Why Permission-based Marketing?

Do you still market to people without their permission? Are you aware of how much you hurt your brand when you do so?

I was reminded this week how many people still don't understand the concept of permission-based marketing. I received an unsolicited email from one of my LinkedIn Connections which was a blatant plug for their company. I instantly disconnected from them.

I also meet with many clients who's idea of marketing is to send emails to their contact databases, where none of the contacts were added to the database using opt-in email marketing approaches. Web etiquette dictates that sending emails to people who haven't asked for them is poor form. In fact, no matter how good your intentions or the quality of information you are emailing, unsolicited emails are SPAM.

It also doesn't matter if you are a public sector organization or charity. The same rules apply. In fact there is only one rule.

Never, ever, send an email to anyone that hasn't given you permission to email to them first.

How can you build your permission-based email lists? Here are just a few suggested approaches:

1. Develop a following. You can do this in many ways. Building your personal and corporate LinkedIn pages must be taken seriously. Blog. Join Digg, StumbleUpon and Reddit. Tweet. Post videos in YouTube. Facebook. All of these approaches will build a community of followers who will naturally develop a curiosity towards your offerings and investigate them on their own. This will also create the community or communities into which you are ready to start building your email lists. And developing a following means creating real value with good content. It is not a simple matter of tweeting what you had for lunch.
2. Build the email list. If developing a following is the art, building the email list is the science. This is typically done through tastefully constructed offers to your followers. A great example might be a subscription to a newsletter. You need to ensure the content quality in the offer is as good or better than what is being offered in your social media offerings. The placement of of the subscriber offer can be placed in the sidebar of a blog or in other content you produce. It is an option the follower may select based on the promise of more good content which they have already become accustomed to consuming by following you.
3. Use an email service provider to maintain your email list. This is critical. It provides the double opt-in mechanism to gain subscribers and allow them to unsubscribe in the future if your content no longer interests them. It is the only viable approach to maintaining and segmenting your lists to ensure you maintain the focus of the various interest groups you will develop over time. It is also critical because it stores the approval for you to send emails to your subscribers.
4. Be Consistent. Once you have built your email list, ensure your content is true to the promise you made to get your followers to share their email with you and join as a subscriber. There is no better way to lose subscribers than to fall short of their expectations with inconsistent content relative to the offering you made at subscription time.

There are many organizations which understand permission-based marketing, but many more who are just plain lousy at it. If they can't SPAM you with emails because you checked "off" that option on their site, they get a telemarketer to call on to you instead. This is self-defeating. Permission-based marketing applies equally to any communication you might have with your client or stakeholder. The tools are available to nurture your following, and subsequently your subscribers, but you have to start now to develop the community.

To those that argue this sounds like it is too long term, I would argue that short term SPAMMING and cold calls generate very little in the way of results. If you compare the results of both approaches over a six month period, the permission-based marketing approach will generate significantly better results in the same time period. And you don't have to take my word for it, many others who write about this topic feel the same way.

I believe strongly that if you are not using permission-based marketing you are destroying your brand. You appear callous, desperate, and not at all customer centric. If you were to research what is being written about your company on the web through social media and rating sites, you would see first hand the damage your unsolicited emails are causing.

I strongly encourage any organization not using permission-based marketing to start today. There is no other viable approach to marketing.