PDF Summary:Permission Marketing, by Seth Godin

Often, disruptive advertisements can feel more annoying than persuasive. According to Seth Godin in Permission Marketing, there’s a better way for brands to get the attention of potential customers. Instead of resorting to intrusive marketing that consumers are forced to see, it’s possible to create marketing that consumers ask to see. By doing so, you can build a loyal customer base at a fraction of the cost of a traditional marketing campaign.

In this guide, we’ll discuss how the world of marketing has transformed over the last several decades, and we’ll examine why the old model of intrusive advertising is no longer profitable. Additionally, we’ll explore the three steps to building and profiting from a permission marketing campaign. In our commentary, we’ll paint a more complete picture of Godin’s perspective on marketing, referencing ideas from his other books. We’ll also offer supplementary advice for running a permission marketing campaign from books like How Brands Grow and Dotcom Secrets.

(continued)...

Additionally, Godin notes, intrusive advertisements are inherently less persuasive than permission marketing materials. Intrusive advertisements must be aggressively flashy and sensational to get consumers to notice and remember the brand in as few exposures as possible. This means that, by necessity, they can’t comprehensively communicate the specific benefits of their service or product—the information that would make a consumer want to go out and buy it.

(Shortform note: Research indicates that flashy, sensational advertising may be more effective than Godin gives it credit for. When an advertisement presents something unexpected, emotional, or loud, viewers automatically pay a little bit of attention to it at a semi-conscious level, even if they’re trying to ignore it. Although advertisements prompting this kind of involuntary, semi-conscious attention don’t generate quite as many sales as those that appeal to consumer needs and attract conscious attention, they do generate far more sales than ads that viewers ignore completely.)

Permission Marketing Builds Trust Efficiently

In contrast, Godin explains, permission marketing materials don’t require as many repeated viewings to build familiarity with your brand. Since consumers requested the advertisements, they’ll pay attention to and digest them the very first time they receive them.

Likewise, since the prospective customer has already agreed to pay attention to your message, you don’t have to be as showy and can pitch your product or service’s benefits much more thoroughly than you could in intrusive advertisements. You can directly convince consumers that your brand is reliable, building the same kind of brand trust that intrusive advertising does but much more efficiently. Since customers tend to buy from brands they trust, this often results in a swift increase in sales.

Engaging Marketing Builds Trust More Efficiently

Although Godin contends that consumers who opt in to your permission marketing will be naturally receptive to your message, other permission marketing experts elaborate that you won’t succeed with just any message. In Dotcom Secrets, Russell Brunson asserts that permission marketing messages must be carefully crafted to convert as many viewers into customers as possible. Specifically, every piece of marketing copy you send must accomplish three things: catch the audience’s attention, illustrate your product’s value, and tell them exactly what to do next.

Brunson provides more detailed advice than Godin on how to illustrate your product’s value. Although many consumers would be interested in a simple list of your product or service’s benefits, you’ll get more sales if you communicate those benefits in a compelling way. For instance, weave details about your product or service into a colorful anecdote that illustrates your brand’s unique value. If you’re selling earplugs that are nearly invisible, tell the story of the time your brother went to a metal concert, purposefully left earplugs at home because they looked garish, then got tinnitus. The customer can see how your product would have prevented this painful experience.

The Permission Marketing Mindsets

Now that we’ve covered what permission marketing is and why it’s so much more profitable than intrusive advertising, let’s start explaining how to put it into practice. Before we get into specifics, let’s cover two key mindsets that will improve the decisions you make while running a permission marketing campaign.

Mindset #1: Your Customer Relationships Are Long-Term Investments

Godin asserts that every consumer relationship you build is a long-term investment. The main goal of permission marketing is to get consumers to trust you more over time. If your brand serves them reliably for long enough, they’ll feel that buying from you is a safe bet and will give you increasing permission to claim more of their time, attention, and money.

