The man Business Week calls "the ultimate entrepreneur for the
Information Age" explains "Permission Marketing" -- the
groundbreaking concept that enables marketers to shape their
message so that consumers will willingly accept it.
Whether it is the TV commercial that breaks into our favorite
program, or the telemarketing phone call that disrupts a family
dinner, traditional advertising is based on the hope of snatching
our attention away from whatever we are doing. Seth Godin calls
this Interruption Marketing, and, as companies are discovering, it
no longer works.
Instead of annoying potential customers by interrupting their
most coveted commodity -- time -- Permission Marketing offers
consumers incentives to accept advertising voluntarily. Now this
Internet pioneer introduces a fundamentally different way of
thinking about advertising products and services. By reaching out
only to those individuals who have signaled an interest in learning
more about a product, Permission Marketing enables companies to
develop long-term relationships with customers, create trust, build
brand awareness -- and greatly improve the chances of making a
sale.
In his groundbreaking book, Godin describes the four tests of
Permission Marketing:
1. Does every single marketing effort you create encourage a
learning relationship with your customers? Does it invite customers
to "raise their hands" and start communicating?
2. Do you have a permission database? Do you track the number of
people who have given you permission to communicate with them?
3. If consumers gave you permission to talk to them, would you
have anything to say? Have you developed a marketing curriculum to
teach people about yourproducts?
4. Once people become customers, do you work to deepen your
permission to communicate with those people?
And in numerous informative case studies, including American
Airlines'' frequent-flier program, Amazon.com, and Yahoo!, Godin
demonstrates how marketers are already profiting from this key new
approach in all forms of media.