Who am I?
I am Taher Bhindarwala, Sales Specialist at Dista. A learner with 5 years of experience in all types of sales, right from on field door to door sales, cold calling to inside sales.
What is a push strategy?
Push strategy involves pushing your brand/product in front of the audience by various means such as social media campaigns, outbound emails, ads etc. Just like everyone receives messages and emails from lenskart does not matter if you wear one or not.
What is a pull strategy?
It refers to a strategy where the firm aims to have promotional activities in a way that customers actively seek your product, pulling customers towards you. Reaching out only to a specific audience who can be your potential customers. Example- Having an account based outbound emails can be a part of pull strategy.
Now when we have a general overview the next question that comes to mind is what is better?
To answer this question, one would have to identify and understand the culture and few things of the organization, how aggressive are they? What are the long term & short term goals? What product are you dealing with? Who are your buyers? What kind of business are you in, B2C or B2B? What geography are you dealing with?
So whatever you write in email is nothing but a mere reflection of all the above questions. If your organization has a product that comes with a deadline that has to be sold aggressively, your email will sound like you are here to sell rather than understanding customer needs.
On the other hand, if you have a product that requires a lot of education and where purchase decisions are not blunt or based on impulse, your main purpose of writing an email here will be educating the person and buying his/her time so that both parties can sit and explore.
Hence, like email, other tools and ways such as search engine optimization, search engine ads, content marketing, social media content, social media paid ads, white papers etc,. all can be a form of both push and pull marketing.
So if everything, especially emails, comes under both the strategy, then what is the difference?
The difference is your approach. You write an email in push and pull both but what you write, your content in the email defines which category your email will fall under. How often are you sending them email? Are you spamming them? Do you allow them to opt out of your campaigns if it seems unnecessary to them?
Push is mostly used for quick sales whereas pull works when you want to establish a legitimate and long term business.
So what works best for you?
You need to find answers to the above questions and decide.
With Dista, the focus was always on quality rather than quantity. That’s the culture here. Hence sending bulk email without context (Push Strategy) was never a part of our work, also the solutions that we offer are not so generalised that everyone can relate to it. There are specific Industries/Organization and within that organization there are a specific set of people who would be interested to explore different solutions as per their own forte. Bulk email with one general template will only work when you don’t know who your audience is and you just want to reach out to as many prospects as possible.
Combination of both is always recommended. As you cannot spam your customers that’s true but also at the same time you cannot just pass information without expecting any return.
Well that is my experience, the best part of being in sales and marketing is that there are no formulas to stick to, you need to explore, make mistakes and learn.
I hope you enjoyed your time reading this.
The author of this article is Taher Bhinderwala, Sales Specialist.