For example, if you sell furniture, you could email customers a series of videos over time explaining the effects that different mattresses have on your spine. Eventually, they’ll come to trust your brand because of the consistent value you give them (and simply through repeated exposure). In the future, they’ll be more likely to buy a mattress from you.

In contrast, if you ask for too much permission too quickly, you’ll seem less valuable—and therefore less trustworthy—and push customers away. For instance, if the first email you send to a potential customer begs them to buy a $1,500 mattress before the end of a holiday sale, they won’t yet trust you enough to make the purchase and may unsubscribe to avoid having to read pushy marketing.

Build Long-Term Relationships Through Excellent Customer Service

According to Tony Hsieh in Delivering Happiness, the surest way to build long-term trusting relationships with customers is to offer stellar customer service. Customers will return to your brand again and again if you give them an impactful customer service experience, yielding more value over the long run even if you sacrifice short-term profits.

Hsieh says that his shoe company, Zappos, achieves this kind of service by establishing unique guidelines for its customer service call center. Its call center doesn’t time calls with customers, to avoid pressuring representatives into rushing their service. It doesn’t use call scripts, instead encouraging representatives to have honest, human conversations with customers.

Zappos also doesn’t force representatives to try to make new sales while on call, as many companies do, instead letting them focus on the customer’s problem. Companies that try to sell to customers looking for support are arguably asking for too much permission too soon. If a customer already has a problem with your brand they’re trying to solve, their trust in you is in jeopardy. Asking them for more money will only further unravel their trust. Instead, these companies would be better off selling to satisfied, loyal customers who have developed trust in the brand over months or years.

Mindset #2: Personal Data Lets You Offer Personalized Service

Godin recommends asking for permission to gather personal information about consumers so you can better serve their needs. Using this data, you can personalize the messages you send to each consumer and ensure that you only make offers that are truly valuable to them (unlike other companies that spam them with intrusive advertising for things they don’t want).

Make sure not to sell or trade this personal data to another company. Although you could profit from this in the short term, Godin asserts that when your customers discover you’ve allowed other companies to use their data without their permission, they’ll conclude that you don’t have their best interests in mind. You’ll lose their trust, and they’ll take their business elsewhere.

Cookies and Data Privacy on Today’s Internet

One of the primary ways online companies collect personal information from their users is through cookies—local files that allow websites to track your online activity and information. Practically since the dawn of the Internet, companies have used cookies to collect personal data without explicit permission, persistently drawing concerns over privacy. In particular, critics protest third-party cookies, which allow companies to track users’ activity across websites that don’t belong to them.

In Permission Marketing, Godin (in 1999) correctly predicts that targeted advertising using third-party cookies will quickly become the dominant form of advertising on the web. However, he arguably overestimates how much consumers would distrust companies that sell their data and abandon those that did so. One 2022 study found the average US resident has their online activity shared with a third party 747 times every day—yet most of us continue to trust big tech companies at least enough to use their products every day.

Responding to privacy concerns, some companies have taken steps to limit the trade of personal data. Third-party cookies have been blocked by default by web browsers Safari and Firefox, and Google Chrome is set to follow suit sometime in 2024.

However, some companies are developing cookie alternatives for marketers that still don’t align with Godin’s vision for voluntary data collection. For instance, Google’s Topics API is a tool marketers can use to show personalized ads to users interested in certain topics, without those advertisers having access to specific user data. Critics have noted that this tool still tracks consumers without explicit permission and leaves them largely in the dark about what personal data is being shared with whom.

Permission Marketing Strategy

We’ve established some of the broad basics of permission marketing: Make long-term investments in your customers and personalize offers for each individual. Now, we’ll get more specific and conclude this guide by outlining the steps you can take to set up and profit from a permission marketing campaign.

First, Godin recommends opening a line of communication with consumers by offering them valuable freebies in exchange for their contact information. Then, gain their trust by pitching them the benefits they can expect if they purchase from your brand. Finally, leverage the trust you gain from messaging consumers to implement one or more profitable business models.

