Optimizely’s latest UK research is a useful warning for teams that have used automation mainly to increase output. The company says 75% of consumers often receive marketing that feels irrelevant, 69% often receive duplicate messages or emails, and 61% feel overwhelmed by the volume of brand communication. Its guide also says 42% disengage when content feels irrelevant and 35% become more likely to unsubscribe after poor or irrelevant experiences.
The operational issue is just as important as the consumer complaint. Optimizely points to marketers working with limited time, fragmented data and disconnected systems. That is the mechanism Brandformance readers should focus on. Irrelevance is rarely caused by one weak subject line. It is usually the visible result of a broken workflow: campaign calendars move faster than data quality, approval queues reward shipping over learning, and channel teams do not see that another team already sent the same audience a similar message.
Why this matters for leaders
For CEOs and CMOs, the risk is not only unsubscribes. Irrelevant communication makes paid traffic work harder, lowers email and CRM response, weakens brand trust and hides the real problem behind more activity. A team can publish more assets, create more variants and run more journeys while the customer experience gets worse.
This is why the research should not be read as another personalization headline. The practical question is whether the marketing organization has a relevance operating model. If not, adding another content tool or AI workflow can increase the speed of weak communication.
A relevance operating model
- Define what counts as a relevant message for each lifecycle stage, not only for each channel.
- Maintain one campaign calendar that shows audience overlap, frequency and exclusions.
- Give CRM, paid media, ecommerce and content teams a shared suppression rule for recent buyers, churn risks and high-value customers.
- Review duplicate-message risk before launch, not after complaints appear.
- Measure relevance with behavioral signals: open quality, click depth, product-page return, unsubscribe rate, complaint rate and assisted conversion.
The model should be small enough to use every week. A relevance review that requires a quarterly workshop will not prevent duplicate emails on Thursday. The useful version is a pre-flight check that campaign owners can complete before a send, launch or automation change.
What to stop doing
Do not treat volume as proof that the stack is working. More variants only help when the underlying audience, offer and timing are better. Do not let every channel define relevance independently. A customer does not experience the email team, paid team and website team separately; they experience one brand repeating itself or helping them.
The business takeaway is direct: content velocity needs a quality gate. If a campaign cannot explain who should receive the message, why now, what they should do next and what recent message they should not also receive, the team is scaling noise.
