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 advertisements have been sent. The term was coined by Seth Godin in his book of the same name.

Marketers feel that this is a more efficient use of their resources because advertisements 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.