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Smart Sending keeps your initiatives from piling up on the same person. Without it, two journeys can message someone minutes apart, and a busy week can reach one person a dozen times. That annoys people, and on WhatsApp it leads to spam reports that lower your number’s quality rating. It has two rules. Set either, both, or neither in Settings › Smart Sending. Only proactive journey messages count and are limited: WhatsApp templates, SMS and email sent by a journey step. The agent’s replies inside a conversation, and messages your team sends from the inbox, are never limited.

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The frequency cap

Set it per channel (WhatsApp, SMS, Email). The window is rolling, not a calendar day: a cap of 1 per 24 hours means 24 hours after the last message, not “once today”. The largest window is 7 days, and the cap is at most 10 messages. When a send would go over the cap, the step does not send. In the journey it takes the Capped, not sent exit instead of Sent:
  • Leave that exit unconnected and the person’s run simply ends.
  • Connect it to do something else: wait a day and try again, try another channel, or end on purpose.
Every message sent counts toward the cap, whichever initiative sent it. The first message to reach the person takes the slot; there is no priority between initiatives.

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The cooldown

The cooldown is the longer rule: “don’t contact this person from another campaign for 30 days”. It is checked when someone is added, so a person inside their cooldown is never added in the first place, rather than added and then stopped halfway. It can be up to 365 days. It counts messages on any channel from other initiatives. An initiative’s own messages never block it. These are always let through:
  • Someone who messaged you first, or commented on your post.
  • A conversation being handed from one initiative to another.
  • An initiative set to Always send (below).
If you use webhooks, a person turned away by the cooldown shows up as enrollment.rejected with reason: "cooldown".

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Each initiative’s mode

Every initiative decides what happens when one of its messages hits a rule. Set it in the initiative’s Agent step, or for every initiative at once on the settings page. Transactional messages start on Always send, since a notification has to go out. You can change that in its advanced options.
Set your operational initiatives to Always send before turning on a cap. An initiative that sends one person several messages a day, like a document collection flow, would otherwise lose most of them. The settings page flags every initiative that sent one person more than one message in a day over the last two weeks.

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Good to know

  • No cap is set until you set one. Your organization still records every send, so the day you turn a cap on it already knows who was messaged recently.
  • Test sends don’t count. Messages in your test environment, and WhatsApp messages to your organization’s test numbers, are never capped and never count toward either rule.
  • If Smart Sending can’t check, the message goes out. An outage on our side never silently stops your messages.
  • To turn a cap off, clear both fields for that channel. It stops immediately.