Permission Marketing

The idea of permission-based marketing is that you send stuff only to people who have given you permission to do so. Seth Golden is believed to have articulated this concept in his book, Permission Marketing (New York, Simon and Schuster, 1999).

Wikipedia, the free, on-line encyclopedia, says

Permission marketing is a term used in marketing in general and e-marketing specifically. Marketers will ask permission before advancing to the next step in the purchasing process. For example, they ask permission to send advertisements to prospective customers. It is used by some Internet marketers, email marketers, and telephone marketers. It requires that people first "opt-in", rather than allowing people to "opt-out" only after the advertisements have been sent.

Marketers feel that this is a more efficient use of their resources because advertisements are only sent to people that are actually interested in the product. This is one technique used by marketers that have a personal marketing orientation. They feel that marketing should be done on a one-to-one basis rather than using broad aggregated concepts like market segment or target market.

In the United Kingdom, opt-in is required for email marketing, under The Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003. This came into force on the 11 December 2003.

There's a world of great material in the Goldin book. I'd recommend you give it a read. It may change your life. And read the links in the brief Wikipedia article.

I base all my marketing on the permission of the client. I would no more go out and get a mailing list and spam people than I would jump off the bridge to nowhere. My way you build relationships. The other way you get your emails dumped into people's trash bins and no one will respond to you. But that's just me. But, people come up to me and tell me that they like my stuff. It's part of the narrative about myself that I'm building, that I'm always respectful of people's time and attention.

What do you think? I'd like to know. Post a comment.

Entrepreneurship informs all my professional activities. For entrepreneurial real estate go to www.yourstopforrealestate.com/blog and for entrepreneurial writing to www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com