Frequently Asked
Questions

Consumers are often overwhelmed receiving hundreds of marketing messages per day, as marketers create multichannel campaigns across competing teams and priorities – often targeted to the same segments of people. When this feeling becomes so strong that messages no longer resonate, the consumer experiences what is called “marketing fatigue.”

Saturation control is a method used to avoid marketing fatigue, where organizations set limits on the number of communications sent to a certain person in a specific period of time.

Having saturation control processes in place reduces the chances of unsubscribes or of emails being marked as spam. The specific limit for the number of emails and the time period can vary depending on the goals of the email campaign and the preferences of the recipient.

DESelect Engage acts as mission control for campaigns across all channels, providing a saturation control solution that gives insights into exactly how saturated each contact is.

Engage has a cascading impact on marketing revenues and expenses. Among the more important ones:

• Marketing Cloud charges based on the quantity of Super Messages sent. By optimizing campaign frequency, this quantity is reduced
• Fewer unsubscribes and spam designations improve your organization’s email deliverability, ensuring more contacts see your messages
• By limiting the number of emails sent to a specific recipient, marketers find the sweet spot that leads to increased engagement, conversion rates, and ROI
• Increase marketing-generated revenue by identifying undersaturated subscribers and optimizing engagement
• Compliance with GDPR and CAN-SPAM laws prevents costly fines

Engage is a plug-and-play solution, so it takes only minutes to set up.

At a broad level, Engage lets you prioritize based on two factors: customizable rules (such as different frequencies for recent customers vs general subscribers) and how you designate importance of different campaign types (e.g., promotions vs newsletters).

Combining these factors, Engage will filter out oversaturated subscribers from the lesser-prioritized campaigns to ensure the messages they do receive are the most important. In Journey Builder, Engage also gives the option to simply delay the communications an oversaturated subscriber is scheduled to receive until a more optimal time.

Both DESelect Engage and Segment together team up to create ultra-targeted campaigns that drive maximum engagement and conversions. It’s literally sending the right message to the right audience the right number of times.

DESelect Engage operates at the business unit (BU) level. Within each BU, you can define unique Contact Categories, Campaign Types, and Rules.

Saturation levels for a contact existing in multiple BUs are managed separately, respecting the rules defined in each BU. It's important to note that currently, there's no aggregation of Sends across BUs.

As long as brands exist under different business units, Engage can apply saturation control at business unit level.

To facilitate saturation calculations, some information is ingested by our DESelect Engage backend (hosted in Google Cloud), this could include PII (if the subscriber key contains any PII). The information that is uploaded is encrypted and only transmitted over secure channels.

The campaign planner updates in (near) real-time as you move Sends around, once you click 'Recalculate'. Something similar happens when you build new Rules.

The actual data that we use to check if people are saturated is based on a daily batch from SFMC to Engage. As contacts go through the journeys, we register these sends, so they can impact include/exclude decisions for other sends.