What Super Messages are and why you should care
In Salesforce Marketing Cloud the term “Super Message” comes up from time to time when discussing some features and there’s a lot of confusion around this. By reading this article you’re going to find out what it is, how you can report on the current usage and how it might impact your operation.
How is a Super Message defined?
In the “How to Select the Right Marketing Cloud Edition” document it is described as follows:
Any type of message sent to a customer including an email, a high priority email, a landing page impression, CloudPage impression, a Predictive Intelligence web or email impression, a push notification, or an SMS or MMS message. A detailed description of Super Messages and how they may be used can be found at https://sfdc.co/Super_Messages_US_CA_SMS
The further description in the referenced Super Messages document is as follows:
A quantity of Super Messages (including US & CA SMS) is included in each Basic, Pro, Corporate and Enterprise Edition, and additional Super Messages (including US & CA SMS) can be purchased at any time during a subscription term. Entitlements can be applied to one or more messaging channels and each messaging channel consumes one or more entitlements.
What exactly does that mean?
You can think of a super message as some kind of virtual currency within Markting Cloud. This virtual currency is deducted from your balance for interactions with/of your customers. Other than the name suggests, not only messages to your customers reduce your balance, but also CloudPage impressions for example.
What you also need to know is, that not every counted interaction deducts a single super message from your balance, but there are multipliers for certain usage types. An email send with a priority set to high will count as four super messages for example. Multipliers for different usage types can be found in the table below:
Super Message Multipliers by Usage Type
| Usage Type | Multiplier |
|---|---|
| CloudPages Impressions | 1 |
| Einstein Content Selection Impressions | 2 |
| Email Impressions | 1 |
| Emails | 1 |
| GroupConnect Reseller Messages | 10 |
| GroupConnect Transactional Messages | 3 |
| High Priority Triggered Emails * | 4 |
| Interactive Email | 1 |
| Landing Page Impressions | 1 |
| Live Weather Block Impressions | 1 |
| MobilePush Messages | 1 |
| SMS/MMS Messages - CA | 25 |
| SMS/MMS Messages - US | 10 |
| Web Impressions | 2 |
This table is taken from Salesforce’s Super Messages document.
Details and definitons of the specified usage types can be found in the Salesforce Marketing Cloud Data Usage Types Documentation.
* As you might have noticed in the table above, high priority triggered emails are relatively costly. If your emails are triggered from an external system via API (e.g. order confirmations from an e-commerce platform), you might want to consider switching to the Transactional Messaging API, that can be configured using Transactional Send Journeys. This new API is even faster and nonetheless billed as a single super message only.
Monitor your usage
Sounds pretty complex to keep track of your current usage and available balance, doesn’t it? Considering that most reports only include messages, but not the priority of the send, analytics for CloudPage impressions is also available separately and other billed usage types are no exception to that, it is very time-consuming to calculate the total super messages usage of you account.
But I have great news for you! Even though Salesforce doesn’t provide a dashboard within Marketing Cloud itself, you can request a report to be shared with you in the form of a quip document from your Account Executive. This document is refreshed on a daily basis and helps you see the current usage per Business Unit and in total, as well as the remaining balance.
What’s included in your license?
To find out how many super messages are included in your license it is best to check your contract or ask your Account Executive. This is due to the fact that additional super message packages can be included in a contract on top of the ones already part of your edition. Here is an overview of the amount included per edition:
| Edition | Included Super Messages |
|---|---|
| Basic | 250k |
| Pro | 2.5M |
| Corporate | 10M |
| Enterprise | 150M |
This table is taken from Salesforce’s “How to Select the Right Marketing Cloud Edition” document.
Related resources
- Marketing Cloud Editions overview with included Super Messages and a glossary describing the term (PDF)
- Salesforce’s Super Messages document (PDF)
- Salesforce Marketing Cloud Data Usage Types Documentation
- IdeaExchange: Report on Super Messages direktly within Marketing Cloud
- StackExchange: Marketing Cloud: Current number of used super messages
- Transactional Send Journeys and the Event Notification Service (cheaper option for API triggered high priority sends)