When the post office delivers something you want, and have been waiting days to arrive, that's signal.
When they deliver items you never signed up for, and stuff your mailbox full of local advertisements, circulars, credit offers, political postcards, etc., that's noise.
A lot of that noise gets tossed in the trash expeditiously. Whether offline or online, it's noise all the same and treated as such.
Clearly a lot of organizations are comfortable with generating noise. They're proud, and claim victory on the numbers reached, despite very little conversion into value.
Sometimes no matter your best intentions, you may be creating noise for your audience with your outreach efforts. You're definitely creating noise if it's not even customized for them individually, and it's just a generic blast of attention seeking.
Yes, you reached me. I now know you exist for better, or worse. But are you willing to gamble on worse?
If the answer is no, then the need to figure out how to get more signal to the audience you want to convert into paying customers needs to become a priority.
Getting your target audience to opt-in to your message is the first step in converting your own noise into a welcomed signal.
Signal is how you stand out. Signal is how you win.
