Permission based marketing is a relatively new term, coined by marketing guru Seth Godin largely in part to the emergence of e-mail marketing.  Essentially, it's a changed philosophy from traditional forms of marketing where the consumer is interrupted during a desired action and presented with an advertisement they must watch or hear before returning to the desired action.  These traditional forms of  interruption marketing are becoming less and less effective on consumers as they become more adept at "tuning out" the advertisements, and this has lead to the growth of permission based marketing's popularity.

Essentially, permission based marketing is any form of marketing where the consumer has specifically requested to receive or be contacted by you for marketing purposes. This is tied to e-mail marketing closely because you'll usually be sending e-mail to potential customers who've requested (or opted in, to use an industry term) to receive marketing e-mails from your company.  Now initially I'm sure it seems counter-intuitive to bother with the hassles of getting potential customers to request e-mail marketing from your company, but there are a lot of very good reasons you should go through this extra effort, and here's just a few of the many reasons why:

1.  SPAM

Yup, we might as well start with the biggest reason you'll want to get permission before sending marketing e-mails out.  As a regular user receiving spam on a regular basis, it may seem that spammers simply get to send out massive amounts of e-mail without any consequences... but in actuality, spammers play a constant cat and mouse game with system administrators, setting up new servers and finding new places to send spam from as their old servers become blocked.  That's right, there are a host of technical issues that you will have to deal with if your e-mail marketing efforts receive too many spam complains.

First of all, many hosting providers (like us for example) will suspend and cancel the hosting accounts of any domain that has been flagged as being advertised in spam emails.  Your e-mail provider may also cancel your account if you are reported for spamming or your mailservers could become blacklisted, which essentially means most people won't receive any mail from you, let alone your marketing e-mails.

In addition to all those technical issues you'll have to deal with, many countries have now enacted anti-spam legislation, and if you are reported for spamming you may even face legal issues depending on the laws where you live.

2. Trust

One of the primary reasons that permission marketing has become such a popular idea in the marketing community is because traditional forms of marketing are simply not working. To a certain extent, sales has always been about building a relationship with the customer.  Convincing the customer to request your marketing information is not only the first step in building that relationship. E-mail is a much easier method of building relationships with your customer than traditional forms such as expensive mailings and time consuming phone calls.

3. Cost Effectiveness

Even though e-mail marketing is already a very cost effective marketing method, wasted money is still wasted money. When you don't have explicit permission to send your marketing message to a potential customer, you have no idea if they will have any interest in what you sell. Most or all of your e-mail list may have absolutely no interest in your product or service and then you've just wasted time and money to advertise to the wrong target market. Conversely, if your list is built with explicit permission (users have opted in to receive your message) then you can be sure that everyone on your list has at least some interest in what you sell.

So all that is well and good, but I know what you're thinking. "How do I get someone to actually ask for marketing materials from me?" Well, don't worry, because next we'll be talking about the different types of marketing e-mails and their uses as well as ways you can grow your subscriber list.  Stay tuned!