Frequency and engagement caps
- Frequency caps limit how often any one user is messaged.
- Engagement caps reduce sends to disengaged users based on engagement tiers.
- Both caps apply on every send across the stack, not just inside one campaign.
- You ramp caps gently rather than in big jumps to protect deliverability and sender reputation.
Frequency and engagement caps are the guardrails that keep TrailGuide from overspending the two things a marketing program cannot easily rebuild: a person's attention and your sender reputation. Frequency caps limit how often any one user hears from you. Engagement caps pull back on the people who have quietly stopped listening. Both run on every send.
The reason to care is that over-messaging is expensive in ways a single campaign report never shows. Every needless send nudges someone toward mute, unsubscribe, or the spam button, and those signals follow you into every future inbox. Caps are how a system that can send a lot chooses to send well.
Why caps protect reputation
Mailbox and push providers watch how people react to you. Muted notifications, ignored emails, and spam complaints degrade deliverability for everyone you message, including the users who still want to hear from you. Fatigue on one audience quietly taxes the next launch. Caps exist because the cost of one extra send is almost never paid by that send alone.
Frequency caps: how often
A frequency cap sets a ceiling on how many messages a single user can receive in a window, regardless of how many campaigns happen to target them. Without it, a new member at Lumen Skincare could land in a welcome journey, a promotion, and a re-engagement nudge in the same afternoon and feel spammed by a brand they just joined. With it, the system honors the ceiling and the least valuable send is the one that waits.
Engagement caps: who still wants to hear from you
Not everyone should be messaged at the same rate. An engagement cap reads a user's engagement tier, built from how they have responded to past messages, and reduces sends to disengaged users while leaving your high-intent audience fully reachable. You stop spending reputation on people who have tuned out, and you keep showing up for the people who lean in.
- High-intent users: keep reaching them, they are responding.
- Cooling users: ease off before they tune out completely.
- Disengaged users: pull sends back sharply to protect the inbox.
Deciding who to hold back is a measurement question, and it pairs directly with global holdout lift: the sends that show no incremental lift on a disengaged tier are exactly the ones an engagement cap should be trimming.
Ramp gently, never in big jumps
When you do open the taps, do it gradually. Providers reward steady, predictable volume and punish sudden spikes, so you ramp caps gently, nudging a limit up by a modest step rather than leaping from a few hundred to ten thousand overnight. A gentle ramp lets deliverability keep pace with volume instead of collapsing under it.
Raise the daily send cap for the win-back audience from
1,200 to about 1,500 (roughly +300), then hold and watch
deliverability before the next step. Do not jump to 10,000.Guardrails that let you send with confidence
Caps are not a brake on ambition, they are what makes ambition safe. Because they hold on every send, even a large broadcast or an always-on journey stays inside limits you set once, so you can push hard on the moments that matter without quietly eroding the channel you depend on.
Frequently asked questions
- What is the difference between a frequency cap and an engagement cap?
- A frequency cap limits how often any one user is messaged in a window. An engagement cap reduces how much you send to users in lower engagement tiers, so disengaged people get fewer messages while high-intent users stay fully reachable.
- Do caps apply per campaign or across everything?
- Across everything. Caps are enforced on every send, so two campaigns that each look reasonable on their own cannot combine to over-message the same person.
- Why should I ramp caps gently?
- Mailbox and push providers reward steady volume and penalize sudden spikes. Raising a cap by a modest step and holding to watch deliverability protects your sender reputation, whereas a big jump can hurt it.
- How do engagement tiers get set?
- They are derived from how each user has responded to your past messages. Those tiers drive the engagement cap, which pulls sends back for people who have tuned out while keeping high-intent users reachable.