Permission Marketing

One important aspect to building a business online is marketing to your current and potential customers. Marketing can be done hundreds of ways but today I wanted to talk briefly about using email. One person I have great respect for is Seth Godin. As a business/marketing author he has had written many great books and freely shares his incites with the world oh his blog. One article he wrote that I love is a checklist of sorts that you should go through when you are going to send an email.  This checklist revolves around permission marketing, or marketing directly only to those who have specifically given you the permission to market to them.

Permission marketing is the privilege (not the right) of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who actually want to get them.

It recognizes the new power of the best consumers to ignore marketing. It realizes that treating people with respect is the best way to earn their attention.

– Seth Godin

This checklist isn’t just for business marketing, it is a great personal checklist before sending something out.

Some of my favorite points are:

  • Did every person on the list really and truly opt in? Not like sort of, but really ask for it?
  • Is the email from a real person? If it is, will hitting reply get a note back to that person? (if not, change it please).
  • Am I forwarding something about a virus or worldwide charity effort or other potential hoax? (If so, visit snopes and check to see if it’s ‘actually true) – Personal Favorite
  • Does the subject line make it easy to understand what’s to come and likely it will get filed properly?
  • If I had to pay 45 cents to send this email, would I?

It’s a great list and if you want to read through it all you can see it here: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/06/email-checklist.html

There are a ton of topics I would love to cover in depth but my goal right now is to help people get their websites up and running. If there are ideas or questions you have please let me know either in the comments or via the contact page.


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