Permission Marketing gone astray - InfusionSoft
Posted by gopalshenoy on July 9, 2008
Couple of weeks back, I came across this company called InfusionSoft. I signed up to download something that looked interesting to me called “9 proven techniques to double sales”. To do this, I had to fill out the following form.
When you do this, they send you a link via an email to download the white paper. I was fine with it until this point.
Then the trouble started - there is nothing in the above dialog that gives them permission to send me anything other than the above white paper. Now I get daily emails from their CEO Clate Mask. Here are some of the titles of the emails and some of the content in the email.
Email 1: How one incredible number skyrockets your income
…… Just imagine being able to double your sales (even when businesses all around you are falling further and further into debt.) Think how great you’ll feel when customers are begging you to serve them AND you can stop wondering if you’ll be in business next month. ……
Email 2: 7 Magnetic Marketing Secrets To Explode Your Profits
……when you’re in harvesting mode, you’re working smart and scooping up sales left and right. You can spend your time at closings, on the phone with hot leads or out on the golf course because you know your prospects will call YOU when they’re ready to move forward. ….
Email 3: Double your sales with one powerful secret
and on and on it goes.
What? Customers coming begging to me to serve them? Go and play golf because prospects will call you? Am I living on the wrong planet or what?
Do you think I will ever buy anything from InfusionSoft? No, but I sure am writing about them so that I can save others from this experience.
The emails also say this - which I thought was even more hilarious
We value your privacy, we really hate spammers, and we’re not going to sell your info to spammers (or to anyone else). If you really want to read the boring details of the privacy policy, you can read them here.
We Product marketers should take note - Just because we allowed a customer/prospect to download something free from our website, it does NOT give us permission to send them stuff. If we want to engage with them, we need to do it using Permission Marketing, a term coined by Seth Godin. Ask for their permission and then send them useful stuff that will help them get better at what they do. We need to build a trusted relationship with them such that they will hopefully buy something from us in the future. It is not a guarantee, but if we help someone, they are bound to at least invite us to the “purchase” party if we indeed have what they want.
Permission marketing is NOT getting permission from the customer to spam them - this will absolutely kill any chance of getting any future business.
Yes, InfusionSoft does give me a way to unsubscribe from these emails, but it is work I have to do.
Clate, you will not be getting the phone call from me begging you to serve me while you are having a good time playing golf.
Liked this article? Leave me comments - I would love to hear your thoughts - or get an RSS Feed to this blog at http://productmanagementtips.com/feed
July 9, 2008 at 7:08 pm
Gopal, thanks for the heads-up! It’s hard to believe that in today’s social media, web-focused culture a company would do what InfusionSoft is doing. The messages they sent you violate what they are trying to promote (e.g. ‘prospects will call you when they’re ready to move forward).
Permission marketing is the way to go. Thanks for the reminder. -Michael
July 10, 2008 at 4:19 pm
This seems to be a universal situation. Especially when you go through a “publication” site. Download a “white paper” then all of a sudden your blasted with other opportunities.
Permission based has slipped in recent months. Which begs the question why are they blocking “white papers” to sign-up
July 10, 2008 at 7:45 pm
Gopal–very fair point. We should have had the language on there that communicates we will send follow-up messages when you hit submit. My bad. We will change that.
I complete agree with you about permission marketing. And I admit that sometimes we get going too fast and make mistakes that result in unwanted messages. But believe me: we do want to send value, build a relationship and become a trusted advisor to folks who want to know how to build their businesses more quickly and effectively.
Thanks for your comment. It will cause me to examine things and see if we’ve been too heavy on promotion and light on valuable content to our prospects.
BTW, I really appreciate your perspectives and am a little embarassed to be called out by you.
July 15, 2008 at 11:17 pm
Hi Gopal,
I was searching for perspectives on Infusionsoft and came to your site keen to hear your message. They are valid, however when I visited your site I was greeted with this annoying popup called Snap Shots that appeared to promote other WordPress articles of yours. All I wanted was to read the article on Infusionsoft and yet was harassed by this piece of software. I could not work out quickly how to stop it and so it stole some of my time.
Maybe some of Clate’s message could equally be applied to your attempts to promote your other articles.
July 16, 2008 at 12:09 pm
Hi Nick,
Thanks for pointing this out. I had no idea that there was a setting to control this and that it is automatically turned on. I have turned it off and it should now not be a problem.
Thank you for reading my blog and for taking the time to comment. I appreciate the feedback. Wanted to let you know that I have listened
(Now, I just hope I don’t get an email - why the heck did you turn off that cool feature :-))
Gopal
July 18, 2008 at 3:50 pm
If there is no control specfically capturing your permission, why did you think permission was involved. Anytime you give your email, you could be giving it to a spammer, unless they specifically request your permission. Even then, as a permission platform, you might get ads that you don’t want, but they should come from the company you gave the permission to. Revoke that permission.
To keep this from happening again, create a temporary email address on a free service, get your content, and then never sign on to that email account again.