![]() ![]() You have tickets to the Springsteen concert. Does it matter how much the land cost to buy? No. The one that’s right next to the huge subdivision being put up, not the one next to the condemned shopping center. On which one should you develop a gas station? The past investments are over, lost, gone forever. When making a choice between two options, only consider what’s going to happen in the future, not which investments you’ve made in the past. The best shortcut, in this case, is no shortcut at all.The most important decision-making rule you learn in business school is still largely misunderstood. That’s why so few companies do it properly. If it sounds like you need humility and patience to do permission marketing, you’re right. And I never, ever did anything with those addresses again. When I launched my book that coined this phrase 9 years ago, I offered people a third of the book for free in exchange for an email address. The internet means you can treat different people differently, and it demands that you figure out how to let your permission base choose what they hear and in what format. Permission doesn’t have to be a one-way broadcast medium. You don’t assume that just because you’re running for President or coming to the end of the quarter or launching a new product that you have the right to break the deal. But the promise is the promise until both sides agree to change it. You can promise a newsletter and talk to me for years, you can promise a daily RSS feed and talk to me every three minutes, you can promise a sales pitch every day (the way Woot does). You don’t sell the list or rent the list or demand more attention. 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. In order to get permission, you make a promise. That’s why home delivery newspaper readers are so valuable, and why magazine subscribers are worth more than newsstand ones. Subscriptions are an overt act of permission. 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. Permission doesn’t have to be formal but it has to be obvious. Home delivery is the milkman’s revenge… it’s the essence of permission. RSS and email and other techniques mean you don’t have to worry about stamps or network ad buys every time you have something to say. One of the key drivers of permission marketing, in addition to the scarcity of attention, is the extraordinarily low cost of dripping to people who want to hear from you. You earn the right, over time, bit by bit. You don’t start by asking for the sale at first impression. He was upset because for three days in a row, his Daily Candy newsletter hadn’t come. I got a note from a Daily Candy reader the other day. Real permission works like this: if you stop showing up, people complain, they ask where you went. Just because it’s in the fine print of your privacy policy doesn’t mean it’s permission either. Just because I don’t complain doesn’t mean you have permission. Just because you somehow get my email address doesn’t mean you have permission. Real permission is different from presumed or legalistic permission. Attention becomes an important asset, something to be valued, not wasted. And there’s no way they can get their attention back if they change their mind. Pay attention is a key phrase here, because permission marketers understand that when someone chooses to pay attention they are actually paying you with something precious. It realizes that treating people with respect is the best way to earn their attention. It recognizes the new power of the best consumers to ignore marketing. Permission marketing is the privilege (not the right) of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who actually want to get them. ![]()
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