intended results, while high frequency can result in overexposure, negatively impacting your brand; resulting in low engagement and high spam rates.
Please look at the open rates, click rates, and overall engagement across your different marketing channels to identify the preferred frequency that works best for your customers and your brand.
However, if you do not have enough data yet, or just starting to engage with your customers, here are a few best practices based on industry insights to get you started.
The prescribed frequency cap is 2-4 emails per month in order to prevent users from unsubscribing.
As you see higher engagement, you can increase the frequency cap to 6-8 emails a month.
SMS
For the best results from your SMS marketing efforts, set a maximum cap of 1 message per week to your entire list.
This regular cadence is especially important for businesses in the first six months of launching an SMS channel.
As your SMS marketing becomes more mature, you can set a cap of 2 messages per week.
Similar to SMS marketing, a maximum of 1 message per week is ideal for WhatsApp marketing
As you see an increase in engagement, you can increase the Frequency to 2 messages per week.
Note: These are intended as general recommendations based on a combination of publicly available industry insights, resources, and benchmarks and are not to be taken as definitive standards.
If you have any other questions while setting up Frequency capping, please reach out to [email protected]