Elevate Customer Experience with Daily Frequency Capping in AJO

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Controlling how often customers receive messages is critical in today’s marketing landscape. Too much outreach can cause fatigue, reduce engagement, and erode trust. Modern marketing automation tools must offer precise, real-time controls to strike the right balance.

Adobe Journey Optimizer now supports daily frequency capping, making it easier than ever to manage customer communication across channels, journeys, and campaigns.

Daily Frequency Capping in Practice

Luma, a premium lifestyle and apparel brand, is known for its data-driven marketing and highly personalized customer journeys. To keep customers engaged, the brand runs daily campaigns across multiple channels—emails for product drops, SMS for loyalty offers, and push notifications for cart recovery or flash sales.

As their marketing efforts scaled, some customers began receiving 5–6 messages per day across various campaigns. This led to higher opt-out rates, lower engagement, and a risk of damaging long-term customer trust.

To mitigate this, Luma needed a way to cap daily message volume per customer. However, at the time, AJO didn’t offer out-of-the-box support for daily frequency capping.

To address the need for daily capping before native support was available, customers like Luma implement the following approaches

• Create streaming segments and use in-segment checks within journeys to exclude profiles that have already received a message that day, based on experience events. However, this approach becomes ineffective when Adobe disables the ingestion of experience events into the profile feedback dataset, as they are no longer required.
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• Introduce wait nodes before message steps in batch journeys to force a profile refresh. However, it adds unnecessary delays and complexity to journey design.

Although these approaches offered partial control, they were never designed as true daily capping solutions. As a result, shifts in Adobe’s strategy, such as changes to experience event ingestion made them increasingly fragile, harder to maintain, and ultimately unsustainable at scale.

Recognizing this need, Adobe Journey Optimizer now supports built-in daily capping, giving brands like Luma a reliable and scalable solution to manage frequency capping effectively.

️How to Implement Daily Frequency Capping in AJO

Adobe Journey Optimizer supports frequency capping through reusable rule sets, which can be applied across journeys and campaigns. User can choose to use Global Default Rule Set to enforce communication limits over all communication or create custom local rule sets for more targeted scenarios. AJO supports two types of capping: channel capping and journey entry capping, giving marketers full control over how and when messages are delivered.

Channel capping allows you to define how many communications a profile can receive via specific channels such as Email, SMS, Push, or Direct Mail within a set time frame (daily, weekly, or monthly).

Journey entry capping controls how often a profile can enter journeys or how many journeys they can be part of at the same time. This prevents profiles from being added to too many campaigns concurrently.

1. Create and Activate Rule Sets

• Navigate to: Administration > Business Rules

• Click Create Rule Set

• Select a domain and click Save

  • Channel: Cap communications by channel (e.g., Email, SMS, Push)
  • Journey: Cap entry or concurrency within a journey

2. Define and Configure Rules

• Open the Rule Set and click Add Rule

• Configure the rule:

  • Set Reset frequency (Daily, Weekly, Monthly)

  • Define Capping value

  • Choose applicable channels (Email, SMS, Push)

3. Journey/Campaign Authoring

Select highest-priority namespace when configuring the profile identity type during authoring. The namespace list in the dropdown is sorted by priority, so it’s recommended to choose the one at the top. This ensures accurate counter evaluation at the profile level and helps avoid identity mismatches across journeys and campaigns.

Below are examples of how to select the highest-priority namespace for different types of campaigns and journeys:

Batch Journey 

Unitary Journey

Audience Qualification Journey

Scheduled Campaign

4. Apply Rule Sets to Channel/Journey

• While authoring a campaign or journey message:

  • Click Add Business Rule in the content editor for channel capping and select appropriate ruleset

  • To apply a capping rule to a journey, navigate to the journey’s Properties section. Under the Capping rules dropdown, select the appropriate rule set.

• Proceed to schedule the campaign or journey execution as usual.

3. Reporting

Users can view Live Reports and Global Reports to monitor how frequency capping rules have impacted message delivery and profile exclusions.

For detailed instructions, refer to:

Get started with rule sets

Frequency capping by channel and communication type

What’s New in Daily Capping

Real Time Profile Tracking for Capping Decisions

Profiles are evaluated in real time at the moment of message delivery, ensuring that capping limits are enforced accurately and immediately.

Business Rules Evaluation at Profile level

Adobe introduced Profile Namespace Priority to ensure each profile is represented using its highest-priority identity namespace. This enables:

• Accurate and reliable evaluation of business rules at the profile level

• Consistent enforcement of capping across journeys and campaigns

 Read more on namespace priority

Final Thoughts

The introduction of daily frequency capping in Adobe Journey Optimizer marks a significant step forward in intelligent customer engagement. Brands can now manage communication frequency natively and precisely, without relying on complex workarounds or manual delays.

This enhancement not only simplifies journey design but also ensures a consistent and respectful customer experience by:

• Preventing over-communication across channels

• Supporting real-time delivery decisions based on live counter data

With the right rule configurations and namespace prioritization, marketers can confidently deliver personalized, timely messages at just the right cadence.

Adobe Journey Optimizer now gives you the tools to engage smarter, communicate responsibly, and build deeper customer relationships all with greater ease and accuracy than ever before.