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Permission marketing

Sending mails without asking is spamming

The Bootstrappers
The Bootstrappers

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Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

A friend, who runs a for profit social business, has been sending me WhatsApp messages about his business for a few months. At first, I thought that it was a one off thing. But, it became a weekly and at times daily thing. I stay away from Whatsapp groups, as I do not want constant flooding of the messages. I sent him a blog post of Seth Godin.

He wrote a post titled ‘ Permission Marketing’.

Real permission is different from presumed or legalistic permission. Just because you somehow get my email address doesn’t mean you have permission. Just because I don’t complain doesn’t mean you have permission. Just because it’s in the fine print of your privacy policy doesn’t mean it’s permission either.

The friend said that he thinks it to be alright to send messages to his contacts, as he gets messages from them too. He took exchanging of informal messages to be an implicit permission to spam the contact list. That doesn’t work.

Seth also wrote:

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.

Always remember three things about the permission:

  1. The permission is about the specific product or publication. You can not use the list for another one.
  2. It shouldn’t be a one way street. Offer people a choice. Ask them how do they want to use it and in what format.
  3. The best shortcut, in this case, is no shortcut at all. Build the list slowly and with permission.

I am not receiving the messages anymore. But, he requested me to share a email dump, which a client had shared with me a few years ago. I haven’t used it till date for Bootstrapper’s Digest. I won’t offer it to anyone.

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