Relevance: What Is It, Anyway?

by Loren McDonald, Thursday, August 13, 2009, 11:45 AM for Media Post's Email Insider

"Ask any of my fellow Email Insider columnists (or other industry pundits) what is the No.1 key to email marketing success. I bet they'll reply with some variation of "relevance." But what does "relevance" mean? What makes one email more relevant than another?

Now, ask the average email marketer to define "relevance." Answers might range from "Sending the email my subscribers signed up for" to "Whatever I think my subscribers want to read" and even "If it they opted in, then it's relevant."

So I was curious and posed the question on Twitter of what "relevance" means. Here are a few responses (not surprisingly, mostly from email industry folks)"...read on
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It's all about relevance...

and permission...

and interaction...

and other stuff too, but relevance is really important