Email and Permission Based Marketing

A long time ago, there was a pretty large debate about whether or not we need permission to email someone marketing material. At the time, permission was not really a huge concept in marketing. We simply were allowed to marketing to anyone in whatever medium we wanted. We would flood peoples mailboxes with catalogs and direct mail pieces, place ads wherever we pleased, and we used whatever data we could get our hands on to target those pieces to increase efficiency.

But email was very different. Email inboxes were much more personal than a mailbox. Even though inboxes were largely free (e.g. originally supplied by your internet provider...this is pre-Gmail), they were owned by the user and thus the user should have more control over what comes into that inbox. If you were not part of this debate, let me tell you back in the early 2000's it was heated and emotional for many. The fact that this was never really fully settled led to the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 in the U.S.

In 2001, the Direct Marketing Association, in an attempt to keep the government from regulating this, issued the decree that email would require permission to send to the user. Marketers were obliged to comply...some reluctantly and others championed the decision.

And so began the era of permission based marketing. However, permission based marketing in email was never really deployed in the way that it was intended. Permission became a hurdle that a brand needed to overcome rather than an indicator that a customer was willing to give us their attention...this is a complete bastardization of the concept that Seth Godin put forth in his book, Permission Based Marketing. If you are a new marketer, I would encourage you to read the book.

Permission Based Marketing is about gaining the attention of your intended customer and keeping that attention by providing continuing value to that customer. Once we stop providing that value to the customer, they simply cut off their attention.

By treating permission as a hurdle, rather than the first step of a long term relationship. Most email marketers spent the next decade bombarding customers with emails rather than focusing on providing the highest value. Today, the average B2C marketer sends 2-3 emails per day to their customer. Do you think that garners their attention?

The answer is no. What it has done was lead to an increasingly difficult battle to gain the attention of the user. What most consumers do today is delete most of their email rather than pay attention to it. And ISP's are now forced to deploy more and more restrictive guidelines for what they call "bulk email" so that they can protect their servers. It has become a back and forth battle to reach the inbox.

Meanwhile, those marketers who have figured out how to provide the key customers with high value win. My advice:

1. Make sure that as a marketer you understand the value of an opt-in
2. Provide value with every interaction, don't just send an email because you need to 2-3 times per day.
3. Segment and Personalize - it increased email ROI by 30-50% and is worth the effort
4. Allow your customers to choose email frequency and respect that choice
5. Automate email and trigger it based on consumer behavior...not on your schedule.

Most of all, respect the relationship that you get when a consumer raises their hand to give you their attention.