Feb 09 2010

Use Permission Marketing to Improve E-Mail Link Begging

The guest post is by Ross Hudgens, a Senior SEO Analyst at Single Grain. You should follow him on twitter here.

Seth Godin coined the term Permission Marketing, which means that you obtain permission from the consumer before advancing to the next step in the purchasing process. The opposite of this is interruption marketing – interruption marketing frequently occurs when you watch television or surf the internet. The commercials you don’t want to watch get pushed in your face, similar to the AdSense or banner ads that clog the internet.

It makes sense – when you are yelling at someone who isn’t paying attention, there is a much lower likelihood that your message will be received, and even if it Is, there is a low chance that it will be received the way you would like it to.

For SEOs, link begging can be a frustrating process. ROI is normally rather low and the thin margins of profitability must be maximized to make the process worthwhile. By incorporating Permission Marketing into our methodology, we can improve ROI and get improved response from our e-mail blasts.

While we can never obtain true permission when link begging, we can do our best to maximize the likelihood that the recipient truly listens to our message. To do this, we have to avoid e-mail “blocks”.

Think about your e-mail reading process. When you open your inbox in the morning, you have the highest volume of unread mail. You sift through many of the messages, delete what looks like spam and give less attention to those e-mails that have less priority.

During the middle of your workday, e-mail alerts are given more attention. You assess each one on a one on one basis, or in smaller batches of two or three. Of course, this process depends on the person, but generally, this remains true. Later at night, less people are working, and e-mails are checked more causally and given less strict concentration. As we reach the end of the week, we start caring less about work and more about the weekend, and e-mails and assistive link requests are more likely to be ignored.

Finally, we must assume that most of our link requests are being made to websites in the United States, so we must adjust for that window. If you aren’t in the United States and find yourself targeting more specific areas, adjust this time window accordingly.

Monday: 10AM – 1PM PST

Tuesday: 10AM – 1PM PST

Wednesday: 10AM – 1PM PST

These time windows provide the most likelihood that you will get someone in office through the entire United States, in a state of mind to grant more permission to your e-mail. This isn’t an exact science, and working outside this window might be okay, but I try to stay true to these time conditions.

My company’s link begging sample size is not significant enough to guarantee the impact of these claims, but with our current success rate nearing 6% of e-mails, there are strong leans towards the positive benefit of this tactic. At worst, this process can only cause you to more strictly plan your day – at best, it will improve your ROI, if only incrementally.