Permission marketing is a term used in e-marketing. Marketers will ask permission before they send advertisements to prospective customers. It is used by some Internet marketers, email marketers, and telephone marketers. It requires that people first"opt-in", rather than allowing people to"opt-out" only after the advertisments have been sent.

Marketers feel that this is a more efficient use of their resources because advertisments are not sent to people that are not interested in the product. This is one technique used by marketers that have a personal marketing orientation. They feel that marketing should be done on a one-to-one basis rather than using broad aggregated concepts like market segment or target market.

The term was coined by Seth Godin in 1999 in his book of the same name.