Mr. Seth Godin, V.P. Direct Marketing at Yahoo!, tells us how to turn strangers into friends and friends into customer in the excellent book on how to be successful in marketing your products and services. I can only hope that every SPAM marketer, direct mail marketer and fax-blast marketer reads this book. Perhaps if they do, we will all have a lot fewer useless intrusions in our lives.
The bottom line of this very well written and entertaining book is that Godin advises us that “The goal is to avoid surprising the consumers and interacting with them by sending only messages they expect.” Those of us who were trained in consultative selling techniques will recognize much of what Godin advocates, but he packages even these “old ideas” in such a way as they are now usable in the new world of internet communications and e-commerce.
Godin gives us the logic behind what most of us have intuitively decided is true – TV advertising doesn’t work, direct marketing (as done today) is a waste of time and money, we are squandering our internet marketing opportunity, and we are alienating potential long-term relationships. Godin outlines for tests for permission marketing which, by definition, offers consumers incentives to accept advertising voluntarily. Permission Marketing must: 1. encourage learning relationships with your customers. 2. track the people who have given you permission to communicate with them. 3. provide marketing curriculum to teach people about your products/services. And 4. allow you to deepen your permission to communicate with those people in your permission marketing database.
Interested? Want to know more? Click on the book image and get Permission Marketing by Seth Godin.
Click to see it at Amazon.