Permission Marketing

What is permission marketing?
To simply put it, it’s the opposite of interruptive marketing. Pretty much as the name implies permission marketing is the freedom of delivering expected, personal and relevant messages to people who actually want to get them. In this form of marketing, potential customer gives you permission to market to them. This means that they actually want you to market to them and introduce them to new products. Permission marketing opens the doors to a whole new relationship for you and your client. When you get a customer's permission to market to them you are building a massive trust with that customer that will turn into loyalty and more sales for you.

How to implement permission marketing?
How do you get customers to come ask you for more information about your product or business? The kind of marketing I’m talking about can be given many names. Call it relationship marketing, permission marketing or one of about 20 other names, in his kind of "dating" marketing. It's about conversations, participation and relationships. Even better, you can do it with as many people as you like and no one gets mad at you.

How to get the first date
If you're getting a project / business/ a new product off the ground, the last thing you can afford to do is splurge on marketing on one ad, one mailing, one huge sign for your storefront, or even one Web site. Especially now, when most everyone has built amazing anti-advertising walls up to keep the noise away. Instead, put your time and resources into attracting customers by creating a demand for your brand.

How to get permission?
You can use lots of techniques to make it worthwhile for people to give you permission to talk to them. Use contests and games because they work. Create promotions in which the game itself involves information about your product. People search for ads and read them because they need to find missing pieces of information to get the prizes they want.

The Net is the ultimate tool for permission marketing. But the idea itself is more about mind-set than about medium. I never use any shampoo but Dove. That's because every three months, the company sends me a catalog loaded with different shampoos for different hair type, how one is different from the other, conditioners and hair spa treatments, and analysis of what type of hair needs what combination of care, treatment and product . Dove educates me. It talks to me in a language I understand. It has permission to send this catalog to me. It has permission to follow up with other mailings. In return, I learn a lot about its products. So I buy Dove products more often, I use more shampoo and conditioner - and the company makes a lot more money off of me than Garnier ever will. The most clichéd way to do permission marketing is to give away something valuable. Swap it for an email address and permission to send stuff. As clichéd as it is, it works wonders, so don't shy out of it.

Subscriptions are an unconcealed act of permission. That's why home delivery newspaper readers are so valuable, and why magazine subscribers are worth more than newsstand ones.

RSS and email and other techniques mean you don't have to worry about stamps or ad network buying every time you have something new to say. Respond to customer email inquiries promptly. Always remember the networking rule, bad news travels much faster than good on the Internet.