Why Permission is Important

Permission based marketing is becoming more important in business marketing. Well, it’s actually always been important, but we seem to be getting more reminders about it with the increased use of social media marketing.

Recently I got a big reminder about permission.

Social networking is a great means to build an audience of people that you can connect with and get to know.

But connecting with someone on a social network doesn’t give you permission to market to them.

I know you’re thinking ‘if they follow me, they want to know what I have to say’, and that is absolutely correct. You are free to share your marketing on your social network where they ‘friend’ or ‘follow’ you. If they become uninterested, they have the right to stop following you at any time. Basically by clicking Like or Follow, they are giving you permission to share with them. There is no problem here.

What is does NOT give you the right to do is to add them to an email list of any kind without their consent. This was my run-in with permission recently.

I am connected to someone in LinkedIn. We belong to the same group. I receive his regular LinkedIn posts and his discussion posts and all sorts of things. His information is interesting and relevant to my areas of interest, which of course is why we are connected and why we belong to the same LinkedIn group.

So imagine my surprise when I suddenly received an email broadcasted from his email provider. I had not opted in to receive his newsletter. I immediately knew this, because I know whose lists I belong to … and I knew for sure I had not opted in to his list. I knew we were connected on LinkedIn and that he had not obtained my consent. This frustrated me, so I decided to let him know.

I used the opt out link at the bottom of the email to opt out of his new mailing list – which was called ‘LinkedIn Contacts’. Clearly he had exported the email addresses of his LinkedIn contacts and imported them to his email provider, and sent us all an email (presumably the first of many, based on his LinkedIn activity).

This annoyed me, so I emailed him to let him know. I told him I knew I didn’t opt in (long story short, my LinkedIn user name contains my maiden name in brackets – which I never type in for opt ins – this means that the email arrived to Dear Tracey (Blanchfield), blah blah blah … it was very obvious to me that I had not opted in on my own.

He responded by saying he intended only to import people who had opted in (right!), and apologized. I could have reported him as a spammer but I did not. I simply let him know I was on to what he was up to. I promptly went and disconnected my link with him on LinkedIn as well, just because I don’t support his methods of marketing.

So, bottom line. Just ask people to opt in. The ones that raise their hand (opt in) are going to be interested in what you have to say. Then send your information to them. Simple. You will go a lot farther in your networking and your know, like and trust factor will grow much faster!