When surveying contacts in multiple campaigns at the same time, there's a high risk of over-survey some of them. "Over-surveying" a contact means that they have received more than one survey in a very short time frame, and this will inevitably affect your survey campaign's open and response rates or worse, contacts might leave low ratings.
Retently had a few options to help you avoid over-surveying contacts.
Transactional email and in-app survey campaigns
Transactional campaigns have a built-in "Throttle" feature that you can find in the campaign's "Trigger" section.
The throttle menu has two options:
This campaign (default)
All campaigns
It also allows you to pick a number of days to indicate how long the throttle period should last per contact.
When switched ON, depending on the menu options selected, the following will happen:
This campaign: A contact can receive only one survey in this particular campaign. The throttle feature will automatically dismiss any other triggered surveys for this contact until the throttle time range has passed. Once the throttle period has passed, the contact can receive another survey in this campaign.
All campaigns: A contact can receive only one survey in general. If the contact has already been surveyed in another campaign, then any new surveys triggered in this particular campaign will be dismissed until the throttle period has ended.
When the throttle option is switched OFF, there are no limits to how many surveys a contact can receive in this campaign or how often. In case of the campaign's trigger misconfiguration, this might result in the contact being over-surveyed, which is why we suggest activating the throttle option and adjusting it to fit your needs.
Edge case
If your campaign also has the delay survey option activated along with the throttle, two things will happen:
Before a survey is delayed and added to the Queue page, it will be analyzed by the throttling algorithm. If the survey doesn't fit the throttle schedule, it will be dismissed without being added to the Queue.
If the throttle option is activated in your survey campaign before a queued survey is about to be sent in this campaign, the throttle algorithm will analyze it, and if the survey no longer fits the throttle schedule (e.g., the contact was already surveyed a couple of days ago in this or another campaign), then the queued survey will be dismissed and canceled without being sent out.
Regular email and in-app survey campaigns
The regular email and in-app campaigns do not need a built-in throttling option due to how their recurring schedule works. Specifically, regular campaigns have two schedule rules:
First survey rule
Recurring survey rule
These rules are global, which means that they also take into account a contact's last received survey in another campaign.
For example, if a contact has already received a survey in another campaign, they will never be able to receive a "first survey rule" rule again. Or if your current campaign has a recurring survey schedule of 90 days, but the contact has already been surveyed in recently in a different campaign, then the 90-day recurring rule will be counted from the date of the contact's last survey in that other campaign.
This is how the schedule in regular campaigns acts as a survey throttle feature.
Link campaigns
Retently doesn't provide any throttling options for link surveys, mainly because we're not handling the delivery of these surveys. Therefore, the person sending the survey link to their audience is responsible for making sure that the survey link is not sent multiple times to the same contact over a short time frame.