It’s Better to Ask for Permission Than to Ask for Forgiveness

“It is often easier to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission.” 
— Grace Hopper

Grace Hopper was a pioneering computer scientist, military leader, and mathematician. She also invented the first compiler for a programming language, which led to the development of COBOL. Not a bad resume if you ask me. More amazing females like her in history should be remembered and celebrated.

The advantage of taking the approach of seeking forgiveness instead of permission is that it forces you to act. Permission is often a barrier to entry for taking action. In the context of challenging the status quo (which most certainly Ms. Hopper did) or of ambiguous situations that require quick decision-making, it’s often better to take bold action and deal with the consequences.

However, in the context of modern digital marketing, it’s far better to seek permission.

This is in fact one of the basic premises of permission marketing — a concept pioneered by entrepreneur and marketing genius Seth Godin. He laid out the principles in his famous 1999 book, Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers into Friends and Friends into Customers.

According to Godin:

“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.”

Clearly, permission is not a new topic then — it’s been over 15 years since Godin’s book was published. Yet our inboxes are full of spam, we get bombarded with unsolicited offers and content 24/7, and marketing is as intrusive as ever.

There are a couple of basic reasons for this.

These days, as connected consumers, we’re sharing more data than ever, willingly and unwillingly. Marketers are collecting more data than ever. Marketing technology that ingests and analyzes this data has become more sophisticated than ever. Savvy marketers have also had 15 years to run A/B tests to find out what works and what doesn’t (or what they can and can’t get away with).

The sophisticated, data-driven marketer, in her quest to provide quantifiable evidence that her efforts are leading to real business outcomes is obsessed with metrics and ROI — not permission. In startup culture, the emphasis is on “growth hacks”, shortcuts, or other viral strategies that lead to early-stage rapid growth and the next big app — not permission.

This perfect cocktail of factors has led to a delicious irony — in our quest to deliver more personalized and relevant messages (per Godin’s guidance, though we forgot “anticipated” as part of the deal), we’ve become more invasive and more interrupting.

Marketing Hacks That Are “Hacks”

Marketing Land recently did an article (which actually prompted me to write this) about sports teams using beacons and proximity tech to increase their incremental revenue. For example, the Golden State Warriors were able to sell seat upgrades using beacon-driven push notifications to fans that entered the arena and had the team app installed. For the Warriors, beacons accounted of 9% of all seat upgrades during the season.

Clearly, proximity marketing to deliver personalized and timely offers clearly has a lot of promise.

Then the article laid out possible solutions to overcome the challenge of gaining opt-in participation for using beacons:

“However, those challenges can be overcome in several ways. Google’s Eddystone beacon standard can push notifications using the Chrome browser, rather than through an app. Mobile Wallets can be used as the app-foundation for push notifications. Finally, some companies (e.g., Gimbal) are building app networks that utilize pre-installed apps on users’ phones.”

The way to address the challenge of opt-in marketing is by creating a compelling and relevant offer that will get the right people to opt-in to your communications — not by finding a workaround. That defeats the purpose of opting in!

There is a world of difference between permission-based notifications for fans who choose to download a team app (which can score as an indicator of interest for ongoing dialogue) and notifications based on a mobile browser or pre-installed apps. For the latter, you’ve bypassed the first level of qualification entirely.

Permission marketing is not just something you do — it’s also a philosophy. There is no point in seeking permission in name only if you don’t also seek it in spirit.

Well you can, and it might balloon your list in the short-term, but it will bite you later on.

I’ve come across so many different shady, abusive opt-in practices over the years, both as a marketer and as a digital consumer:

• Buying lists — people purchase email/telephone/mailing lists full of out-of-date or scrapped information as a shortcut to launch their business or extend their reach
• Transferring email lists — transferring emails from your social media contacts or your personal email list into your subscriber list, or from one of your digest subscriber lists into your product pre-launch list without proper consent
• Data harvesting and misuse — asking for more demographic or contact information than is necessary, and then using it cross purposes
• Obscuring opt-in request in legal “fine print” — hiding consent requests for contact in legal terms of service and fine print, knowing full well that most people don’t carefully read them very carefully, and shifting blame when they complain
• Obscuring opt-in request in web design — creating small opt-in boxes or radio buttons and using small font with the intention that people will overlook and hit submit
• Defaulting to consent — assuming consent by having radio buttons or check boxes checked by default in registration forms hoping that people will forget to uncheck or turn off notifications
• Bait and switch — using a lead magnet or a piece of content to build an email list, but not being 100% transparent about your intention to send updates or marketing emails
• Implicit consent — assuming that certain set of lead scoring values grants you permission for marketing outreach without having explicitly been granted consent
• Difficult opt-out process — creating an opt-out or cancellation process that requires consumers to jump through too many hoops in hops of reducing opt-out rates
• Opt-in popups (controversial) — ambush-like popups that are invasive and ruin the user experience (though the data suggests when done right, they can increase conversion)
• Illusory opt-out process — delaying opt-out, not implementing opt-out immediately upon request, or not implementing it at all

Some of these practices are blatant spammer techniques, while some of them are subtler and walk a fine line.

