7. Frequency capping
Narrative context
The mortgage journey is running. So are other journeys — credit card promotions, current-account upsells, customer-care surveys. Without a global rule, a single customer might receive three or four marketing emails in a week and stop opening any of them. Frequency capping is the brand's promise to the customer that we won't spam you, even when several internal teams want to talk to you at the same time.
Open business rules
- In the left menu, under Administration, click Business rules.
You should see a pre-staged rule set named Marketing Rules in the list.
What a rule set is. A rule set is a container of individual capping rules that share a common purpose (e.g., all the marketing-category caps). A single rule set can contain many rules — one per channel, one per category, one per scope — and the rules are evaluated together at send time. Rule sets are what gets assigned to journeys; rules are what does the work.
Business rules sit above journey logic — every action node in every journey is evaluated against them. Even a high-priority journey is subject to capping unless explicitly exempted.
- Click the rule set name to open it.
Configure the rule
A rule set is made of one or more rules. Inside Marketing Rules you will find a predefined rule called Email capping — already staged but not activated.
- Click Create Rule.
The rule editor opens.Complete the fields exactly as below:
- Rule name (must be unique): {{LASTNAME}}_email_capping The name is unique within the rule set.
- Category: Marketing The rule applies to messages whose category is set to Marketing. Categories are assigned on the action (message) itself; the rule only fires on messages tagged with this category.
- Rule Type: Channel Capping Channel Capping caps the total count of messages sent across the selected channels, regardless of campaign or journey of origin.
- Capping count: 3 Maximum number of messages a profile can receive within the reset window.
- Reset capping frequency: Weekly
- Every: 1 week(s) Together with Reset capping frequency, this defines the rolling window — every 1 week.
- Channel: check Email only (leave Push notification, SMS, Direct Mail, WhatsApp unchecked). Capping applies across the selected channels as a total count. If both Email and Push are checked, the cap counts Email + Push combined toward the same limit of 3. For this lab we cap email-only.
- Click Create rule.
- Click the three-dots icon, then Activate to activate the rule.
Activate the rule
Rules are activated at the rule set level — not on individual rules. The rules set Marketing Rules enables every rule it contains (including the Email capping rule you just configured).
The status of the rule set is set to Active. The capping is now enforced on every Marketing-category email sent from every journey that implement this business ruleset.
A profile who has already received 3 Marketing-category emails in the current weekly window will be suppressed at the next Marketing-category send.
Business punchline
You have placed a quiet ceiling above every journey LF runs. The marketing team cannot accidentally over-message a customer just because three different campaigns happen to align. The customer's inbox is protected without the marketer having to track it manually. Capping is the invisible work that makes "send when relevant" survive contact with reality.