Can Engage support apply saturation control on sends that are happening outside of SFMC?

It's possible you send messages for certain channels outside of SFMC. For example, in case of postal mail, or when you send SMSes through another service than SFMC.

DESelect Engage can be used to exclude contacts from campaigns sent through such channels, and these communications can also be taken into account in a contact's send history (so they impact the availability of slots for other messages).

1. Exclude contacts from campaigns sent through custom channels

You are probably already using a data extension that contains the list of contacts to receive the communication via the custom channel. You may be downloading the content of this data extension as a CSV via the browser or SFTP so you can upload it to the third-party service provider.

For DESelect Engage to filter out contacts from that data extension, create a journey that uses that data extension as the entry source. Add the DESelect Engage journey component and add the contact to a data extension if they reach the Undersaturated branch, using an Update Contact activity. Now a new data extension is being populated with only contacts that are undersaturated. Export this new data extension to the third-party service provider.

Make sure to run this journey as closely as possible to the exporting of the data to have the most accurate saturation control decisions.

2. Take sends on a custom channel into account

To know which sends happened outside of SFMC, DESelect Engage can ingest a data extension that contains the contact key and date of the sends. This can be based on the data extension used to pass the contacts to the third-party service provider, you just need to add the date of sending.

Engage can then be configured to ingest the data in this data extension on a regular basis so it knows these sends happened. That way they will impact the saturation levels for a contact.

For example: you do email sending through SFMC but SMS sending outside of SFMC, and you have a saturation control rule that allows for 4 communications in a week. In the last few days, 2 emails have been sent through SFMC, and 1 SMS via a third-party provider. Engage has visibility on that SMS by ingesting the data extension, and now knows there is one more slot available for sending this week.

Setup

To make use of this functionality, DESelect Engage needs a data extension per custom channel, which you populate with all sends happening through the custom channel.

Such a data extension needs to have at least the following fields:

- One field containing the contact key
- One field containing the send date of the communication
- One field containing the moment the record was added to the data extension

It is recommended to configure a Retention Policy of at least 7 days on this data extension. That way there is some room for recovery in case ingestion of the data from this data extension into Engage fails.