Attract customers, attract customers, attract customers. That’s your main obsession, isn’t it? Of course it is – as an ecommerce owner, it’s impossible to forget that you need customers to increase your sales.
The question here is how? What’s the best strategy to sell online with an online shop? That’s precisely what we’re going to talk about in today’s post. Today we’ll share with you the two main concepts on which every sales strategy is based. And because of how well they combine and work together, they are often successful.
Here we will teach you about push and pull — the foundation of all sales.
Inbound marketing is a strategy that consists of leading clients to your website thanks to free, quality content.
On the other side we have outbound marketing — traditional publicity strategies consisting of following clients.
Push and pull are more or less the same in that they focus on the same idea:
Don’t worry if those concepts aren’t totally clear yet. We are going to explain each of them right now more in detail.
Push Marketing is about “pushing” all of your products to the client, even though they have no intention of buying them yet (or they don’t know they need them).
What that means is we start from the idea that clients are not looking for you. That’s why you need to find potential markets, segmented groups of clients who have an unsatisfied need or an unsolved problem. You focus on that target audience and create the need to buy your product and, on top of that, you are going to be the best option to meet that need (so they don’t choose a different competitor after you’ve put in all the legwork).
This strategy requires a lot of effort. Remember that the customer “is not aware that they need you at this point” and you have to send them your offer.
This strategy works best when:
Since there’s nothing better than using real cases to understand an idea, here you have two interesting examples:
These are relatively extreme cases, but it’s obvious that they were products without existing demand that knew how to create necessity in the market.
A clear success case (and a less eccentric one) highlighting the potential of the push marketing strategy is the case of the Hawkers Co. sunglasses, a worldwide success story that we’ve already mentioned in the Doofinder blog.
What was the secret to their success?
Are you still shocked by the Doogles Push case? Here you have a video where they explain how it all started.
You need to get information about your shop and products to your clients. Some useful tools to accomplish this include:
You can choose just one or you can combine them; it will all depend on your budget. However, remember that it’s always better to master one strategy instead of starting and not finishing several.
This is the opposite of Push because we are now talking about attracting. In this case, clients are already looking for you to solve a need. They may even already know you. However, they are tired of ads that seem to stalk them, and their attitude toward the brand is often worse as a result of Push strategies. That’s why Pull can be so powerful.
In this case, we don’t follow anyone. Instead, we get them to enter our shop voluntarily, so their perception of our brand is much better.
The concept behind Pull is getting customers to come to you by offering helpful and informative materials, and this is possible because you know your ideal client’s interests and needs.
All this content that we create will be used as follows:
There are plenty of options, but as we said before, don’t spread yourself thin trying to use them all. Choose your strategies carefully and give it your all with the ones you choose.
If you want some more guidance with Pull, learn from these success stories:
The truth is that there is no definitive answer — both strategies are good, but for different reasons. What’s important is knowing when and why you are using them. For that very reason, our advice is to cleverly combine them.
With Pull strategies, you’ll be able to attract clients who may not buy the first time but are more likely to become loyal. Conversely, Push strategy customers will give you more immediate sales, but it may be more difficult to turn them into repeat buyers. The challenge is to find a balance between the two methods to see a profitable digital marketing investment and to maximize you ROI.
Most eCommerce websites are obsessed with SEO. Clients use Google to find the products they want and it’s compulsory to be there. However, in order to optimize your conversion rate with all that traffic (including the traffic coming via push strategies), you need to use pull strategies such as email marketing.
This advice will hopefully give you plenty to work with. Don’t forget about all the useful content linked to this post that will help you to better use these strategies. Moreover, don’t forget that you are not alone, and plenty of resources are available to help you make the most out of all these different strategies.