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The first “killer app” of the Internet is fast becoming the most important. Lowly E-mail!

Back in 1999, when Seth Godin wrote the groundbreaking book Permission Marketing, he predicted that an increasing percentage of marketing messages would be, “anticipated, personal and relevant.”

It was a radical idea at the time. E-commerce marketers with their frictionless webs were doing just fine, thank you. But today, the battle is on for the inbox.

For example, a French company by the name of Vente-Privee invented a little virus that began to replicate. It’s spawned the whole “flash sale site” category. The numbers behind this revolution are impossible to ignore. In the traditional e-commerce model, two percent of visitors to a site might become customers. In the permission model, marketers convert ten, twenty, even thirty times more!

The War of the Inbox is for a special relationship with consumers. Ultimately, it’s an ideal that is going to be rare, because attention is finite. Still, Inbox Appointment Marketing is the holy grail for those few marketers that can craft compelling offers and keep them coming day after day.

Whether or not that’s you, that is your competition.