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The Rules of Permission Email Marketing

sonia_simone — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 15:28:03 CDT

1. Be Respectful!

Permission marketing is all about respect and honoring your audience. No spam, no tricks, no hard-sell. Trust takes time to build, and you can destroy it in an instant. Don't.

Don't even think about using anything other than double opt-in for a permission email program. (That means your users have to verify that they want to receive your stuff. It's an important anti-spam measure and it will boost your deliverability like crazy.)

Some people (mostly high-pressure marketers without a solid relationship with their audience) will tell you that your confirm rate will plummet if you use double opt-in. These people don't know what they're doing. My confirm rate is about 97% with double opt-in. Everything depends on how you set things up and how useful your content is. If your audience truly wants to hear from you, they'll confirm.

2. Be Interesting!

Since permission marketing is all about enticing people to read your marketing messages, they have to be interesting in and of themselves. You've heard that content is king--well, this is what they're talking about. If you're not sure how to create fantastic content, read sites like Problogger or Copyblogger and put their advice into action.

(Yes, I'm an Associate Editor with Copyblogger. But I gave that advice before I ever wrote a word for them.)

If you're stumped for how to create good email newsletter content, I've created a free 10-lesson email course on how to do exactly that. (The course is popular with bloggers, too.) I will never trade or sell your information (and you shouldn't either, it completely violates the permission principle) and I won't spam you to death either. In fact, if I can blow my own horn for a minute, this e-class is a pretty good example of how to provide valuable content and build great relationships. You can subscribe to the email content class here.

3. Be Useful!

Make it all about them, not all about you. If your email marketing solves reader problems, gives readers cool new ideas for stuff they can use, entertains readers, and educates them about what they care about, you're going to create raving fans who talk you up to their friends, do more business with you, and laugh at the idea of ever going to one of your competitors.

There's nothing worse than an email newsletter that's all pitches. You should have at least three times as much useful, pitch-free content as you do offers. And of course, everything you sell, whether it's your own product or someone else's, needs to be terrific and needs to solve real problems. Your actions (offering great stuff) need to match your words.

4. Be Generous!

This is the age of content and information, and that means the expectation is that you will give away lots of useful free stuff. Your newsletter needs to be valuable in and of itself.

How much should you give away? If you feel like you're giving a little too much away, you've got it about right.

Give first, get second.

5. Be Consistent!

Be sure you're using your email provider's autoresponder function to deliver a pre-determined chain of great content to every new subscriber. That way you can be kind of flaky (like I am) and your subscribers will still form a great bond with you. I like to create 10-part sequences with really high-quality information, so every person who's new to my lists will come to see me as a friend and a trusted authority.

You also don't want to start out with generous, useful content and then turn into some scary Mr. Hyde with a lot of high-pressure selling. Keep the balance of purely useful content to selling consistent, don't turn on a firehose of pitches without warning.

Email Marketing Articles from Around the Web

sonia_simone — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 15:15:49 CDT

5 List-Building Ideas for Restaurants

October 2, 2008. The Aweber blog has some ideas for how restaurants can boost their email newsletter subscriptions. Some of these can apply to any business or project, so it's well worth checking out.

What We Can Learn from E-mail Spammers

September 12, 2008. Dosh Dosh writes a thoughtful (as always) post about what &$%#&@ spammers can actually teach us about effective communications, particularly in how you can quickly grab and hold attention.

Email Marketing: How Not to Be a Dirty Rotter Spammer

July 16, 2008. My article on how to keep your email from looking like spam to your readers, whether or not it falls into the "technical" definition of spam.

The Harpoon or the Net: What's the Right Copy Approach for Your Prospects?

June 26, 2008. I wrote this piece for Copyblogger to contrast two marketing styles--the "harpoon" (a single shot at your customer, such as a typical Internet marketing sales letter, replete with yellow highlighting and red headlines) vs. a content "net" to build trust and authority. Be sure to read the comments, where Michael Fortin and John Reese share their thoughts from the "harpoon" side of things.

Permission Marketing

January 31, 2008. Seth Godin, who coined the term permission marketing, talks about what permission really means and what the marketer needs to bring to the equation. "If it sounds like you need humility and patience to do permission marketing, you're right. That's why so few companies do it properly. The best shortcut, in this case, is no shortcut at all."

Email Newsletters: Surviving Inbox Congestion

June 12, 2006. Probably the biggest problem email marketers face (once we get through the spam filters) is getting noticed and read in the clogged, congested emailboxes of our customers. Usability guru Jakob Nielsen reports on some best practices, supported by research, that will help you do exactly that.

Shortcuts

March 23, 2005. Seth Godin: "If there were shortcuts, people smarter than you and me would have found them already. There aren't. Sorry. "

Permission Email Marketing Home

sonia_simone — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 22:34:56 CDT

So what's permission email marketing? Permission marketing is a new way to think about marketing and communication. It's perfect for people who:

hate spam
hate gross salespeople
hate cheesy "closing techniques" to close sales
hate marketing
but don't want their business to shrivel and die

"Permission marketing" was a term coined by the amazing Seth Godin for a new way to market. Instead of blasting potential customers with increasingly annoying messages designed to interrupt their attention and force them to listen to your aggressive sales message, permission marketing actually asks the person if it's cool to share some messages with them about what you have to offer.

There are other ways to do permission marketing, but email marketing is the most common because it's cheap, it's easy to set up, and it reaches customers using something almost everyone has--an email address.

Please don't contribute spammy, high-pressure, creepy Internet Marketing or other scamlike stuff to this site! This is all about ethical, respectful use of these techniques.