Thursday 17 October 2013

Permission Marketing - Seth Godin Book Review


Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers Into Friends And Friends Into Customers is a book by marketing guru Seth Godin. This book details how you should use permission marketing into your business as this brings in the most customers. Permission Marketing as you guessed it means getting permission from the customer before you advance to the sales process. Permission marketing can be anything from 'Join my mailing list and get free ebooks sent to you' or 'Like this page and have a chance to win a car'. Permission marketing was a term that was just popularized by Seth Godin has been known for many years before Seth Godin.

Seth Godin is a famous entrepreneur, marketer and blogger who resides in America. Godin founded the site Squidoo in 2006 and Squidoo has since become one of the 500 most visited sites in the world. Godin has authored 15 books and is the author of many best selling books such as All Marketers are Liars and The Dip. Seth Godin is one of the brightest minds out there and you can learn a lot from him.

Seth writes in his book that the normal way that marketers used to get their consumers attention does not work anymore. For example a television commercial playing in the middle of the program you were watching or a telemarketer calling you while you are busy eating, this is called interruption marketing and is the complete opposite of Permission marketing. He goes on to say that in todays day and age, interruption marketing no longer works. He claims using Interruption marketing just annoys your potential customer.

He goes on to say how Permission marketing builds a much long term lasting relationship with the customer, and how it increases trust, brand awareness and also increases the chance of parting with the customers money.

Godin tells us about the four tests of Permission Marketing:
1. Does every single marketing effort you create encourage a learning relationship with your customers? Does it invite customers to "raise their hands" and start communicating?
2. Do you have a permission database? Do you track the number of people who have given you permission to communicate with them?
3. If consumers gave you permission to talk to them, would you have anything to say? Have you developed a marketing curriculum to teach people about your products?
4. Once people become customers, do you work to deepen your permission to communicate with those people?

Also in this jam packed informative book, Seth also includes many real life case studies such as Amazon and Yahoo. He shows how big companies are using permission marketing effectively and gaining more customers through using permission marketing.

The book was first written in 1999 and some readers may find this outdated as some of the examples and case studies used are not up to date and do not include the latest examples. However if you can look past this then this should be no problem for you. Seth also does have the tendency to repeat himself and sometimes he does repeat the same point over and over again. From time to time he also uses contradictory statements in his book.

All in all this is a very well written book that will help you understand the term permission marketing. It will also help you implement permission marketing in your business and help grow your business. It is slightly outdated however that is not such a big issue. Seth is an excellent author and we highly recommend this book as you will end up learning a lot from this book. Please click here to buy this book on Amazon.

No comments:

Post a Comment