Permission Marketing by Seth Godin
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I had never read Permission Marketing. But because it was a book by Seth Godin, who was the former vice president of marketing for Yahoo, I decided it would be a good book to read. Plus it was recommended by a friend of mine who has a large Internet business.
These are some of my favorite quotes that came from this book, and I think Permission Marketing is a great manual for anyone wanting to get started in online or real-world marketing, with building a list of people who give you their permission to contact them.
Marketers have invested and almost completely wasted more than $1 billion on websites as a way of cutting through clutter. General Electric has a site with thousands of pages. Ziff -- Davis offers a site with more than 250,000 pages! And as a direct result of these attempts to cut through all of the clutter is the most cluttered, least effective marketing of all.
Powerful advertising is anticipated, personal, and relevant.
Permission Marketing is anticipated, personal, relevant. Anticipated -- people look forward to hearing from you. Personal -- the messages are directly related to the individual. Relevant -- the marketing is about something the prospect is interested in.
While your competition continues to interrupt strangers with mediocre results, your Permission Marketing campaign is turning strangers into friends and friends into customers.
Five steps to dating your customer. 1. offer the prospect an incentive to volunteer. 2. Using the attention offered by the prospect, offer a curriculum over time, teaching the customer about your product or service. 3. Reinforce the incentive to guarantee that the prospect maintains the permission. 4. Offer additional incentives to get even more permission from the consumer. 5. Over time, leverage the permission to change consumer behavior toward profits.
As new forms of media developed and clutter becomes ever more intense, it's the asset of permissions that will generate profits for marketers.
Focus on share of customer, not market share. Fire 70% of your customers and watch your profits go up!
The process of getting new customers needs to be reengineered. Like caterpillars turning into butterflies, prospects go through a five-step cycle: strangers, friends, customers, loyal customers, former customers.
The one-to-one marketer works to change his focus from finding as many new customers as he can to extracting the maximum value from each customer. The permission marketer works to change his focus from finding as many prospects as he can to converting the largest number of prospects into customers. Then he leverages the permission on an ongoing basis.
Customer service has always mattered. But now that power has shifted to the consumer, it matters a great deal more.
One powerful method is a method used by a woman at camp fairs and in magazines. Her only goal in the ad, and at the trade show, is to get permission to send you a video and a brochure. The ad sells the brochure, not the camp. Call the camp's number, and her staff will immediately qualify your interest and then send the video. This is perhaps the best produced camp video in the market and the brochure is also extremely well done. The only goal of the video is to get permission to have a personal meeting. It doesn't sell the camp. It sells the meeting. At each step, the only goal of the next step is to expand permission.
The less you ask of the consumer and the bigger the bribe the more likely the consumer will give you permission.
A single ad, no matter how well produced, no matter how compelling, is almost never enough to sell your product. To put this in the positive terms: frequency works. Mohamed Ali did not become heavyweight champion of the world by punching 20 people one time each. No, he became the champ by punching one died 20 times. By applying frequency to the poor opponents head, all he was able to bring his message home.
Back to Mohamed Ali again. After he's had someone 10 times and the guy still standing, the opportunity for the quick knockout is long gone. Only through persistence is all he going to get this guy down. The easy path is no longer available. Yet the past that remains is the one that works: frequency. So even though frequency can be expensive, it still must be used. The reason national advertisers need to spend so much money, Procter & Gamble spent more than 2 billion last year, is that without reach and frequency, you can't build a national brand.
Some marketers wonder, "If the best prospects have already understood my ads and then ignored them, doesn't repeating those same ads with frequency only leave me with the bottom of the barrel -- the least likely, the least receptive, the hardest to reach?" It turns out that the answer to that question is no. You don't reach the bottom of the barrel. You do reach the most profitable prospects with frequency.
The days of high demand and limited supply are over. We are no longer competing to see who can build the factories that will supply the world. It's a new game now. A game in which the limited supply is attention, not factories.
Where does trust come from? Trust comes from frequency. But before frequency turns into sales, it turns into permission. Permission to communicate, permission to customize, permission to teach. And permission is just a step away from trust.
Reasons people give permission. The first reason is to save time. The second reason is to save money. The third reason is a little more surprising: it's because people don't like to make a choice. The more successful the marketer is at selecting products that are relevant to our lives, the more likely we are willing to let them pick. The fourth reason is to avoid stock outs. The milkman makes sure we never run out of milk.
Customers want more than price. They want a combination of price and service and safety and comfort. If that makes it superior to your competitors, you will be able to maintain this enviable level of permission.
The offer of a reward in exchange for my patronage, and by extension my attention, is powerful indeed.
The best marketing programs get better over time. They don't depend on novelty to burst through the clutter, nor do they build on the foundation that doesn't actually deliver value in the long run.
People like getting me-mail, not e-mail. With me-mail, every interaction is anticipated, personal, and relevant, not to mention unique, to them.
1. No one enters a promotion thinking he's going to lose. 2. no one quits a promotion when she's tied for first place. 3. The fear of losing because you don't have enough points outweighs the cost of attention that comes from performing in the way the marketer asks. 4. If the interactions are fun and good for the ego it's likely the consumer will continue to participate.
