It’s hard to believe that Permission Marketing by Seth Godin was published in 1999–over 11 years ago.
The subtitle of the book is “Turning Strangers Into Friends, and Friends Into Customers” and that simple statement is even more true today than when Seth wrote this book.
At the time this book was written Google was a recent start up in Palo Alto. Overture, AskJeeves, Excite, and Yahoo were the kings of the online marketing world and companies like iContact, Aweber, and Constant Contact were pretty new also. You couldn’t find drip marketing or lead nurturing information in search so this concept really was pretty out there, in my mind.
The principles outlined in this book are good quality direct response marketing strategies applied to an online setting. At the time not many were thinking this way.
Don’t forget the dotcom bubble hadn’t burst yet.
So the concept “Turning Strangers into Friends, and Friends into Customers” stood out at the time.
And you couldn’t get a better description of how to do good quality email marketing. The proper use of auto responders is one of the best ways we know to take a stranger and move them closer to the friend category.
Permission Marketing, the book, talks about specific strategies and marketing ROI calculations to help you figure out how much leads cost, and based on your conversion numbers, how much a new clients costs.
We think it’s brilliant–just as brilliant today as in 1999!