Ask any email pundit the key to successful email marketing and you’ll get a one-word answer: Relevance.

While Loren McDonald understands that, he wonders what makes one email message more relevant than another. So he asked other email marketers what “relevance” means to them.

“Most agreed that a core principle of relevance is ‘the right message at the right time,’” he writes in MediaPost’s Email Insider. And he adds these thoughts:

- The foundation of relevant email is that a subscriber has knowingly and actively opted in to receive your messages. That’s why email continues to be an efficient and cost effective tool for communicating with prospective students who have expressed an interest in your school.

- Your messages must be timely, fitting in with what subscribers expect and what is appropriate for the content.

- The email should reflect the subscriber’s interests, preferences, history and other details. Segmentation, dynamic content, integration of analytics, and trigger-based emails drive personalization.

- Your emails must provide clear value. They should inform, notify, remind and solve problems.

- Your emails should occasionally delight recipients with special content, discoveries, recommendations, reminders or even rewards.

- An underappreciated component of relevance is personality and humanism. People don’t want to read email from faceless corporations and institutions. The more “human” your emails are, the more your subscribers will anticipate and interact with them.

To see more of McDonald’s post, visit:
www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=111604

Read more about our authors.  Ray Ulmer, public relations director at TargetX, has been involved in higher education marketing for more than 25 years, including serving as executive director of communications at La Salle University and director of public relations at Drexel University. He has also worked in corporate marketing and advertising.