The Highest Form Of Permission Marketing

I am currently reading Permission Marketing book, authored by Seth Godin, whenever I am outside. I got interested reading about the highest form of permission marketing. And that is when your customer is very willing to pay you whenever it is necessary. Times when you are on subscription basis for your daily newspaper, signing the consent form for the doctor to inject anything into your body while you are not conscious, etc.

This is the time when you have complete trust from your customers who are willing to pay you at an agreed price whenever necessary. But this is also the time when you cannot fulfill in one way or another, that your trust is almost as good as going off permanently. And currently, I just had such an experience with a customer. Though there is a misunderstanding, it is very hard to explain when your customer is angry. All I can say is still sorry about it.

There is also a slightly lower form of permission where some companies actually took advantage of this trust and bill on the smooth transaction of using credit cards online for recurring payments. Sometimes, the bill is so small that it becomes insignificant while the customer is paying the money for no service rendered. According to Seth, these people actually pay through the decades!

Another type of companies took advantage of billing significantly high price to their customers on a monthly basis, and their customers are “happily” paying for it and yet the service is probably rendered only 20% most of the time. One very good example is the fitness centers. The gym goers tend to pay high dollars to them for going a few times initially. After that, these gym goers are either too busy to go, or too lazy to go. And yet they are paying high dollars continuously because they want to avoid paying at an even higher price later when they wish to go gym again.

One way of going this way is to change the model of your product-selling business into a subscription business. Product selling has been a norm to most people out there. Gateway has decided to be different by asking the customer to pay $49 every month to use a computer. And when the user has paid through 24 months, they will get a new computer to use. So it’s a total win-win situation for the customers to always get latest model while the computer company can make profits continously. The old computers can still be sold cheaply to companies or even consumers in the second-hand industries! There is a potential huge subscription business for most of the products out there… Things such as cars, computers, books, television, radio, refrigerator or just any product out there which is paid once and can be used for a long time.

Just some food for thoughts today.