by: Christian Sarkar
An edited version of this article was originally published in Clip webzine, an e-zine sponsored by Compaq.

Everything you know about Web marketing is wrong, says Yahoo VP Seth Godin. But that's OK. In his new book, Permission Marketing, Godin debunks popular myths and explains the best practices of Web marketing, including how to solidify customer relationships.

According to Seth Godin, there is an attention crisis in America. As a result, the traditional "interruption marketing" approach just doesn't work anymore.

"The key to each and every ad is to interrupt what the viewers are doing in order to get them to think about something else," he says.

How effective is this approach? Just ask yourself how many times you buy something when a telemarketer interrupts your dinner with a canned sales pitch.

What's a marketer to do? Enter a new concept dubbed "permission marketing." Simply stated, it's a method of marketing that literally asks the consumer for permission to discuss a product or service. It's sort of like a date, Godin says, where getting your customer to say "yes" is a gradual process based on voluntary discussions, shared interests and an ever-increasing familiarity with you, your company and your products.

In the world of online marketing, this translates to getting your customers to "raise their hand" and ask for permission. The marketer uses customized e-mail messages to build familiarity and trust.

THE FIVE-STEP METHOD

According to Godin, there are "five steps to dating your customer":

• Offer the prospect an incentive to volunteer
• Teach the consumer about your product or service
• Reinforce the incentive to guarantee that the prospect maintains the permission
• Offer additional incentives to get even more permission from the consumer
• Over time, leverage the permission to change customer behavior towards profits

Acquiring permission from a customer costs money. Godin cites examples such as America Online (AOL) and American Express – AOL has coughed up as much as $300 per customer, American Express up to $50. Nevertheless, it's a good investment, according to Godin, because getting a customer's permission and engaging them in a meaningful way is much more effective than the randomness of interruption marketing.

How much more effective is it? Godin compares a traditional marketer with an online permission marketer. The "interruption marketer" must make an ad pay for itself after just one viewing.

"If it costs $2 to get one person to pay attention to the ad, it pays off only if, on average, it generates more than $2 in new business profits per viewing," Godin says in his book. So the traditional marketer goes ahead and runs the ad if, and only if, the impact is greater than or equal to cost.

What's the catch? If a marketer has to run the ad frequently, his cost – as well as the payback he has to recoup – increases significantly. If, for example, he puts a $2 ad in front of a viewer three times, he has to recover $6 in new profits. The online permission marketer, on the other hand, has negligible follow-on costs. The money is spent up front on an incentive designed to gain a customer's permission.

After that, it's a matter of e-mail follow-ups and engagement through the Web. Permission enables frequency, which in turn builds trust. According to Godin, "once the initial toll is paid, … the rest of the ride is close to free."

PERMISSION ON THE WEB

According to Godin, everything you know about marketing on the Web is wrong. First and foremost, marketers need to answer these questions before building a website to sell products and services:

• What are we trying to accomplish?
• Can it be measured?
• What is the cost of bringing one consumer, one time, to our website?
• What is the cost of having that customer return?
• If this works, is it scalable?

He also debunks the "most popular myths about marketing on the Web." A few of those myths include:

• Traffic (Hits!) is the Best Way to Measure a Website. Without metrics to convert hits to sales, or hits to market share (!) you're wasting time.
• You Can Sell Stuff on the Web if You Invest Enough in a Secure Server. Focusing on infrastructure, instead of marketing, gives you a store with no sales.
• The Search Engines Are the Key to Traffic to Your Site. Successful sites need a process that creates a scalable flow of traffic, which doesn't depend on "random visits via a search engine."
• Your Site Should Be a Complete Online Experience. Most companies can't afford to create an all-encompassing portal with everything a user needs in on site. Attempting to do this badly is worse than not doing it at all.
• Anonymity is Good for the Net. Permission marketing rewards viewers for taking off their "ski masks." Traditional Web techniques embrace anonymity, and fail.
• Activity is Good. Just because you tweak your site daily, add new features and have an active committee of well paid executives involved, doesn't mean you are doing marketing.

So what should your website do? According to Godin, every commercial website should be set up with one goal: "To sign up strangers to give permission to market to them." Your company should be obsessed with getting permission. Here, Godin offers a few simple steps to getting that permission:

• Test and Optimize Your Offer. The costs are up front. What incentives work best to get permission?
• Make the Permission Overt and Clear. Don't sell, trade or rent your permissions to others.
• Use Computers, Not People, to Send and Receive Information. Make sure only the people who need human intervention get it.
• Focus on Mastery, Online Consumers Need to Feel Smart. Build a website that's easy to use.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Traditional advertising doesn't work like it used to. Nowadays, to be successful, you have to deliver your messages frequently, at a low cost, and to a willing audience. Getting them to listen is the key. And that's where permission marketing could make all the difference.

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