For digital marketers looking to create scalable, impactful customer experiences, marketing automation is an essential part of the equation. And one of the most common—and widely used—types of marketing automation out there is auto-scheduling tools designed to ensure that messages reach a given user at the right time. By automatically working around obstacles to a message’s success (such as sending an email on a holiday or too many similar communications in a short period of time), auto-scheduling features can help deliver a higher-quality user experience for the user while costing marketing teams less time.

The Braze platform is built to support more meaningful, more “human” customer experiences—and part of that support is a suite of auto-scheduling tools. So let’s take a look at six useful Braze auto-scheduling features that can help ensure the success of a campaign:

1. Re-Entry Rules

In its default state, Braze sends campaign messages to users just once. By adjusting the Delivery Controls, users can become re-eligible to receive messages from a particular campaign once again. This kind of auto-scheduling can be useful during message testing, in which a message is sent to a particular group before being distributed to a wider audience, or to allow particular users to receive specific messages for a second time.

2. Blackout Windows

Time-based functionalities make it easy to avoid sending messages during unwanted time periods, such as holidays or specific dates that may conflict with other brand messaging. With Braze, implementing blackout windows can also take time zones into consideration, so recipients in other parts of the world don’t receive messages at odd hours of the night.

3. Suppression Groups

Properly managing suppression groups helps you respect the wishes of users who do not wish to receive your messages. For example, the Braze platform’s suppression group capabilities automatically remove users from a particular segment as soon as they unsubscribe or opt-out of communications.

4. Rate Limits

Rate-limiting features allow for fine-tuned control over the marketing pressure of a particular campaign. Depending on the campaign’s needs, rate-limiting can be implemented in order to prevent users from receiving too many messages in a particular time period or to reduce sending spikes to keep servers from becoming overloaded. That’s especially key during particularly high-traffic times of year, such as Black Friday, where a single push notification sent to a large audience all at once can potentially drive so many people to your app or website so quickly that a crash is hard to avoid.

5. Frequency Capping

Frequency capping lets brands place parameters around how many messages any one individual will receive within a set time period—for instance, no more than two emails per week or no more than one push notification per day. Within Braze you can deploy frequency caps in automated, flexible ways, including:

• Limiting messages deployed across all channels

• Limiting messages deployed within just a single given channel

• Limiting messages channel by channel and across multiple (but not all) channels

Intelligent Timing

Intelligent Timing, part of the Braze Intelligence Suite of automation features, makes it possible for brands to deploy campaigns asynchronously, at the right time that's unique to every individual message recipient, no matter where they are in the world or what time of day they're most likely to engage. With this auto-scheduling feature, the same message might reach one customer at 10 am and another at 2 pm, allowing you to communicate with both of them at the time they’re most likely to want to hear from you. Even better? Braze research has found that push messages that use Intelligent Timing are 2.6X more effective at driving app opens than push messages that do not.

Final Thoughts

With the Braze platform’s auto-scheduling capabilities, digital marketers can exert greater control over the manner in which messages are delivered. By taking advantage of tools that help ensure that messages get seen at the best possible moment, organizations can avoid sending ineffective, conflicting, or unwanted communications.

To see how Braze can optimize, orchestrate, and deliver highly personalized messaging, learn how Pizza Hut used machine learning (ML) to drive a 21% increase in revenue.