Permission Marketing

One of the most prolific Internet marketing techniques is through email marketing. This type of marketing can be productive, yet has some drawbacks. The most insidious of these is Spamming prospective customers. Many a marketer has been reported as a spammer to their ISP (Internet Service Provider) and lost their email accounts or worse. Permission based marketing is the single best way to avoid this happening.

Permission marketing is very simply an organized way of getting people to give their permission to you to send them ads. Permission marketing is also known as opt-in or double opt-in marketing. This is done by having the prospect fill out a small form with their name and email address for this purpose. An auto responder (there are free ones available) comes in real handy here and keeps your contact database in order.

Some Extremely positive Aspects

Aside from the SPAM reports that can occur, permission marketing has some extremely positive aspects to it.

• By asking the customer to allow you to send them information, they know what they are looking into. This means that the prospect is already interested in what you have to offer and is called a "targeted" lead.
• The customer has the choice of opting out at any time. This puts them in the driver's seat and makes them feel to be in control.
• Once you have successfully sold to them, you will have their trust. You will have built a rapport with them and increased your credibility.
• Going hand in hand with what I said above, you can market your higher end items to them as well. If your initial sale was something they liked, they will come back later for more of the same.
• As a marketer, you can cherry pick customers that are inactive or unresponsive and deal with them one-on-one.
• Because they are already interested on your product(s), your customers will look forward to hearing from you.
• Because your prospects are interested in your offering and have given you permission to send advertisements, the response rate is much higher for those emails. As a result, sales conversions are higher at around 10 to 15 percent.

Permission Marketing is Currently Underused

This type of marketing is presently underused as an advertising medium, but has the potential to exponentially increase sales numbers for marketers worldwide. Due to the power of permission marketing, it is quickly rising to the top of the Internet marketer's arsenal of methods. In short, permission marketing will be used increasingly for at least the next ten years, maybe more.

The best thing about permission marketing is that is basically free. You ask for the contact information and people give it willingly of their own free will. Outside of hosting fees for your website, your outlay is $0. Even that expense can be managed to be free by asking for contact info via email. The small form mentioned earlier can be easily added to an email message.

The marketer doesn't even have to know HTML to add the form to an email or their website. The code for the form can be copied and pasted in about 30 seconds. The future of Internet affiliate marketing is squarely centred on permission based marketing practices.