Permission Marketing

Permission marketing is an evolution of direct marketing. You marketing your product or service to your potential customers with their permission. How is it possible? It is possible when they opt-in to receive information from you.

Permission marketing is asking for an audience about their interest in your product or service, let a certain percentage of the audience put their hands up expressing their interest in your offer and then you offer them further information. Before email became main stream this was still practiced using direct mail. But it was done only by a few people because it was difficult to manage sending out thousands of letters physically. Now email has made it far easier to do direct marketing electronically and permission marketing has reborn.

Permission marketing involves the following activities:

§  Advertising a Solution

§  Follow Up  Messages

§  Permission Based Email Marketing

    

Advertising a Solution   :

The first step is advertising. But you may ask: isn’t it interruption marketing? Yes it is… but just to get people interested in our offer and allow them to opt-in. For example instead of selling the product directly, you would have seen many ads with titles like “Learn how to ABC in 10 days” or “Are you having XYZ problem? Here’s a solution”. People who are not interested will not opt-in – they will ignore the ads. All the people who opt-in are potential customers. Usually opt-in is carried out using a landing page (or a squeeze page) which is just a single page with one goal: let the people sign up using their name and email address.

You can publish articles in your blog, attract potential customers through quality content and let them opt-in to your subscriber list using various techniques.

For this Read about Inbound marketing

Follow Up Messages

Once potential customers have opted-in to receive more information, we should send them timely follow-up messages to convert them into customers. The follow up messages should be crafted in such a way that they have useful but incomplete. For complete information/solution they should be motivated to buy the product offering. Knowledge in copy writing, persuasion and sales psychology will be of great help while crafting these messages.

When the potential customer is motivated enough to buy the solution, we should present the product to them. Instead of pushing them to buy, this should be a soft sell. Many people will not be ready to buy right away and some will need more information and time to make a buying decision. People who have not bought the product are retained in the same mailing list and we should follow up with more messages (combination of useful messages and sales messages) until they opt-out. Some will end up buying the product and these customers should be segmented into a new list.

Permission Based   Email Marketing?

When it comes to email marketing, permission is the act of getting consent from a subscriber to send them commercial email marketing messages.

Generally speaking, there are two types of permission; implied permission and express permission.

You have implied permission to email somebody if you have an existing business relationship with them. This could mean they are a current customer, donate to your charity, or are an active member of your website, club or community.

If you don’t have implied permission to email a person, then you’ll need express permission to send them campaigns. Express permission is granted when somebody specifically gives you permission to send them email campaigns, likely by entering their email address in a subscribe form on your website, or entering their details into your in-store newsletter subscribe form.