Regardless, persistent abuse and manipulation of consent and information has its consequences.

Man, That List Is Junk

Not taking permission seriously could have a serious impact on your business.

The digital marketer’s mantra is “you are only as good as your list”. It’s the lifeblood of your business. But when it comes to your list, it’s junk in, junk out. If you are not genuinely seeking consent and aren’t transparent about your intentions, your list is going to be full of people who have no real intention of doing business with you. The more dishonest you are about opt-in, the less engaged your list audience will be. For example, purchased email lists perform horribly compared to real opt-in email lists.

According to three years of historical data from MailChimp’s project Omnivore:

Metrics are worse across the board as public (purchased list) correlation increases. Public lists have an open rate of about 1% while true opt-in lists have an open rate of about 25%.

So your list could be junk, what’s the big deal? Well, you might also lose the trust of consumers — possibly forever.

Trust is an oft-overlooked part of marketing. Digital marketers are obsessed with quantitative metrics, like traffic, conversions, CTR, etc., but trust is something priceless. It’s hard to measure, but it’s the backbone of your reputation and one of the most valuable assets you have.

The thing about trust is that it takes a long time to build but you could lose it in an instant. You could also lose it slowly over time. Sadly, many consumers expect such practices from marketers, so they tolerate it as a cost of being a digital citizen. But a lot of times, they hit a tipping point, get fed up, and terminate the relationship. Losing trust could also mean negative word-of-mouth, which affects your ability to generate leads in the future.

In addition, it’s not just that your consumers could break up with you. They could get a restraining order on you!

Enough complaints from them and you could get yourself on a global blacklist, which compromises your ability to operate. For email marketers, this could mean blacklisting your IP, your server, or even your domain name. The process for getting off a blacklist could be lengthy and arduous — time which could be better spent on your business.

Also, the FCC doesn’t mess around. They have stiff laws and penalties against spammers and you don’t want to get on their radar.

In 2015, the FCC warned Lyft, the ride-sharing company, against their robocall practices. They tagged Lyft with making automated calls/SMS part of their terms of service (which is very much illegal), and also for not giving people the ability to properly opt out. In their citation letter, they warn against future violations:

“The Commission may impose forfeitures … up to $112,500 for any single act or failure to act.32”

Fines on a per act basis could be an expensive proposition, especially if you don’t fix automated marketing messages. It’s not just the FCC citation — Lyft got embroiled in a class-action lawsuit for their shady practices. It’s not clear where that stands now, but legal costs aren’t cheap, and that hurts the bottom line.

No Means No

There are a couple of ways you can avoid wasting your efforts, getting into trouble, and having to seek forgiveness.

First, understand what permission really means.

Permission in the context of opt-in marketing is not a difficult concept to grasp if you approach it with the right intentions.

Here are a few choice quotes from Seth Godin in terms of how he defines permission:

“Real permission works like this: if you stop showing up, people complain, they ask where you went.”

“Permission doesn’t have to be formal but it has to be obvious. My friend has permission to call me if he needs to borrow five dollars, but the person you meet at a trade show has no such ability to pitch you his entire resume, even though he paid to get in.”

“In order to get permission, you make a promise. You say, “I will do x, y and z, I hope you will give me permission by listening.” And then, this is the hard part, that’s all you do. You don’t assume you can do more. You don’t sell the list or rent the list or demand more attention.”

Fundamentally, real permission is about honesty. It’s about being 100% open and transparent about your intentions. It requires you to give your consumers the space to evaluate your request without coercion or manipulation, whether it’s blatant or subtle. And it’s about not overstepping bounds or misinterpreting once they grant you your request.

Second, proactively seek genuine permission. It’s about treating people with respect. I think we intuitively know what consent looks like. It takes a certain degree of humility to ask for it. We might abuse it because of short-term business pressures, but that’s no excuse. Don’t wait for complaints to take action and don’t test to see what you can get away with from consumers.

Third, make it easy for people to say no. Realize that some people will try you out, but ultimately decide your content or offers are not a good fit. For some people, their situations change and they aren’t interested after a period of time. That’s OK. You want your lists to be full of engaged, qualified subscribers. List cleaning and maintenance is part of standard practice anyways.

Make your opt-out process transparent, clear, and easy to follow. Don’t make it burdensome and follow up timely with unsubscribe requests.

Fake permission gives you the illusion of access. It creates friction and apprehension. Having someone’s contact info doesn’t mean they are going to listen to you. Consumers are better than ever in terms of tuning out marketers. Our tools and methods may have gotten more sophisticated, but so have theirs.

Real permission gives you real access. It reduces friction and creates an engaging, open, and honest relationship with your potential customers. And at the end of the day, isn’t that what we’re all looking for?