To Follow-Up or Not to Follow-Up? -

Details for To Follow-Up or Not to Follow-Up?

ID:	1818
Author:	buzzbooster
Title:	To Follow-Up or Not to Follow-Up?
Article:	Business follow-up is something that everyone knows they should be doing but few do it and even fewer do it well. On the other hand it is one of the most important things a business should do. Follow-up alone can triple you business and as you heard before it is a lot cheaper to sell again to existing customers than trying to acquire new ones. You will make more money from the follow-up than from anything else. It is naive to think that people will buy a high ticket item on the first contact. Normally you need at least 7 contacts before a person is ready to buy from you. You also want to take people deeper into your funnel and have them buying from you again and again. But there many more reasons to do business follow-up well. As a business owner, you should use the opportunity to follow-up to maximize desire for the brand, to seduce the leads to focus more on your service or product, to make sure demands far exceeds supply, to bring in more qualified leads and to turn interested people in invested people. People that choose to spend money with you. So, why people have a hard time doing follow-up? Mainly because they don't know how to do it and have no strategy in place, then because follow-up can mean a lot of work when you are not using the right tools. It is important to automate as much as possible your follow-up strategies. What is the right way to do business follow-up? Follow-up tends to work better when you apply a multi-step multi-media approach. This means that sending just a flyer in the mail won't do the trick. There should be a series of steps using different formats of media. For example: You can send 3 e-mail auto-responders, 2 postcards followed by a phone call, or a voice broadcast or 3 auto-responders and a mail piece. The possibilities are endless and these are just examples, you'll have to test to see which format would work better for you. A key point in a multi-step campaign is to automate as much as possible, which is a lot easier today. For example, to keep in touch by e-mail, auto-responders are a great option and very affordable. You set a series of messages once, tell the system when to send it and there will be no more work. Of course the messages in this case cannot be time sensitive. The company we use for our auto-responders is webonsteroids[dot]com. Your investment for that will be minimum, with no limit of messages or groups of auto-responders. For postcards and cards, you can also use an automated service where you set the campaigns almost the same way you would do with an e-mail auto-responder. That is what we call postcards auto responders. You upload the graphics for the postcard or card, or use one of the templates available in the system, choose the group of people you want to mail to, choose the day or the amount of days each card should be mailed from each other and pronto. The system will print, stamp and mail the cards for you. Just imagine this: In a follow-up campaign that has 3 postcards that must be mailed 10 days apart from each other, you save yourself 3 trips to the post office and you don't have to rely on memory to send the cards on the right day. This system takes a lot of work out of your back especially because you avoid postponing mailing the cards and ruining the sequence. The company we use for that you find at: sendoutcards[dot]com/wisechicks. Phone calls today are also easy to automate. There are services where you'll have people to call in and a recorded message will do the follow-up or upsell or in another scenario, you will record a message, the system will call your customers and deliver that message to them. This kind of service allows you to track which advertising is working for you because it gives you several phone numbers, that you can use separate in each media you use. A good company for that is: www.automaticresponse.com Tracking the results of your follow-up strategy is crucial to avoid spending a lot of money on steps that doesn't work. When you use a multi-step, multi-media follow-up campaign, your clients will be surprised by your pieces, they don't expect to receive multiple contacts through different channels. That alone is worth doing. Of course, I'm assuming you have backend products to keep upselling them or have at least affiliate products you could sell them. This is a whole topic in itself, and I will do this next month, but think about this: Once you have a sequence that works for you, you can keep selling to your customers different products and services or like I said above, sell them products that you are affiliate with. This alone could double your revenue, and I see no reason why you shouldn't do it. Some people say they think it is too much work. They haven't tried doing this way yet, but they find an excuse not to do it. Well, if you automate a big part of it, the work will be done only once. The most important thing to remember is that having a very profitable business takes some good amount of work and the reason why your competition will be the ones biting the dust is because you have decided to work a little bit more than they were willing to. You have decided to implement a follow-up strategy by now, haven't you? About the author of this article: nashlah boyayan is a marketing advisor with buzzbooster. she specializes in social media marketing . get a free e-book on online promotion at: http://www.buzzbooster.com
Category:	Business: Small-Business
Date:	January 17, 2009 04:03:00 PM

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