Set Messaging Preferences

With messaging preferences, you can set messaging limits or override messaging restrictions. You can also use messaging limits for IP warmup.

Properties for transactional campaigns

Sometimes you may need to send out critical communication for example a password reset confirmation or a notification for a system outage. When communicating such critical information, it is important to ensure that the intended users receive your message independent of their preferences for your promotional/ marketing campaigns.

Property	Description
Skip User Messaging Limits Check	In order to minimize message fatigue, you can set a limit on the maximum number of messages a single user can receive in a given period of time. This setting is available under the Maximum Messages tab in Account Settings. By selecting Skip User Messaging Limits Check you can ignore the messaging limits.
Do not count towards messaging limits	Specify whether the messages sent by this campaign count towards a user's messaging limits. Transactional campaigns might send multiple messages to users during the course of one day. For example, messages related to hotel bookings, items ordered, password resets, and so on. These messages count towards a user's messaging limits and if a user receives multiple transactional messages during one day, the user might not be eligible to receive promotional messages from other campaigns on that day. By selecting the Do not count towards messaging limit option, you can ensure that the user continues to receive promotional messages.
Message users who have unsubscribed or have reported your emails as spam	By default, Blueshift will not message users who have previously unsubscribed or reported spam unless you override that via this setting.
Skip duplicate messaging check	A transaction segment might return multiple transaction records for the same user. By default, Blueshift does not send multiple messages to the same user, even if the message is for a different transaction record. By selecting this setting, you can bypass this default behavior and send multiple messages to a user, one for each transaction record.
Skip global inclusion segment check	A global inclusion segment helps to ensure an account can only message users based on certain user attributes. This is done from the Other Settings tab in Account Settings. Select this option to ignore this limitation and message all eligible users.
Remove unsubscribe links from email header	Remove the unsubscribe header information from any email sent by the campaign. Some email clients, for example Gmail, include unsubscribe links in the email header. Users can unsubscribe from receiving emails by using this link even if you do not include an unsubscribe link in your email content. This might result in users accidentally unsubscribing from critical transactional emails like order confirmations, password resets, and so on. By selecting the Remove unsubscribe links from email header, you can prevent users from accidentally unsubscribing from business critical notifications.

Properties for IP Warmup

These settings will be most critical during your IP warmup phase.

Property

Description

Limit number of messages for this campaign to __

For one-time and recurring campaigns, you can limit the maximum number of messages (N) that can be sent by the campaign.

The N users that the messages are sent to are selected randomly from the qualifying users.

Limit messaging rate to __ messages per minute

For one-time and recurring campaigns, you can also limit how fast the campaign can message users.

Note: You cannot choose a rate that is lower than 1 message per minute or one that can cause the campaign to take more than 1 day to message all eligible users in the segment. For example, if a segment has 4800 users, you cannot use a messaging rate of 100 messages/ hour since that would lead to a campaign execution time of 48 hours (=2 days). For more information, see Messaging rate limitations.

Messaging rate limitations

Note: You must set the messaging rate such that the campaign execution time for one-time and recurring campaigns is not greater than 1 day. If the (segment size or campaign messaging limit) / (campaign rate limit) > 1 day (1440 minutes), an error occurs when you try to save the campaign.

For example, consider a campaign where the segment size is 1M and the campaign messaging limit is set to 100K.

If the campaign rate limit is set as 1000/minute, then the time required to execute the campaign is 100K/1000 = 100 minutes which is < 1 day.
If the campaign rate limit is set as 100/minute, then the time required to execute the campaign is 100K/100 = 1000 minutes which is still < 1 day.
If the campaign rate limit is set as 10/minute, then the time required to execute the campaign is 100K/10 = 10,000 minutes which is > 1 day and hence an error occurs and you will not be able to save the campaign.

Overriding messaging restrictions

To ensure that you don't inundate customers with messages, you can set a limit on the maximum number of messages a single user can receive in a given period of time.

However, there might be certain circumstances where an important message must be sent to a customer and it is necessary to override the messaging limit. For example, if a credit card payment has failed or a password reset email. Similarly, multiple messages might be sent by a transactional campaign during the course of one day. For example, messages related to hotel bookings or items ordered.

Use the following campaign messaging properties to override messaging limits:

Skip User Messaging Limits Check: The messaging limit count is not checked and a message is sent to the user. The message sent counts towards the messaging limit.
Do not count towards messaging limits: The messaging limit count is checked and a message is sent to the user only if the messaging limit is not exceeded. However, the message sent does not count towards the messaging limit.

The following example shows multiple campaigns that have different messaging preferences and how these settings affect messages sent to the customer.

IP Warmup

IP warming is a tactic that you can use to gradually increase the number of messages sent from a specific source. When you gradually increase the number of messages that you send, your email source gains trust with ISPs and email service providers so that your emails are not marked as spam.

Slowly, over a period of time, you can launch more one time campaigns with more users in the segment that you can target. You can also use trigger filters to exclude users who received an email from the previous campaign. So, over a period of time, you can gradually increase the number of emails that you send so that ISPs/email service providers gain trust on the source that sends emails and do not mark the emails as spam.

For example, in the campaign that you create, you include a segment that contains 500 users. Now, if you send 500 messages at the first go, an internet service provider (ISP)/email service provider (ESP) may suddenly notice something unusual and start marking your emails as spam. To avoid that, you have to create a campaign with conditions that limit the number of emails sent with every run.

In the Limit number of messages for this campaign to setting, you can specify an upper limit. For example, if you specify 100, we send only 100 emails even if a segment that you are targeting includes more users.

In addition, you can use the Limit messaging rate option to set a cap on the messaging rate for one-time and recurring campaigns. You can specify the number of messages that our platform sends per minute. For example, you can specify that our platform sends 200 messages per minute. This setting provides additional functionality that you can use to warm up the email source.

To send a specific number of messages within a specific window, you can specify the messaging limits and a start time for the campaign.

For example, if you want the Blueshift platform to send 600 messages/hour, and want to send messages between 1pm to 4pm only, here's what you can do:

In the Start setting under Execution Schedule, specify the time as 1:00 PM.
In the Limit number of messages for this campaign to setting, specify 1800 messages (based on the 3 hour interval that you want to choose and send 600 messages per hour).
In the Limit messaging rate setting, specify 10 messages per minute (based on 600 messages for every 60 minutes).

This configuration ensures that 600 messages per hour (or 1800 messages per minute) are sent between 1pm and 4pm.

You can also add the criteria bsft_open_message_uuid is empty in the trigger filter to ensure that a message is sent to users who have not yet opened a message that was sent as a part of the campaign.