Know-How Exchange : E-Marketing

IIRC, "permission marketing" was a term that Seth Godin coined before writing his book having the same name. I believe the term is generally used when discussing e-mail marketing, although I suppose it could apply to any company/individual relationship provided that the key ingredient--"permission"--has been given.

In e-mail marketing terms, the permission aspect comes from the opt-in nature of the relationship. The recipient of the message has directly ASKED to be sent the information from time to time. This is in contrast to, say, a television commercial which some would call "interruptive."

In summation, "permission marketing" means that the company is sending its marketing message only to those people who have requested it.

Viral marketing is simply a fancy term for "word of mouth" (you tell two friends, they tell two friends, and so on, and so on), only with the Internet that "mouth" can work very quickly and easily.

Many marketers spend time trying to figure out how to get people to tell their friends about products and services by using the Web and e-mail (for example, "tell a friend" and "refer a friend" features in e-mail marketing); they call this kind of marketing "viral" because they hope it spreads like a virus (in a good way).

Hope I haven't overdiscussed this. It's actually all pretty simple, and the two terms really are different.

If I've failed you, I'm sure someone else will come along with a shorter, more elegant reply!

Paul Broni

hi mpamarketer,

permission marketing is when Marketing is centred around getting permission form the customer to give them some information.

The term was coined by Seth Godin ( I think, well he wrote a book about it anyway)

Permission Marketing is the opposite to interruption marketing ( we had an example last week from john https://www.marketingprofs.com/ea/qst_question.asp?qstID=3031 ). It is about building a relationship with the customer, in the words of Seth Godin, “it is about turning stranger into friends, and friends into customers.”

viral marketing is marketing that encourages and enables people to pass along a marketing message. Eg you give away free cell phones to the coolest kid in the play ground, he tell everyone how great it is so they all decide to buy that brand and type of phone.
Viral Marketing only works if there is a high pass along rate. If the cool kid tells a large number of people about the phone and they inturn tell more people the campaign starts to snow ball very quickly, but if the pass along rate is low then you have failed.
At its height most B2C companys claimed to have a viral component to theier campaign stratergy, nevertheless very few marketing viruses achieve success on a scale similar to “Hotmail”, this was probably the first example of a viral marketing.

Hope this helps you

Have a nice day

Sweetasman01

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