If you're not familiar with it, the concept of push vs. pull marketing is pretty simple.
In the world of marketing, especially in digital, you desire to get your prospects engaged and involved in your product, brand, web site, blog, etc. You desire to get them to visit your web site or blog (hopefully bookmarking it and return). Getting them there is considered the "pull" as you need to somehow pull them in and hope they come back. But let's say you launched a web site, a blog or a new product. Unless they know about it, you need to employ some form of "push" tactic to get them there. In my opinion, email is the perfect vehicle for this process.
Think about it this way: there are a bazillion blogs and web sites all working very hard at creating great content in order to keep you there and hopefully getting you to rate them high in your mind as a resource worth coming back to. As an example, an agency partner of ours is in the process of converting to a new blog where they not only have new content regarding marketing innovations, but also interesting podcasts where various members of their crew discuss what’s hot in roundtable format. All great stuff!
The million-user question: how would I know about the blog if I wasn't familiar with them already? And once I know about them (and hopefully I like what I read), how would I be prompted to come back?
Let's face it: we all think our content is extremely intelligent, worthwhile and that everyone who stumbles upon it will set their browser home page to it. Unfortunately, this is not likely. It doesn't mean it’s not worthwhile., but we're just busy as we've only got so much to pay attention to. So how do you stay in their minds and drive repeat visits? You have a couple of options:
- Create brilliant content so they do indeed make it their browsers homepage
- Work hard creating brilliant worthwhile copy, be realistic and push updates back at them over time.
Unless I subscribe to your RSS feed (believe it or not, a study shows only 11% of the internet population knows what RSS is), I'm not running into your updates. In comes email. We all live in our inboxes these days, so why not schedule a regular email that is short and to the point, dropping the 4 or 5 most recent posts in teaser format for me to browse, click and get back at your stuff? This would be considered the 'push' approach.
In the end, think through the fact that you want people coming back to you. You can usually employ tactics to pull them the first time, but keep in mind, we're busy and your content has to be very worth bookmarking. Otherwise, I may forget you as a resource! Start using email - the perfect push mechanism and keep them coming back.
Brett Houle is the CEO/President of SendLabs.