Child jumping into trusted arms
Previous posts have touched on the concept of Permission Marketing. In the context of Internet Marketing this is where your web copy aims to obtain the permission of visitors to your site to market to them usually by requesting that they leave their name and email in return for some form of incentive, such as a free gift or useful information. The idea is to begin a relationship with your visitor. As I have mentioned before, one way to develop this is by a series of useful emails.
Some use e-mails from the outset to hard sell to their mailing lists and lose sight of the goal to develop a productive relationship with the lead. This spammy approach can destroy the initial good work and the recipient is likely to unsubscibe from receiving future e-mails. Many businesses prefer to sign leads up to receiving a regular newsletter, which could be viewed as being less intrusive if the content is aimed at educating the reader on products and services to a point where in future they may make a decision to buy. This editorial style leans towards informational and calls to action gently lead readers towards buying decisions.
While e-mails and newsletters have proved successful for many businesses, from the recipients perspective there are negatives because there are no perfect, disadvantage-free ways to:
- Restrict who you receive emails from;
- Keep yourself anonymous;
- Control message content.
Some of these downsides have been addressed by the trend towards news feeds and blogs, where the visitor who has given permission by “signing up” can control the information flow by specifying and modifying news sources. Results can be filtered and news items containing selected keywords of interest can be flagged. Anonymity can also be preserved when reading feeds or blogs without the marketing website owner knowing your identity. More about newsfeeds and blogs in future posts.
Discussion
Comments are disallowed for this post.
Comments are closed.