Top 5 Strategies for Using Permission Marketing to Grow Your Business
When I was young, my Dad would tell me, “ask for forgiveness, not permission” when it came to things like having a cookie before dinner was done. I still hear that quote often and when it always makes me wonder, just how many cookies did Dad and I slipped out of the kitchen without Mom noticing?
Quotes like this one and “If you want to achieve greatness stop asking for permission” (Anonymous) are quotes that have been circulating for as long as I can remember and are as popular today as ever. And in most situations, I can see the appeal. I recently decided to finish my degree that I started 10 long years ago. If I would have waited for my husband, children and everyone else in my life to give me permission to take that step, taking away from the time and energy I could share with them, I may have been waiting a long while. So in situations like this, it can be a good thing to just go for it! There is, however, one area where I feel certain that asking permission first can be a great asset and lead to an even greater reward — marketing.
As I mentioned, I have just started taking courses to finish up my degree and one of the courses I’m in now just had us read a phenomenal book called “Permission Marketing: Turning strangers into friends, and friends into customers” by Seth Godin. This book has opened my eyes to so many great ways permission marketing can be used to create, build and grow a business. Here are the top 5 strategies for using permission marketing that I believe would benefit every business:
1UNDERSTAND THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN INTERRUPTION MARKETING AND PERMISSION MARKETING. Interruption marketing is the traditional, in-your-face style marketing that we are bombarded with on a daily basis. Ads, commercials, spam emails, phone calls and letters; it’s everywhere! And there’s far too much of it out there for any one person to possibly take it all in, making it, in many ways, a waste of time and resources.
In his book, Godin lays out a new, smarter approach to marketing called Permission Marketing. Godin’s book as well as his blog post, both titled “Permission Marketing,” go into great detail on all aspects of permission marketing but for the purpose of time, which we will be talking about next, we will start with the basics. Permission marketing allows the consumers the opportunity to first volunteer to be marketed to, rather than spamming them with information they neither want or need. Then by focusing only on the volunteers, marketers only use resources to get information about their business or products to those people who are truly interested in learning more and who will likely turn into customers. It’s a win, win!
2 TAKE ADVANTAGE OF ONE OF LIFE’S GREATEST RESOURCES — TIME. On page 42 of his book, Godwin says,
“There is one critical resource, though, that is in critically short supply. Bill Gates has just as much as you do. And even Warren Buffet can’t buy more. That scarce resource is time. And in light of today's information glut, that means there’s a vast shortage of attention.”
Everyone seems to be in such a rush today. There’s a never ending list of people to contact, errands to run and chores to get done. Who has time to explore the incredibly innumerable amount of marketing propaganda floating around? Tell me, when was the last time you sat down and looked through all of the flyers in the Sunday Shopper newspaper? I can’t even begin to tell you when it was for me. Time is such a valuable and scare resource in the world today and permission marketing not only respects that fact but marketers can take advantage of that fact to build their business using permission marketing. Here’s a personal example: I get multiple event invites and group ads on Facebook every single day from friends hosting parties for different consultant-ran businesses. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for supporting consultants who are running their sales business from home, I’m a consultant myself! But with the overwhelming number of events I’m added to each week, I rarely take the time to look into them. The ones that I do explore further are the ones whose host has personally reach out to me to tell me about their party and why he/she thinks I would enjoy the products and then asks if I would like to be invited to their party. Permission marketing at its finest! Time is precious; acknowledge the value of your consumers time by asking permission before using it. Chances are, you and your product will be the one out that they take the time to consider.
3 BUILD STRONG, CONFIDENT RELATIONSHIPS WITH THE CUSTOMERS YOU ALREADY HAVE — THEN KEEP THEM! Permission marketing is more than just asking permission before sending out that first piece of information; it’s building a long-term, committed relationship with your customers.
In their book “The One-to-One Future,” Don Peppers and Martha Rogers explains that getting a new customer is expensive. Marketers have to spend money to first get their attention and then more money to tell them about the business and products. For this reason, Peppers and Rogers suggest focusing on keeping customers you already have for longer, saving money by taking the focus off of marketing to new customers and making money as those long-term customers shop from your business time and time again. By building strong, intimate relationships with the customers you already have, your business will continue to grow without wasting resources.
4 CREATE A CYCLE FOR GETTING NEW CUSTOMERS. Through Godin’s work, we learn that the process of getting new customers is another key strategy to focus on to take your business to the next level using permission marketing. He explains that that process needs to be re-engineered to go through a five-step cycle like the one shown in the graphic below.
Through permission marketing techniques, like individual, personalized outreach, marketers should be able to take strangers and turn them into friends. Those friends may then volunteer to become customers. Using the permission marketing customer/marketer relationship-building techniques we’ve already discussed, those customers will become loyal customers, shopping from your business time and time again. Loyal customers then become former customers which, as we learned in strategy #2, is not a forgotten customer but a lead that we should continue to work on building stronger permissions with and in doing so, create long-term customer accounts and future profit without having to start the process all over with someone new.
5FREQUENCY IS EVERYTHING. As we now know, building a trustful relationship with the consumer is the single greatest part of keeping the customer base you already have as well as creating new sales. We also know that you can’t build trust without first building familiarity. This makes awareness a critical part of permission marketing and, according to Godin, the most important tactic for building awareness is frequency. While an unseasoned marketer may make the mistake of focusing on reach over frequency (reaching 100 people with a brilliant ad once vs. reaching 25 people four times each), the fact is that frequency is ultimately far more beneficial than reach. That one brilliant ad that reach 100 people may have been misunderstood by some, some consumers likely missed it all together and many consumers who did see it just that one time, will likely soon forget the information. For this reason, using resources to build up the frequency of ads and other forms of outreach is far more lucrative for your business because, even though the consumer pool may be smaller, a greater number of those consumers will understand, see and remember your ad. On his blog, Seth Godin says, “real permission works like this: if you stop showing up, people complain, they ask where you went.” Without frequently reaching out to your customers and potential customers, your business could easily be forgotten in a world so full of information.
