Creation of a Contact Categories data extension

For each business unit in which DESelect Engage is operational, it needs access to a data extension that lists the contacts for which saturation control needs to be managed by DESelect Engage, in order to get the most out of DESelect Engage.

This data extension is used for 2 purposes:

- Managing the scope of contacts for which to manage saturation control

- Understanding the contact category/categories each contact is in

Once contacts are assigned Contact Categories, rules can be defined that are different for different contact categories. For example, you can define a rule that contacts of contact category Lead can receive 3 emails in a week, while contacts of contact category Active Customer can receive 5 emails in a week.

Note: Should you choose to use DESelect Engage without a Contact Categories data extension, all contacts that are in the segments of the campaign Sends (also referred to as just "Send/s") will be considered to have no contact category.

If a contact has an empty value in the mapped ContactCategory field, DESelect Engage will automatically treat that contact as belonging to the "No Category" category.

There is no need to explicitly create or populate a "No Category" value in the Contact Categories data extension.
Any contacts with empty category values will automatically follow the saturation control rules configured for "No Category" contacts.

Structure

This data extension should have the following structure:

You may freely choose the name and customer key of this data extension, but please don't change it after creation. 
This data extension may have additional fields above the ones listed above, but it needs to have one field that contains a contact key (though the field may be named differently), and a contact category (again the field may be named differently).

Note the ContactKey can be an email, number or string, or whatever you use to uniquely identify a contact. Note that DESelect Engage encrypts this contactKey to use it in a secure and anonymized way.

Different saturation control rules can be configured for different contact categories. For example, you may determine that leads can receive 2 emails per week, while active customers can receive 3 per week.

Multiple contact categories can be assigned to each contact. In this case, create 2 rows for the same contact.

For example, if we have 2 contacts, Lisa (contact category A) and Tim (contact category A and B), the table would look as follows:

Usage

Every day at a specified time, the content of this data extension will be exported through an automation. Please make sure you have a scheduled selection in DESelect segment or an automation in Automation Studio running that keeps this data extension up to date.

In the example above; if you have one data extension containing all Leads and another one containing all Active Customers, you can use a UNION statement in a SQL query (or using the tabs in DESelect Segment) to add those together into one data extension which will then be your Contact Categories data extension.

Note pricing for DESelect Engage depends on the number of unique contacts for which Engage manages saturation control. For all contacts that are in the Contact Categories data extension, Engage will make daily calculations to manage the saturation for the Sends that contact is in the scope of.

If a person is no longer in this data extension, Engage will stop making saturation calculations for the Sends that person may be in.

Configuration

Once the Contact Categories data extension has been created, go into the Admin Panel of DESelect Engage and browse to the Contact Categories tab.
There:

Under Select a Data Extension, choose the Contact Categories data extension as defined above.

Under Select a Contact Key, choose the ContactKey field of the data extension.

Under Select field that contains contact category names, choose the ContactCategory field of the data extension.

Click on the Refresh Data button.

DESelect Engage will now scan the selected data extension for the available values that exist in the ContactCategory field, and the distribution of contacts in your Contact Categories data extension with those values.
Next, click on Add Categories to add the contact categories from the data extension to your already existing contact categories (if any). 

Finally, click Save to save all changes made.

Keeping the AllContacts data extension up to date

As your contact list changes over time, you need to make sure the Contact Categories data extension remains up to date. After all, new contacts will be added, existing contacts will unsubscribe, and contacts will change contact categories.

To keep this data extension up to date, we recommend scheduling the SQL query or selection (when using DESelect Segment) to rerun every day. Ideally, this update happens right before the start of the daily calculations (make sure the query/selection has actually completed running before the moment the ingesting starts). You can configure when the ingestion starts in admin panel > Settings > Automations Run Time.