I’m a huge fan of Seth Godin and his perspective on permission based marketing.  Basically, permission based marketing means I have given you the right or the privilege to communicate with me. The idea is that since I’ve let you into my world, you now have the permission to talk to me, market to me, communicate with me until I say I have had enough.

I work with one particular company in town that is completely sold on Email marketing. they truly believe that the more email the send out, the more business they will get.  The trouble is, they are emailing people who don’t want to receive information from them. They spend hours harvesting email addresses from complete strangers thinking that they will be able to sell them via an email message. I have nothing against email marketing, but what I do have an issue with is adding random people to your email list because you got their name off of someone else’s mailing list.  That my friends is pure SPAM. Sending unsolicited email messages to strangers is a waste of time. In fact, I have far less respect for a company that sends me random garbage and am much more likely to NOT buy anything from them no matter what as a result of that intrusion.

I do think you should be gathering email addresses, but, gather email addresses from people who WANT to talk to you, who love your product, who are potentially in the market for what you sell down the road. And please, whatever you do, don’t email people everyday: The more you get in my face, the less likely I am to pay attention to you.

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