How to Control How Many Emails a Recipient Receives

Your recipients don't need to be spammed with emails. In fact, if your recipients accidentally receive too many emails from you, your communications could end up being flagged as junk mail. That's why it's important to put systems in place to cap the number of emails recipients receive from you. 

To set up this kind of logic, you can use the Fixed Person Data 'EMAILS_THIS_WEEK'. This field counts how many emails a recipient has received from you within the past week, from Monday to Sunday. The counter resets every Sunday night.

By using 'EMAILS_THIS_WEEK, there are two ways you can control the number of emails a recipient receives from you:

• Control through a Target Group - This option makes sense when you want to maintain the max number of email rules regardless of what email your recipient is about to receive.

• Control through an Email Step - Use this option if you only want to maintain the max number of email rules on certain communications. For example, you might want your recipients to still be able to receive a birthday Flow email, even if they've already reached the max number of emails for that week.

You can also control how many emails recipients receive by temporarily blocking recipients from a Flow. You can learn how to temporarily block recipients from a Flow here.

How to Control How Many Emails a Recipient Receives in a Target Group

1. Log in to Staging.
2. Open the Data module.
3. Navigate to an existing Target Group or create a new Target Group.
4. Select the Conditions panel.
5. Add a Condition using EMAILS_THIS_WEEK, such as All - Person Data - EMAILS_THIS_WEEK - Less than - 10 - Condition Met.
6. Click 'Save'.
7. Publish to Production if you want to use your Target Group for live recipients.

Now, your Target Group has a Condition set that excludes any recipients who have received ten or more emails in the past week (Monday - Sunday).

A Target Group including any recipients who have EMAIL_PERMISSION set to True and who have received less than 10 emails in the past week

How to Control How Many Emails a Recipient Receives in an Email Step

1. Log in to Staging.
2. In the Flows module, navigate to an existing Flow or Create a new Flow.
3. Insert an Email step if necessary.
4. Click on an Email Step and then click the 'Conditions' panel.
5. Add a Condition using EMAILS_THIS_WEEK, such as All - Person Data - EMAILS_THIS_WEEK - Less than - 10 - Condition Met.
6. Click 'Ok'.
7. Click the 'Save' icon in the 'Flow' toolbar.
8. Publish to Production to apply your changes to the Production environment.

Repeat these instructions for any Email Steps where you want to exclude recipients who have received a certain number of emails in the past week.

Now, your Email Steps have a Condition set that excludes any recipient who's received ten or more emails in the past week (Monday - Sunday).

A Flow with an Email Step which has a Condition that excludes recipients who have received more than ten emails in the past week

Suggested Next Steps

• All You Need to Know About Flows
• All You Need to Know About Data Models
• All You Need to Know About Steps