Setting Up Permissions for your Campaigns

Before examining permission processing as part of the marketing process overview, you first need to understand how permissions and subscriptions are defined in SAP Marketing Cloud.

A permission is consent given for the combination of a communication medium and a marketing area. You can restrict permission for a specific country/region or communication medium combination by defining how permissions are handled. A permission can be classified either as an outbound or inbound marketing permission.

Talking about permissions in general, we mostly mean outbound marketing permissions. They determine whether the system is allowed to contact an interaction contact using a specific communication medium; for example, email or phone. Here, the system allows you to define how outbound permissions are treated.

For some countries, you can set the permission to Implicit so the communication with interaction contacts in that country can happen without their express permission for the defined medium. An explicit permission, on the other hand, always needs to be validated and agreed by the interaction contact before communication can take place.

Finally, you should keep in mind that inbound marketing permissions define how the interaction data will be tracked on social channels like Facebook. You can save such data without any restrictions, record them anonymously, or discard such recordings because of missing permissions.

Subscriptions are a special form of permissions that are only valid for a certain marketing context, for example a newsletter or event. When an Interaction Contact can subscribe for a newsletter X, permission for the communication medium email first needs to be given for that individual to be contacted. Subscriptions are only available for the email communication medium.

Permission Process Overview

Review the graphic of the permission process below, and then read more about the three steps.

A communication category is a grouping to manage newsletter subscriptions for marketing campaigns. A communication limit is a communication category setting that selects the communication medium used for contacts and defines the communication timeframe. You can set limits that are checked during campaign execution and create subscription-enabled communication categories.

To protect your interaction contacts from spam and keep your reputation clean, you can also set some limits for your communication categories. Such a rule can include the communication medium, the number of messages, and the timeframe (days) during which limits get summed and calculated.

An easy example could be that our receivers are only allowed to get three emails of the communication category Camera Newsletter in a 10 day span. If a fourth email of this category is sent out, the contact won’t be included, as the delivery will be blocked.

This example describes the Sent-Out process for an email campaign set up for the marketing area EMEA:

1. First, the permissions and subscriptions of the targeted interaction contacts get checked. Out of the available 16 contacts, we found two contacts not matching our criteria for this specific sent out because of a missing permission for the communication medium email, a missing subscription for the communication category, or both. We are now left with a pool of 14 contacts.
2. In the second sequence, the communication category is checked on the limits set up. Here another two contacts get excluded from the campaign because they already reached the limit for this kind of marketing campaign. We are now left with a pool of 12 contacts.
3. The third sequence check is optional. By configuring a Business Add-In (BAdI) called suppression rules check, own code can be implemented (based on restricted ABAP) for further rule definitions. In our example, three more Interaction Contacts get excluded – maybe in general you don’t want to reach interaction contacts who you know are under the age of 18. We are now left with a pool of nine contacts.
4. Finally, the campaign is sent out to the remaining set of nine contacts.