Do Your Customers Forget About You?

When someone contacts you through your website the chance of a sale goes down the longer you delay a response. If you then sell to a global audience how do you handle time zones etc.

Even if you respond quickly do you follow up with yet further information?

If you are like most small to medium website owners and part time internet marketers, you don’t typically follow up fast enough.

When you don’t follow that initial message with additional information later on, you let a valuable prospect slip away from your grasp! This prospect is a potential customer who has already demonstrated they may have been very interested in your products by contacting in the first instance. Sometimes, when the first response gets in they may be too busy to make a purchase and a further trigger with re-instate that interest.

Often, buyers will test a website and purposely put off making a purchase, to see if you show interest. If nothing arrives through a follow up message, they may well take the business elsewhere.

Are you losing money due to inconsistent and ineffective follow up?

Following up with leads is more than just a process, you need to implement a follow up system! If you don’t follow up with your prospects consistently, personally and in a timely manner, then you might as well forget the whole follow up process.
Consistent and timely follow up gets results!

One basic technique often used is to add everyone to a list and then email or broadcast news to the whole list at the same time. Due to the general broadcast the news tends to be generic. You would also write follow up newsletters every now and then, and send them, in one mass mailing, to everyone on the list. While this technique does help, it tends to return only a small degree of success.  Why isn’t the list technique” very effective?

* It is NOT consistent. You tend to only send out follow up messages when the company has news.
* Sent messages tend to be generic news and don’t give the potential customer any additional information about the product or service in question. They can’t make a more informed buying decision after receiving a newsletter!
* Messages convey a generic impersonal mentality to your potential customers.

What follow up method should you use?

You need to be personal and have the appearance of 1-2-1 communication. Following up with each lead individually, multiple times, but at set intervals, and with pre-written messages. This WILL dramatically increase sales! The only problem is to set this system up, you need to do some planning.

You need to develop your follow up messages. A first informative letter and then a second letter starts the follow up process. This second letter should go into more detail than the first letter stressing the advantages of your products or services!

The next 2-4 follow up messages should be short and specific. Include lists of the benefits and potential uses of your products and services. All letters should be written so that your prospects can skim the contents, and still see get the message.

The next couple of follow up messages should place a bit of pressure and create a sense of urgency in your prospect’s mind. For example, make a special offer with an end date, giving a reason to order NOW instead of waiting any longer. After reading these follow up messages, your prospect should want to order immediately!

The next couple of messages need to try and discover why they have not purchased. Phrase each in the form of a question, asking why they have not placed an order? The aim is to get them to email a response and start a conversation. Typical questions include: if the price is to high, the product isn’t the right color or doesn’t have the right features. The longer a lead waits it becomes less likely they will order but any feedback can help you modify your follow up letters or products, so that other prospects will order.

We now have the mails but we now need to think about timing. You don’t want one prospect to receive a follow up the day after he gets your initial informative letter, while another prospect waits weeks for a follow up! Always send an initial, informative letter as soon as it is requested, and send the first follow up 24 hours afterwards. You want your prospects to have information quickly, so that they can make informed buying decisions!

Send the next 2-4 follow up messages between 1 and 3 days apart. Your prospect is still hot, and is probably still shopping around! Tell him about the benefits of your products and services, as opposed to your competitors’. You will make the sale!

Your prospect is now cold and so send the final follow up messages later on at least 4 days apart. As they probably don’t want to buy you don’t want to annoy them!

Following up effectively seems complicated, but it doesn’t have to be! So many potential customers are lost because of poor follow up – don’t you want to be one of the few to get it right?

With email marketing tools it is very easy to manage your lists, follow up emails and web forms to capture the emails in the first instance.  Any email tool should also provide reliable non-spam delivery and have detailed tracking of who clicks and signs up etc.