Communication Limits, Smart Campaigns, and Custom Object Records

[nhabischWings]

Looking for some advice/suggestions here - We utilize custom objects and unfortunately have cases where there can be multiple records of individuals under a single email address Lead. We also tend to send a hefty number of trigger and batch emails based off of met criteria.

Our current communication limits are set to 4 per day and 7 per week. My department thinks that is too high and I am being tasked with figuring out how to "hold" the email(s) until the next day if the limit has been reached.

My question is - due to the multiple records problem, we have a lot of emails using Velocity scripting and looking for specific data points (like Membership Opening is 4 days ago) in order to personalize to a specific record. If I set something to hold for 12/24 hours if the communication limit is reached, then that "4 days" criteria would become 5 days by the time the limit was reset.

Curious how anyone else recommends handling this? Am I stuck with every email having a "range" for any particular data point to personalize to the record?

[AjayS · Accepted solution]

Have you considered using a custom score field to track the number of emails sent to each lead within a certain period on Marketo? You can create a smart campaign that increases the score by one for each lead who meets your criteria for sending the email. You can also reset the score to zero whenever you want to start a new cycle. Then, you can use the score as a condition to decide whether to send the email immediately or wait for some hours in the flow step.

[nhabischWings]

Hmmm I like that idea - it's at least a good start. Not to mention we should probably prioritize our emails based on need in terms of what someone SHOULD receive versus not.

Thank you for the idea!

[Zoe_Forman]

For email communications could you have a score or priority for emails - say blogs or newsletters are 3, product promotions or events are 2 and new product launches and news are 1

So that a priority one will always send first within communications limits so not just based on scheduled date in calendar within the 7 day window and priority 2 or 3 will be dropped or held if the communications limits are reached within that week.

[Darshil_Shah1]

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@nhabischWings wrote:

Looking for some advice/suggestions here - We utilize custom objects and unfortunately have cases where there can be multiple records of individuals under a single email address Lead.

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To clarify, when you say multiple records of individuals under a single email address, you mean you have purposeful duplicates in your system? Or are you talking about multiple custom object records associated with a single person record? Batch campaigns have a safety feature wherein it will process only a single person record through the Send Email flow step in case there are multiple records of a person with the same email address.

Your current communication limits might be too lenient as most Marketo users in my experience set the limits to 2 emails per day and 5 emails per week. But having said that, there's no one setting fits all thing for the communication limit, it depends on the type of people in your database (e.g., generally customers have a higher tolerance to emails than prospects), business/product, industry, etc.

My question is - due to the multiple records problem, we have a lot of emails using Velocity scripting and looking for specific data points (like Membership Opening is 4 days ago) in order to personalize to a specific record. If I set something to hold for 12/24 hours if the communication limit is reached, then that "4 days" criteria would become 5 days by the time the limit was reset.

Curious how anyone else recommends handling this? Am I stuck with every email having a "range" for any particular data point to personalize to the record?

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I believe if a person isn't eligible to receive the marketing communication due to them reaching their communication limits is okay, and instead of finding ways to go around it, you might want to plan your marketing campaigns in a way so people are able to receive the communication/promotional emails you want to send them. For example, avoid sending general/regular marketing emails to people matching ICPs so they have the bandwidth to be able to receive those targeted/tailored promotional/marketing emails.

Having said that, I liked Ajay's idea of using a score field and then using it in a Wait step condition so a person is put in a wait step until their communication limits are restored and then they progress to the Send Email step, if you want to go that route. 🙂

[nhabischWings]

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To clarify, when you say multiple records of individuals under a single email address, you mean you have purpose duplicates in your system, right? Or are you talking about multiple custom object records associated with a single person record? Batch campaigns have a safety feature wherein they will process only a single person record through the Send Email flow step in case there are multiple records of a person with the same email address.

Multiple custom object records under a single Lead. For instance, our "Customer Profile" record might have 4 people in the household who are all different individuals all under the same email. Caused mostly by our system not restricting a single user to a unique email address.

Your current communication limits might be too lenient as most Marketo users in my experience set the limits to 2 emails per day and 5 emails per week. But having said that, there's no one setting fits all thing for the communication limit, it depends on the type of people in your database (e.g., generally customers have a higher tolerance to emails than prospects), business/product, industry, etc.

Probably but where it gets tough in our case is with the potential for multiple records under a single lead you could end up with the following scenario:
-- Person A qualifies and gets an email
-- Person B qualifies and gets an email
-- Person A qualifies for a different email

Now I have tried to circumvent that like you said by using batch campaigns and using Velocity to personalize to multiple qualifying individuals, but there are some cases (like a survey link) where on the data side it needs to be sent individually.

I also like the scoring idea and plan on bringing that as an option - surprised Marketo doesn't have any sort of communication limit Smart List filters, but I guess in theory that's handled at the Schedule level.