Frequency capping and quiet times

What it does

Two separate governors sit between a journey and the customer's inbox. Frequency capping limits how many commercial messages a person receives per channel in a rolling window. Quiet times block sending during defined hours or dates and hold the messages until the window closes.

Key facts

Frequency caps are configured at Settings > Customer engagement > Frequency cap, per business unit, and the Marketing Manager - Business role has access by default.
Caps are evaluated across three rolling windows — daily (24 hours), weekly (7 days) and monthly (30 days) — and re-checked each time a message is about to send.
Caps are set per channel: email, text message and push. A blank value means no cap for that channel.
Only commercial messages count. Transactional messages are always exempt and always send.
Frequency capping is on by default for every journey. You switch a journey out of it with the Frequency cap toggle under Other settings, and only draft journeys can be edited directly — a live journey has to be republished to change it.
When a cap blocks a message, the message is not sent but the customer carries on through the journey. They are not held and they are not exited.
Blocked messages appear in message analytics under delivery details and can be exported to CSV.
Messages sent before a cap existed for a channel do not count towards it retrospectively.
Quiet times are configured at Settings > Customer engagement > Quiet times, also per business unit, and hold rather than discard messages.
Quiet times can follow the journey time zone or each customer's own time zone, falling back to the journey's if no audience time zone field is configured.
Quiet times support general rules plus advanced rules conditioned on country/region, state/province or phone number, evaluated top down with first match winning.
The combined block from quiet dates and quiet hours cannot exceed 21 consecutive days, with quiet dates themselves capped at 14 consecutive full days.
Quiet times and frequency caps are independent: the cap is evaluated when the message is released from the quiet-time hold, not when it was queued.
"Send now" does not honour quiet times.

When to use / skip

Quiet times are close to mandatory for SMS and voice in any market with rules about calling hours, and they are cheap insurance for email. Configure them once at the compliance profile level and forget about them.

Frequency capping is more of a judgement call. If the client runs one journey, capping does nothing except create a mechanism to explain later. If they run twelve journeys across three teams with overlapping audiences, it is the only thing standing between them and a spam complaint rate that damages their sending reputation. Most mid-size implementations should switch it on with generous numbers rather than leave it wide open.

Where it goes wrong is treating the cap as a marketing tuning dial. It is a safety net. Set it above the planned send volume, not at it, or you will spend go-live week debugging messages that were suppressed exactly as designed.

Configuration decisions

Cap values per channel and per window, agreed with the client's compliance or brand team rather than picked by the consultant.
Which journeys are exempt from capping — operational and service journeys usually should be, but check they are actually flagged transactional first.
Whether messages are correctly classified commercial or transactional, since that classification does all the real work here.
Journey time zone versus audience time zone for quiet times, which depends on whether you hold a reliable time zone field per customer.
Whether general quiet times suffice or the client's geography needs advanced rules by country, state or phone number.
Quiet dates for holidays and company shutdowns, and who maintains that list after handover.

Gotchas

Quiet times plus rate-limited entry produces a burst. People accumulate during the quiet window and everything releases together when it lifts, which can dwarf the hourly entry limit you configured.
A capped message is skipped, not retried. The customer moves on and never receives that message — there is no queue and no catch-up.
Turning off capping for a live journey needs a republish, which creates a new version. In-flight customers stay on the old version and stay capped.
Transactional classification is set on the message, and marketers set it optimistically. An "order confirmation" containing an upsell block is a commercial message wearing a hat.
Frequency cap settings are per business unit. Multi-business-unit tenants need the settings created in each one, and the owner field is what derives the business unit.
"Send now" bypasses quiet times entirely, so an ad-hoc blast can land at 2am in a market where that is a problem.
Overnight quiet hours need two rules, one either side of midnight. A single rule from 18:00 to 08:00 does not do what people expect.

Consultant notes

Configure quiet times in the first sprint, before any SMS work. Retrofitting them after the client's legal team reviews the solution is a bad week.
Demo the held-message counter on a live journey — seeing messages waiting rather than lost is what convinces compliance stakeholders.
Set caps deliberately generous at go-live and tighten later with data. Nobody has ever regretted the cap being too loose in week one.
Audit the commercial/transactional flag on every message before go-live. It is a five-minute check that prevents the two most common complaints.
Tell the client capping is a suppression, not a delay. Marketers assume the message goes out later; it does not.

Worth another look if capping ever gains per-journey or per-campaign cap values, or if the 21-day quiet block limit changes.