This week I’ve been commenting on Relationship Marketing. Relationship marketing is to market based on a level of permission or connection. It is essentially the opposite of interruption marketing which comes out of context and sometimes uninvited. Also known as permission marketing as Seth Godin made popular, it is a fact that someone who has invited your message is much more likely to purchase your services.

Relationship Marketing Example 2,3 and 4: Opt In Marketing

The people that opt into your marketing are the people that are the most interested. For this reason, it would make sense that those are the people that you should marketing most specifically to. It might also make sense that all your outbound marketing should (in many cases) be focused on simply drawing people into your opt in model. I’ve broken this into three specific examples:

2. Email Marketing. This is one of the most common and most known modern forms of opt in marketing. It is also known to be one of the most hated and abused as well. On the contrary, if you are truly using a permission marketing approach than you are not in the same category of those methods that have given email marketing a bad name. One of our customers told of of their raving fans (customers) that have called their email marketing “the only junk mail I look forward to”. This is because it is truly based solely on permission. That opt in list is the first to respond to special promotions, in essence, their most profitable customers.

3. Social Media. We do a lot to make our customer’s Facebook pages come to life. Using Facebook as the example, You have to “Like” a page to be opted into the brand’s content. Furthermore, you have to have activity on their wall (or responding to posts, etc.) before the algorithms of the famous “News Feed” will pull the brands content into your top news. For this reason, a Facebook user is only likely to really see what they are truly interested in. If you are using social media to market your business, I would focus on getting people interested, rather than simply putting out content.

4. Direct Mail, Catalogs. In this day and age we get a lot of junk mail. We don’t have laws against junk mail in the same way as we do spam and telemarketing. For this reason people have to be captivated by your message (or actually think it IS the IRS trying to send them money if they call now). The fact is, while I throw most of that mail away, the mini catalog from Guitar Center is one I always look through – because I am receiving based on my actual interests. I have made purchases there and given them my address (I.E. Permission).