24 September 2025 · Journal
When frequency caps hide your best copy
A responsible-looking cap can starve the only notification that still influences. Fatigue is real. Blanket silence is not the only treatment.
Product teams reach for a global daily cap after one loud complaint. CRM then wonders why the carefully written receipt reminder never appears. The cap did its job: it counted messages, not value. Push notification performance has to distinguish transactional necessity, promotional appetite, and true fatigue.
Count by job, not by total cards
We group sends into jobs: account-critical, time-sensitive operational, promotional, and win-back. Caps belong on the last two first. Account-critical messages should almost never compete with a flash sale for a slot. If your ESP only offers a single global counter, say so in the report and escalate the limitation — do not quietly accept that a password reset lost to a mango promotion.
Fatigue without a vibes chart
Watch opt-out rate after promotional bursts, time-to-open stretching inside the intended window, and influence per incremental send. If the third promotional card in a day adds no next actions and lifts opt-outs, that is fatigue. If the third card is a boarding reminder, it is not.
Copy tests run under a tight cap will under-sample your best work. The message that needs a second impression never gets one, so you conclude the headline “lost”. In Signal to Send we pause caps on the test slice or we do not call it a copy test.
A milder policy
Prefer per-job ceilings, quiet-hour suppression, and token hygiene before a blunt daily maximum. When a global cap is politically required, exempt operational jobs in writing and review the exemption quarterly. Alumni in ride-hailing learned this the hard way during monsoon delays: users wanted more operational cards, not fewer.
None of this argues for spamming. It argues for reading the catalogue as a set of jobs. Performance is whether each job still earns its place — not whether the total count looks tidy in a brand-safety meeting.