Many marketers are unable to deliver completely different levels of service to different audiences. A dry cleaner can't readily offer cheap and fast service to one customer and expensive and perfect dry-cleaning to another.
In Permission Marketing, the opposite is true. You must find a reason for the prospects to pay attention. You have to offer an explicit reward -- information, education, entertainment, or even cold hard cash -- to get the consumer to opt in to the message.
In summary, the successful permission market are first offers an obvious benefit to the right audience. Second, because it is so allied with the services being offered, the congruence makes it far easier to escalate the customer up the permission ladder.
Permission can be canceled at any time.
Every communication must be crafted with the goal of ensuring that it's not the last one.
Intel has an entire division that fund startup companies, with the sole goal to promote the development of cutting edge stuff that people can't see without upgrading their computers.
Here are the questions that must be answered in order to have a coherent strategy when facing the Web: 1. What are we trying to accomplish? 2. Can it be measured? 3. What is the cost of bringing one consumer, one time, to our website? 4. What is the cost of having that consumer return? 5. If this works, can we scale it?
It's vital that you create a process that leads to a scalable mountain of traffic that doesn't depend on random visits via the search engines.
The net is fundamentally an anonymous medium, though it didn't start that way. Today, with dozens of companies offering anonymous accounts, you can be anyone you want online. Permission Marketing rewards individuals for giving up their anonymity. Traditional Web techniques embrace anonymity and fail because of this shortcoming.
Five simple steps to any Permission Marketing campaign in the context of the Internet: 1. The marketer offers the prospect an incentive for volunteering. 2. Using the attention offered by the consumer, the marketer offers a curriculum over time, teaching the consumer about the product or service. 3. The incentive is reinforced to guarantee that the prospect maintains the permission. 4. The marketer offers additional incentives to get even more permission from the consumer. 5. Over time, the marketer leverages the permission to change consumer behavior and turn it into profits.
The law of permission is simple: to maximize the value of the list, you must maximize uniqueness, anticipation, and overt mess. The more unique the audience, the more anticipated the messages, and the more overt the opt in permission is, the more valuable the list is.
Every commercial website should be set up to accomplish one goal. Your website should be 100% focused on signing up strangers to give you permission to market to them.
Four steps to setting up your permission-based website.
1. Test and optimize your offer. In order to structure a marketing campaign to get opt in permission, it's necessary to recognize that the media cost is heavily weighted at the beginning. You pay for attention now, and get it later.
2. Make the permission of overt and clear. It doesn't pay to trick people into giving you permission. The idea is to have a mutually beneficial dialogue, and the more you tell people about what to expect, the greater the anticipation you be able to create. That's important, as you work to leverage it. Making a promise, and overt deal, and keeping it is the secret to long-term success in Permission Marketing.
3. Use computers, not people, to send and receive information. There are approximately 10,000 seconds in a day. So if you have 10,000 people in your permission database and it takes your computer one second to handle each one, you just maxed out your system. Worse, if 1% of the people in your permission database require human contact every day than half a million people in your permission database will lead to 5000 customer service requests a day reset your expectations on what you should provide to the consumer and to build a sophisticated automated solution. It's essential that you triage your users and make sure that only the people who need human intervention are getting it. You can accomplish this by making it very easy for consumers to escalate an issue, only when a human is truly needed.
Four. Focus on mastery -- online consumers need to feel smart. If you can build simple tools that work, and you can make people feel smart for using them, prospects will flock to you and stay with you. The reason e-mail is the killer app is that it's simple and it does exactly what people expect it to do. Your Permission Marketing campaign should work the same way.
One simple three-part process:
1. Attract targeted consumers with banner ads promising a great price. Interested consumers get more information by clicking on the banner, which takes them to a registration page.
2. Inform consumers about the promotion and have them enter their e-mail address on the registration webpage.
3. Engage the consumer in a high-frequency web and e-mail correspondents in which participation is rewarded with ever greater chances to win the prize.
10 questions to ask when evaluating any marketing program:
1. What's the date?
2. What does an incremental permission cost?
3. How deep is the permission is granted?
4. How much does incremental frequency cost?
5. What's the active response rate to communications?
6. What are the issues regarding compression?
7. Is the company treating the permission as an asset?
8. How is the permission being leveraged?
9. How is the permission level being increased?
10. What is the expected lifetime of one permission?
The best bait is easy to describe. It's coveted by a large portion of your target market, and is economical to deliver. The bait must be tangible enough that the consumer will give up precious attention and privacy to participate. Choosing the right bait is essential. It must also resonate with the product or service you offer. If there's a high overlap between the bait and the ultimate message, you're far more likely to attract and keep the right people.
Permission Marketing isn't about games or sweepstakes. It's about taking a business like direct marketing approach to high-frequency relevant personal anticipated interactions with prospects.
Just because someone is a professional doesn't mean he isn't selfish! Make yourself a little sign and post it on your wall. America's favorite radio station is still WIIFM. What's In It For Me. If you don't acknowledge that with the professionals you're interacting with, they won't give up their valuable time to respond.
Companies that aren't used to being the final step between the consumer and the product need to think long and hard about whether they wish to become gatekeepers or to build direct permission relationships with consumers.
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