Blog#1

What is permission marketing? The technical term of permission marketing is the ability to obtain customer’s permission to receive information from a particular company (Marketing Terms, 2007).  This term was popularized by Seth Goldin who stated “Permission marketing is the privilege (not the right) of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who actually want to get them.”(Seth Goldin’s blog). An example of this is where people want to sign up for newsletter or special promotions in advance relating to certain produts or services they are interested in. The hardest part of being able to master this skill is being able to capture your target consumers attention especially with so much advertisements and spam mail being received. Building on top of that, those annoying telemarketers who constantly call you asking either to ask you to fill out  a survey or trying to sell you a certain product is not exactly the best way to win over people’s brand loyalty. According to Seth Goldin’s Blog, “in order to get permission, you make a promise” and then by promising to do something for the consumers, hopefully the company can gain permission from the consumers to listen. And on top of that, you dont do anything else. More of Seth’s knowledge on permission marketing can be found by clicking here.  There are many ways to reach out to potential clients whether its through direct mail or email. By using email, All Business, has four rules to develop your own opt in strategy and some of them include: letting the customer decide what format they want to receive your promotions and also allowing customers to stop receiving future mails. The rest of them can be found on the website.

Being able to stand out from the rest of the competition takes creativity and knowledge. An example was H&R Block being able to do to gain the attention of more than 50,000 tax paying customers by grabbing attention of their attention through banner ads promoting a sweepstake(Fast Company 2008). The deal was this; you give us your permission to email you more information about our new service and you get a chance to have your taxes paid by H&R. (Fast Company 2008). I think this was a clever idea to get peoples’ attention and time since most people dont like to pay their taxes.  If you like more information on what H&R did or more information and  tips on permission marketing, you can find it on Fast Company.

~ by echen86 on September 3, 2008.