• by David Goetzl  @dgoetzl, December 10, 2012

On a "What The Hell Is Relevant?" panel at the Email Insider Summit:

Nicole Delma, who works in email and database marketing at the Huffington Post, says she and colleagues are starting to focus on the metric of "time in email" as a measure of engagement.

Dell's Adrian Olvera, who works in global CRM, says a goal with relevancy is "how can we get as much traffic and as much conversion without affecting the customer experience." 

HP's Daryl Nielson, worldwide email manager, spoke about the customer lifecycle and suggested with an "awareness cycle (you) need to send out a lot of email," but once a person is in the buying process, emails need to be increasingly relevant, which continues until after purchase.

Nielson continued that marketing teams focus on getting new prospects, but at HP the most valuable group are customers who have been in the database for five years, who are loyal.

He added that with preference centers, he does not believe in them. Customers might fill one out and "it might be relevant for that day, that month when they filled it out, but their behavior is going to change."