Consent marketing is the new rule of the day. With privacy laws littering the digital search landscape, retailers are left with a targeting quandary because of neutered search capabilities that big tech seems happy to accommodate. Forget being pragmatic and realizing that it serves both buyers and sellers best if what is served up is highly targeted, the government believes they must protect us from ourselves, therefore the new normal they are creating.
Uncle Sam and his parade of “do-gooder” politicians, who have stepped in and started imposing privacy laws which don’t protect the consumer or the retailer. Sounds bleak doesn’t it? Technology, whose tsunami ushered in legal tracking, will now and once again be the savior of the retailer. Technology will allow us to capture people who will give us permission to serve them. We will then use tracking tools fed by permission driven data to “fish” for people who look like people who buy pianos. We will have to lean less and less on big tech tools and rely on permission based data to fish for people using what we used to call “demographics.” Some self-professed things and basic information will always be available and when fed the steroids of consent-originated information, we will continue building a targeted and growing pool we can promote to.
We have to take a step back on some terminology because of the privacy laws and realize that buzzwords like “behavioral” and “contextual” marketing are still in play but are now subservient to gathering “permission and consent.” In my last blog, I mentioned the unfair advantage that we have in gathering piano buyer profile information that allows us to target at a level that cannot be competed with. The over 2 million piano interest leads that we have created since 2015 means that we know what the piano buyer looks like better than anyone. The privacy laws affect us less than they do anyone else, so bear that in mind when you want to build an audience to ask permission to talk to.
We will, thankfully, always be free to communicate the benefits of what we have to offer to those who give us the stage. Those who give us permission to communicate with them are the audience we will rely on to sell to. The days of being able to scour the internet for people who act like they have an interest in what we have to offer have been wounded, therefore forcing us into a new way of marketing moving forward.
The bottom line for marketers? You must get permission, not forgiveness. This generation of young adults have grown up with a cell phone in their hand and Google at their beck and call. They and the older buyers both will continue to search and purchase. Driving them to a page or site that is “optimized for conversion” is the key. Consider it, as Seth Godin calls it, “a trade” – contact information in return for whatever the carrot may be. For Prospects International and the LeadFlow program, the incentive has been the ability to view an inventory list. A significant portion of the online interest traffic is willing to give their “permission”, in the form of their personal information, in exchange for the ability to see instruments on a list our clients compile and manage. Why does it work so well? The main reason is because an impressive percentage of consumers are willing to raise their hands and tell us who they are in order to see a unique list, not available on a company website, tied to a special promotion. Piano dealers have done a good job of placing a lot of pianos on their websites. Static pictures and varying levels of instrument descriptions are abundant so that web browsers can see their product for sale, yet a “well crafted list” tied to a specific theme allows LeadFlow and EventFlow participants to capture consumers to communicate with, because they “bite” on the opportunity to view a “special” list. Consent marketing simply means that many consumers will indeed give their consent in exchange for a peek at something in the wheelhouse of what they are searching for. My next article will address how best to serve up the right information that will encourage them to deepen their relationship with you and engage you as their tour guide on the way to making an important new family member decision.
The word permission itself has a strength of its own. I have experienced so many people willing to drop their barriers when sales pros concentrate on using the word “permission” all throughout their sales engagements. It is a positioning statement that portrays you as being willing to be their ally and assume a servant’s posture. When the perception the consumer has of a company’s reputation and the sales person representing it becomes positive, wonderful things tend to happen. The same is true of marketing communications, if you think “telling is selling” you often alienate, if you ask and get them to open up, you make more friends. As I say at least 5 times daily, “The Company With the Most Friends Wins!”
Allow me to inject a question based selling example with which to bring this all home –
When consent is given, all sales psychology effort should be applied to the leads so that you “make friends” better than your competition. When someone gives you permission to communicate with them about their wishes, this is a buyer’s sign that can be treated effectively or conversely in a cavalier manner. Please follow me here: when we first built the form that pops up for the potential prospects to fill in to see if they want to see a “specially crafted” clearance list we had a “comments” section at the bottom of the form. As a result of that word, “comments”, only about 20% of the visitors who filled out the form would share some information about the type of piano they were interested in. We were not happy with that result, therefore we applied some “question based selling” and changed the word “comments” into “What type of a piano are you searching for?” The consent, the knowledge of what type of a piano the prospects were searching for, is a prime example of incorporating question based sales psychology into “the ask” for personal preference information. It is incredibly valuable to a sales associate to have a starting point, sweetened with the knowledge of the type of instrument a prospect is most interested in. We knew this, and as a result of this one simple question based adjustment, PianoLeads now provides the piano type 80% of the time. They now regularly grace us with “consent” to engage about specific piano types with them!
There are a blue million ways to screw up lead generation and the followup. We are now officially ten years into offering this critical service and have learned SO much. We’ve seen multiple attempts to plagiarize our LeadFlow sales funnel fall short. The single largest reason they do, and we don’t, fall short is because we are constantly honed by our substantial consortium of clients (40 markets strong) who we give credit to for our best innovations and our data advantage.
Get permission. Make more friends than your competition. Getting permission to be the piano concierge for more prospects in your market is the recipe to success. Not getting the largest amount of permission in your market to help more people have more music in their lives is actually unforgivable. It means someone else cares more and is outworking you and no one should ever give you permission to commit that unforgivable retail act.
“Permission Marketing is the tool that unlocks the power of the Internet.” – Seth Godin
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