Seth Godin’s Permission Marketing Book Review

Interruption marketing, as Seth Godin explains it is advertising based on the hope of snatching our attention away from whatever we are doing. Permission marketing is about offering consumers incentives to accept advertising voluntarily. A very common example of this online is the offering of a free E-Book in return for the downloader to opt-in for relevant and personal follow up messages in the hope they will buy something further down the permission process.

Permission Marketing is no longer a cutting edge concept which is clear as the book was written in 1997! What is very interesting is how Seth Godin was exactly right in predicting what marketers would do. The typical opt-in page offering an incentive followed by a long sales page and lots of follow up emails. That technique combined with PPC has been used to death because it work(ed)s so well and surely was the reason for the creation of a great many Google Adsense ads.

Looking back at the book a decade after writing it Seth Godin describes it as “a worthwhile snapshot of what was happening at the time and a decent representation of the concepts involved”. I wholeheartedly agree with this.

Permission Marketing gives some timeless marketing principles and helps us understand “where we are up to” so far in the timeline of development and helps younger people (like myself) to know what the state of the advertising industry was 5-10 years ago.

It is quite eye opening into how wasteful marketing was back then and how it has been so incredibly refined by the Internet:

“Publishers with established brand-name authors had no idea which individuals were buying their books and had t start their marketing and promotions from scratch every time a new book was launched”

The book teaches that gaining permission is an investment and also that frequency builds trust and permission facilitates frequency. On the face of it that doesn’t mean much but it does have a very profound meaning. For someone to buy something from you they have to trust you and for them to trust you they have to had head of/from you multiple times. If you have permission to contact them you can ensure they have heard of you multiple times and thus build trust. Therefore permission if used correctly equals trust, which equals repeat sales.

This makes it obvious why the phrase “the money is in the list” spawned.

Conclusion

I did find myself skipping through a fair number of pages because they were out of date or not very relevent to the modern Internet, but all in all Seth Godin’s Permission Marketing Book provides valuable insights into marketing and is well worth the read.

You can pick up a copy from Amazon here

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