Calendar, SMS and Push as One Sequenced Programme

Three channels, one person: what decides whether this works is suppression, not sequencing. Our rule is one contact per person per 72 hours across web push, SMS and calendar combined, quiet hours from 21:00 to 08:00 Japan time, and the calendar entry never carries an offer that expires. Programmes that break the first rule beat ours in week one and are finished by week six. Why calendar is a commitment channel, not a delivery channel: A subscribed .ics feed refreshes on the client's schedule, not yours. Google Calendar polls a subscribed feed on its own interval, which can stretch to most of a day; iOS refreshes more often but still not on demand. Anything time-critical placed in a VEVENT arrives after it matters. So calendar carries what is already agreed: the class, the appointment, the renewal date, the session, with a VALARM set at the interval the person would have chosen themselves. Push and SMS carry the change. We publish with X-PUBLISHED-TTL and REFRESH-INTERVAL declared, and we never write a feed that inserts events the subscriber did not agree to receive. A feed that drops promotional entries into a personal calendar gets the calendar removed, and it deserves to. SMS in Japan changes the arithmetic: Japanese SMS is UCS-2, which means 70 characters a segment, and carrier delivery is priced per segment at a level that makes a 210-character message cost three times a one-line message without being three times as effective. Sender registration with the carriers takes time and is worth completing before the campaign is designed rather than after a batch is filtered. Shortened links on shared domains are filtered aggressively; we send on a branded subdomain the client controls. Where volume makes SMS uneconomic, and in Japan it often does, a LINE Official Account carries the same message at a different unit cost and a different consent trail. We will say so rather than sell you the SMS build. How the sequence gets built: We start from the event the person is actually waiting for and work backwards. Each channel takes the job it is best at: calendar holds the date, push carries the change or the near-term nudge, SMS is reserved for the message whose absence breaks the whole sequence. The suppression table is one table across all three, keyed on the person, rather than three vendor-side suppression lists that agree with each other on a good day. What we refuse: No calendar subscription obtained by anything other than an explicit subscribe action. No SMS to a list collected without SMS named at the point of collection. No sending on a national holiday or the morning after one. No legal-services acquisition into Japanese consumer numbers; attorney advertising rules and the solicitation rules under the Act on Specified Commercial Transactions make cold outbound in that category a risk we will not underwrite. Who this is not for: Advertisers who want all three channels carrying the same message on the same day. It is the request we receive most often and decline most often. Teams with no single identity join across the three channels, because without it the suppression rule cannot be enforced and everything else in the design is decoration. What arrives: The sequence map with each channel's job and the trigger that fires it. The .ics specification with alarm intervals, refresh declarations and the update path for changed events. Message sets in English and Japanese, counted in segments. The suppression table schema and the job that enforces it. A weekly read on contact frequency per person, which is the number this is managed on.