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A Winning Combination: Automation, Permission and Real-Time Marketing

Monday 8 June 2015

9 minute read

By Sarah Burns

There have been lots of articles, blogs and ebooks written on the importance of marketing automation for modern marketing. Equally, there has been lots of the exact same on the importance of real-time marketing. 

The question is, which is really more important and also, to throw another ingredient into the mix, what is permission marketing? Read on for more information...

Permission marketing: An approach to selling / offering goods and services in which a prospect explicitly agrees in advance to receive marketing information (by providing their contact details).

As you will know, if you've ventured around the Thrive website, we offer a lot of permission marketing services, by providing ebooks and checklists full of information, in return for your personal details (which we keep confidential, of course).

It is this method of marketing that is seeing an upsurge in popularity, not least thanks to the growing focus on inbound marketing. 

Inbound marketing is defined as methods which serves a purpose to nurture visitors into leads, they become leads when they give you their details in exchange for further information or services from you. This is a complete contrast to the cold tactics of outbound marketing which marketers focused heavily on in the 80s, 90s and early 00s. Outbound marketing was about interrupting and distracting your readers and leads and essentially forcing your content, products and services onto unsuspecting individuals. 

Permission marketing is a winning technique because as long as you don't become a spammer you can do no wrong in what you send your contacts, because they've subconsciously allowed you to send them materials, as they've handed over their details by choice. As long as you additionally ensure that you're completely transparent about opting out of communications, this is a great method to use.

Find out more about inbound marketing and outbound marketing techniques and how they both compare.

Equally, this can then open up the debate of when you have permission, do you send automated or real-time communications? 

This can be quite tricky, so let's break it down...

Permission and Automation 

Our marketing activities are often conducted online in the form of blogs, ebooks, emails, social media posts and so on. Marketers therefore aim to collect permission, manage it and use it effectively. Automation tools are a huge help in doing this. For instance, they allow us to:

  • Collect permission by adding a form and content offer on your site.
  • Manage permission so that communications are anticipated.
  • Use permission to ensure the content is relevant and personal.

There is also real proof that these tools really work for permission marketers!

In a 2011 study, open rate and CTR were compared between opt-in and opt-out lists.

  • Opens in the opt-in lists were twice as high as the opt-out lists.
  • CTRs on opt-in lists were also twice as high on average.

 

What about real-time marketing?

Sometimes it's just as important to avoid scheduling your company's marketing 100%. Focus on joining in real-life events and jumping on board real-life Twitter trends or news pieces and issues that affect your industry or audience.

Although the general public are savvy enough to know that your 9:00am email is probably not being sent by somebody clicking a button at 9:00am, they also like to see that you're human.

Being a marketer who has a human personality is key to nurturing and converting leads. There is no good in using all of those fancy inbound techniques to attract and convert strangers into leads, if you're then going to become robotic in your relationship. 

We focus our personality on our social media feeds, which is why you'll often find #FastFoodFriday tweets and birthday messages! 

To sum up - which method wins?

All of them! There is little point putting permission marketing methods into place if you have no automation tools to record that data and then use it effectively. 

However, keep in mind that a personal touch helps, so find out what your audience likes and dislikes or what they want to hear from you (this can be done through your automation tools) and adapt your content to suit them! 

Find out why it's crucial to choose a UK HubSpot Partner Agency to help you implement inbound/HubSpot at your company

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