Relevancy Versus Frequency in Email Marketing

One person's spam is another's actionable information.

By Sylvia Sierra
11/17/2008 -10:22 PM

How much email is too much email? My opinion on this subject has taken a 180 degree turn in the last year. Coming from the traditional print circulation management background I wrote the original rules of email usage for my company. We had established no more than one email per week per subscriber. Frequency of communication was the most important aspect of how we managed email communication.

How the world has changed! Yesterday I received three emails from the same pure e-media company, at 9:35, 10:56 and 2:26. Under my old standards, this is spam! Did I unsubscribe? No. They were serving me product that is of interest to me. So, spam is in the eye of the beholder. We may need to switch gears and start thinking of relevancy instead of frequency as the metric to apply to how much email is appropriate to send.

Sylvia Sierra is SVP, Corporate Audience Development at Access Intelligence.