Permission Marketing vs. Inbound Marketing – Are They Different?

I had an interesting thought this afternoon triggered by an email exchange around some work we are doing at Wild Apricot.  It got me to thinking about the possible differences between the ideas of “permission marketing” and “inbound marketing,” two terms that I had heretofore used pretty much interchangeably.

The thought struck me when we were discussing the relative merits of taking a piece of downloadable content — for the sake of explanation let’s say it was a whitepaper — and putting it behind a registration form, so that if someone wanted to download it they’d have to fill out the form, including an email address.  The person arguing in favour of doing this claimed, I’d say rightly, that since we were offering them some valuable information, it was only fair that they give us an email address so we might send them more information directly in the future, which hopefully would ultimately lead to a sale.  This person felt this was well in keeping with the concept of permission marketing whereby, as author David Meerman Scott explained in his book The New Rules of Marketing and PR:  “…if you’re asking for someone’s e-mail address … you must provide something equally valuable in return.”

My counter-argument to this was that, as company trying to practice good inbound marketing (in the sense of “getting found by customers” which is how the term is used around the Inbound Marketing Summit) the best approach for us would be to allow as many people as possible to download the whitepaper, with the minimum possible barriers to allowing them to get and spread the information.

I think there may be a subtle but important philosphical difference in these two different kinds of marketing, which even Wikipedia treats as essentially the same.  Within permission marketing, there’s an inharent requirement to make ‘asks’ at each stage to move to the next stage of the relationship, whereas inbound marketing seems to imply the ball is much more in the court of the customer — it’s up to them to come (back ) and get more information or to make a purchase, rather than saying ‘send me more.’

What do you think?  How do you use these terms? Do you see a difference between them?

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