Charles Lau dot Com

If somebody tells you that permission marketing means to send mass advertorial email to everybody, and have an opt-out link at the bottom, how would you react?  I was totally shocked to hear that today from someone who is fluent in offline marketing.  If spamming with an opt-out link is permission marketing, we should be sending out emails to everybody we know and let them know “By the way, you can opt-out by clicking on this link.”

Obviously, it is quite a common thought amongst many Singapore companies (both big and small are affected.) that reaching out to as many people as we can is the way of doing business.  Even if it’s only a 1% response, it means good to them already!  And they will think this is a good measure of “spamming” more people.

My God, when will these people wake up to understand permission marketing?

I have been having debates with someone who has no knowledge about internet marketing and yet she has a lot of her “theories” about how internet marketing works.  She is definitely influential and good in her offline marketing world.

Permission marketing always comes with an incentive for your potential customer.  She couldn’t believe that to be the standard, and thought that this is just one of the many marketing strategies.  For sure, it is so in one way or another.  However, we still have to work out an incentive to look for the correct market who is interested in our business.

How many kinds of permission marketing can we find in this world other than what Seth Godin has defined for us?  I personally feel that Seth Godin has defined it well to live up to his name as a very powerful internet marketer.

Well, the truth of permission marketing is that we are building a very powerful list for ourselves. The conversion rate can be as high as 80% if you have done a good job over the years.  Why would we want to spend so much money to maintain a huge database with so little conversion as 1%?  Now, we can understand why there are so many internet millionaires born every now and then.

The maintenance of building a list is much lower, and the profit from converting the list is so high!

It is equivalent to opening an MNC who can spend millions of dollars to profit only tens of thousands of dollars (1% profit?).  These many MNCs have made many of us think that we must have a lot of money to make a lot of money….

Seth Godin, your Permission Marketing book should have open the eyes of the marketers now…