Let’s inspect each step in more detail.

Step #1: Open Communication by Giving Out Freebies

Your first goal when starting a permission marketing campaign is to get consumers’ permission to send information about your brand directly to them. Godin acknowledges that permission marketers must initially resort to intrusive advertising to make first contact with consumers and request their permission for later marketing materials. This initial advertising isn’t meant to build brand trust—just to attract consumers to the messages that will. Run advertisements that direct consumers to your permission marketing channel—for instance, a YouTube advertisement telling viewers to sign up for your email list.

(Shortform note: If you don’t have much cash to invest in intrusive advertising, you may be better off drawing consumers to your permission marketing channels with SEO (search engine optimization). This is strategically designing your brand’s website (where consumers can sign up for your permission marketing materials) so it becomes one of the top results shown by search engines like Google. SEO isn’t intrusive advertising since you’re only showing your brand to consumers already actively searching for what you’re offering. If you learn to do SEO yourself, you can generate organic traffic without hiring professionals or paying for ad space someone else owns.)

To incentivize consumers to give you their permission to contact them, use your initial intrusive advertising to offer them something valuable for free in exchange for their contact information. Even if consumers are only slightly interested in your brand, if the reward you offer is enticing enough, they’ll give you permission to contact them again. In follow-up communications, you can give them more information about your product or service to heighten their interest.

The freebies you offer consumers could be anything—a free sample of your product, helpful and practical information, or just a link to a fun video you’ve created. The important thing is to design these freebies to attract the target audience to whatever product or service you’re selling. For example, if you’re selling incense, you may offer a guide to the most popular incense scents and their traditional symbolic meanings for free.

(Shortform note: To determine what freebies to offer in a permission marketing strategy, Russell Brunson (Dotcom Secrets) recommends creating a “customer avatar”: an imaginary person that represents your ideal customer. Knowing in precise detail who you want to serve will help you identify a freebie they can’t resist. For this reason, make your customer avatar as concrete as possible: Create a biography for them with as many details as you can, give them a name, and find a stock image or other photo to represent what you imagine they would look like.)

Step #2: Build Trust by Pitching Your Product or Service

After you secure permission to contact consumers directly, your goal is to use that communication channel to build their trust in your brand. Godin suggests sending consumers a series of marketing messages that convey specifically how your brand will improve their life.

(Shortform note: Arguably, the marketing messages you send at this stage have more of an impact on customer satisfaction than the product itself. In his 2005 book All Marketers Are Liars, Godin argues if you tell a story about how your product can radically improve someone’s life, and your customer believes that story, it becomes true. This is because the customer’s perception of your product is largely subjective. For instance, imagine you hand-carve flutes out of a rare type of balsa wood. If you emphasize in your marketing emails that this will help customers create beautiful music unlike any other type of flute, customers may prefer how your instrument sounds even if it’s not objectively “better.”)

Make sure consumers don’t lose interest in these messages, Godin notes. Each one should provide enough value (such as entertainment or useful information) to retain their attention. If consumers need more encouragement, provide additional freebies as necessary to keep them engaged.

(Shortform note: For how long do you need to keep consumers interested and engaged in your emails before they’ll actually buy your product or service? Marketers answer this question with the “Rule of Seven,” which states that customers will typically engage with your brand seven times before they’re prepared to make a purchase. Thus, you may need to spend more on creating valuable emails and promotional freebies than you initially expect—they won’t start paying off until you engage a consumer seven times.)

Step #3: Establish a Trust-Based Business Model

Once consumers strongly believe that your brand can improve their lives, you unlock a number of profitable business models that only function after you’ve earned consumer trust. Here are three options for trust-based business models with the potential to turn your company into a wild success.

