A the internet moves forward and new technologies come into more everyday use the difference between push and pull marketing techniques could start to play a bigger role in marketing any company. Firstly what am I talking about with push and pull
Pull marketing is traditionally what has been used for years online, this is where you attract customers to you and usually involves third parties and high spending, in effect pulling them in. Affiliate marketing falls under this as affiliates also pull visitors into their sites through their own PPC, SEO or word of mouth or for an offline example travel agents as the customer visits the travel agent, thy then query their suppliers and the travel agents chooses who to make the booking with – generally whoever is paying them the most commission.
Push marketing is where you push yourself directly on the consumer and make them want the product rather than having to advertise it in a traditional way. Direct email marketing can fall under this title but more recently the uptake of RSS feeds has given push marketers another channel to exploit and also the ability to build on brand loyalty.
One of the first major uses of push marketing was by spyware and adware companies. They installed a small piece of software on your computer, usually installed without the users knowledge but attached to a free download such as a screensaver or P2P file sharing software. The software they installed on the PC then monitored the websites that computer visited and forced pop ups onto the screen, this is not the website forcing the pop up but the adware or spyware application detecting that you are on a site relating to one of their advertisers and so showing you the pop up in the hope that it may be of interest to you. However as these companies worked on a mercenary basis advertising anyone who paid them the end user was receiving pop ups on virtually every site they visited slowing down their browsing and overall system performance.
Until recently the only way companies have really communicated with their customer base online is via email and even this isn’t ideal. The customer doesn’t actually ask for the email, or the content it is just sent to them in the hope it will be of interest to them. If I am subscribed to a travel newsletter who I only ever go to one hotel in Crete im not really going to want any information other than special offers on that hotel, or special flight deals. However as the company has hundreds of thousands of customers all wanting different things they have to vary the email content in the hope that each one will satisfy some people. Basically rotating the theme to appeal to the masses each time, so in a year I might receive 50 emails and only really pay attention to 1 of them.
However RSS feeds could revolutionise this and create a truly loyal customer, why? Because they get what they ask for. Its personalised content for every single visitor, using the same example as above with the Crete hotel. The differences firstly are rather than me waiting and receiving an email when the company decides to send it, I can request the data weather that be information, deals or special offers. Also where the email may be totally unrelated to where I want to go I could choose to pull in the Crete RSS feed so immediately I know anything that I look at in my feed would be Crete based. Just to say that RSS will probably only be of use to the internet savvy user at the moment, but there are a lot of free websites and software applications out there that make using and receiving RSS data very easy and parsing it into an easily readable format. Surely this is any companies dream having customers actually requesting deals, prices, special offers for any given area?
