About 10 years ago Seth Godin, marketing guru, coined the term “Permission Marketing”. 
The idea was so important that he wrote a bestselling book about it – Seth Godin’s Permission Marketing (full disclosure: affiliate link). Seth describes permission marketing as, “the privilege (not the right) of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who actually want to get them.” The way to obtain permission to talk to someone is usually through an opt-in of some sort. Now, there are ethical ways to obtain an opt-in, like double opt-in and unethical ways to collect opt-ins, such as, implied opt-ins.
Just the other day, I reached out to a real estate agent about an investment property. I’m always looking for great real estate deals and I had one simple question for the agent. A few hours later I received a four paragraph response to my one question email. The agent’s email came full of additional questions for me, yet my initial question wasn’t answered. You may say, OK, well that’s his job. He needs to sell the house. That’s fine, I understand that. The reason for this post was the next response that came to my inbox. A few minutes later I received another email from the agent, but this time, it was a pre-canned ‘Welcome to my email newsletter’ message. Did I imply that I wanted to be a part of his email newsletter list from my one question email? I don’t think so…
This is probably the third or fourth time in two weeks that something like this has happened to me. I think 50% of the time it was with real estate agents. Perhaps this is because by default agent’s are marketers, yet they have no formal marketing training. Because of this, they do it wrong all the time and the results are frustrated customers and/or prospects. Never once did I ask to be a part of this email list, but these agents & businesses use implied opt-ins to fuel their email marketing list.
Getting back to Seth Godin for a minute, in one of his blog post’s Seth talks about Permission Marketing. He says, “just because you somehow get my email address doesn’t mean you have permission. Just because I don’t complain doesn’t mean you have permission. Just because it’s in the fine print of your privacy policy doesn’t mean it’s permission either.”
So it doesn’t really matter if you’re a real estate agent or a SMB (small or mid-sized business), if you want to keep customers happy, be sure to obtain their permission before including them on your email marketing list. If you don’t, the negative backlash could be more than you’re able to withstand. If you’re not sure about the rules to permission-based email marketing, send me a message. I’ll work with you on it.