Option #1: Sign Customers Up for a Subscription

According to Godin, the most valuable form of permission you can get is to charge the customer for goods and services you know they want, without them giving specific permission for each purchase—typically, this takes the form of a recurring subscription payment. If consumers trust that you understand what they want and can reliably give it to them, they’ll gladly pay you to buy things for them to avoid wasting time doing it themselves. All permission marketers should aspire to achieve this level of permission, since it’s the most profitable.

How to Create a Habit-Forming Subscription

If you’ve built brand trust and your product or service still isn’t attracting subscribers, what can you do? According to Nir Eyal (Hooked), subscription models only succeed when you successfully influence consumers into making a regular habit out of using your product or service. For example, your subscription-based meal delivery service will be a failure unless you somehow get the customer to regularly get food delivered, justifying the recurring expense.

Eyal contends that you can make your subscription-based product or service a habit by designing it to be constantly surprising. Contrary to what Godin claims, consumers by default prefer to make purchases for themselves. Thus, consumers will often cancel their subscriptions after the initial novelty of having someone else choose what they buy fades away. However, if you constantly refresh this feeling of novelty, consumers will make a habit out of your subscription to keep that feeling.

One way to achieve this perpetual novelty is to create a product or service that learns and improves as subscribers use it, like an app on your phone that tracks the food you eat and learns to suggest personalized daily meal schedules.

Option #2: Implement a Rewards Program

If you can’t establish a subscription model, the next most valuable form of permission you can get is permission to influence consumers’ behavior in exchange for points that earn them free rewards. Godin recommends offering points for every purchase as well as for actions that increase the likelihood of future purchases—for instance, a customer engaging with a branded message to learn more about your product or service.

Rewards programs increase profits by incentivizing consumers to purchase from your brand more frequently than they otherwise would have—in other words, by bribing people to become loyal customers. With this in mind, Godin recommends a specific way to structure your rewards: To ensure that only customers who are truly loyal to your brand get rewarded, make your points worthless if consumers interact with your brand once or twice but pay off if they become regular customers. That way, you only invest money in already-profitable customers.

Counterpoint: Rewards Programs Don’t Work

In How Brands Grow, Byron Sharp contends that offering a rewards program is one of the most common mistakes that marketers make, as these programs’ profits fail to reliably outweigh their cost. Consulting purchasing data from businesses across a wide range of industries, Sharp finds that the members of a brand’s rewards program don’t purchase from that brand any more frequently than customers who aren’t members. Thus, these programs largely offer discounts and rewards to consumers who would have purchased from the brand anyway, making those rewards a waste of money.

Seen through this lens, Godin’s recommended rewards structure may backfire. The system assumes that customers deserve massive rewards if they become your most loyal customers. But if those customers would have become your most loyal customers anyway, you may be undercutting the revenue you get from what should be your most profitable customers.

Option #3: Sell High-Ticket Items Personally

Finally, another option for establishing a profitable, trust-based business model is to reach out, set up meetings with individual consumers, and get to know them personally. If someone trusts you on a personal level, you can get them to invest much more in you and your brand than if you contacted them through an impersonal system. That said, Godin acknowledges that the utility of this business model is limited since it requires significant personal attention that you can’t provide to a wide customer base. Thus, only use personal trust to sell expensive goods and services that provide enough revenue to justify your prolonged personal time and attention.

Build Trust Through Authenticity

In Start With Why, Simon Sinek further explains how to earn the trust of others on a personal level: Demonstrate that you share a purpose with them. Sinek argues that trust is an instinctive feeling generated deep in the brain’s emotional center, the limbic system, when a person sees you as part of the same group as them. For this reason, you can’t build trust by appealing logically to a potential customer—for instance, by emphasizing how many satisfied customers you’ve had.

Sinek doesn’t specifically discuss one-on-one sales, but you can still apply his ideas regarding trust to this strategy. Target potential customers who share the purpose, cause, or central belief behind your business, and authentically communicate it while making the sale. For example, if you’re trying to sell solar panels to large corporate offices, contact the leaders of environmentally conscious businesses and emphasize your shared mission of sustainability when meeting with them.