I am re-reading Permission Marketing : Turning Strangers Into Friends And Friends Into Customers, by Seth Godin, published in 2000, and a ground breaking marketing book.
While reading, I kept thinking of the fragility of customer relationships, and that while we all like to have “customers for life”, we can easily create “un-customers for life”. Society and technology keep offering more and more options. It is not good enough to have that customer as a raving fan; we must be aware that the raving could quickly stop if we do not maintain a high level of service. There are just too many options and alternatives. One false step and the customer could be gone for good.
Taking the customer’s point of view, I have declared myself a non-customer for life a number of times: a vendor I recommend, who does not treat my customer fairly or r who does not live up to his/her promises seldom gets a second chance with me. Looking back at my past relationships as a customer, I often can’t remember a precise reason why I became an un-customer for life, so the event obviously doesn’t have to be earth shaking. I don’t go to Burger King. I don’t remember what event caused me to scratch them off my list of fast food places. I just know something happened at some time in the past that caused me to never go back.
Tag Archives: permission marketing
It’s Hard to let go of Interruption Marketing
I wonder if we Realtors can differentiate between the old style hard sell interruption and the softer sell of permission marketing.
Interruption marketing is the old school, shove-it-down-their-throats technique, still taught in many or most real estate marketing featuring cold calling, direct mail, email blasts, print ads, trade shows, and TV/radio ads. We are very comfortable with our one way messages and believe that our advertising time and dollars are well spent employing these age-old selling techniques.
Permission Marketing, the term popularized by Seth Godin, embraces customer buy-in to our marketing concepts and features SEO/SEM, blogging, social media (such as FaceBook, LinkedIn and Twitter), RSS, video, free tools/trials and a more transparent marketing atmosphere. It’s a soft sell, because if customers don’t like the message they can turn it off or tune it out.
Yet I find many sales people dabbling in the social media and trying to use them as interruption marketing tools. It won’t work, at least not for long. Real estate blogging often holds onto the concepts of interruption marketing, presenting new listings, tired how-to articles, and sales lures. If a potential client reads my blog and finds nothing but listing advertisements, information about me, propaganda about why this is the best time in the history of the universe to buy a home, or cut and paste boilerplate, she is likely to move along to a blog with relevant content to her real needs.