E-Marketing 101: What is Permission-Based Marketing?

Permission-based marketing is what you do when you send out promotional material to your list of Opt-In email addresses. The practice of email marketing only to the people who have shown an interest in receiving your offers is a good way of getting positive responses from your potential customers. It also reduces the likelihood of you getting blacklisted as a spammer.

The difference between Opt-In and Opt-Out marketing is that when you concentrate on a known, concise group of potential customers (Opt-In), you are getting the message across to people who are interested and more likely to buy what you offer. In comparison, email marketing to a general

list of people can be a waste of time and resources, as it is more of a cold call than a directed effort at selling to an identified prospect. Marketers feel permission-based marketing is a more efficient way of using their available resources.

Yes, permission-based marketing or Opt-In marketing, is fully compliant with all the anti-spam regulations. As of 2003, the CAN-SPAM Act in the United States regulates all email sent out as part of email marketing campaigns. By choosing to market only to your Opt-In prospects, you are completely within the legal framework of email marketing.

Everyone in your emailing list has already shown an interest in what you offer, because they opted- in. You will not be wasting time trying to market to uninterested parties, but will gain genuine consumers by concentrating on the already-interested people.

It builds trust and good reputation when you send emails to your Opt-In customers. Every time they see your email address or company name, they will know whom it is from and likely view the content of the email. As they have opted-in, they would be ready to act on received emails and would most probably reply to the email.

Most of the email list brokers acquire email addresses by using illegal and dishonorable methods. In addition, there are people who “create” email addresses, where they take a sample email address such as tom@email.com, play around with it and produce several possible email addresses, such as tom1@email.com or tomz@email.com etc. The accuracy of these emails is a shot in the dark. Therefore, by concentrating on permission-based marketing, you are safe from email delivery failures and useless time consumption.

Subscribers know they asked you to send them emails regarding your products and services. Therefore, the probability of sending an email to an Opt-In email address only for it to be discarded into the junk folder is much lower. An Opt-In email recipient is more than likely to open and actually read the content in the email as well.

All in all, permission-based marketing is the ideal method to get your message across to the right people, at the right time, in the right way.