Successful Customer Follow Up

Today we have a guest contributor that wrote on a topic that many small business owners need to know. I first saw Bob Bly at a seminar in Boca Raton, Florida that was sponsored by Rich Schefren. Bob Bly is someone I admire and respect. His insight into direct marketing is excellent.

Dear Direct Response Letter Subscriber:
To determine how much they can afford to spend to get a new
customer, many marketers base that figure on the average size of
the first order.

Therefore, if the front-end product or service is $500, they
won’t spend anywhere near that to acquire the customer, for fear
of operating at break-even or even a loss. If they want to double
their money on the promotion, the most they’ll spend to make the
sale is $250.

But savvy marketers know that the amount of money you can spend
to acquire a new customer should be based on the customer’s
lifetime value, not just the revenue from the first order.

Lifetime value refers to how much money your customer is likely
to spend with you during the period he remains a customer of your
business.

For instance, if the average unit of sale is $500, the average
number of purchases per year is two, and the average customer
remains a customer for 5 years, the lifetime customer value is
$500 X 2 X 5 = $5,000.

Based on the average lifetime value, you can see where it would
in fact be well worth spending $500 to acquire a new customer.

The business owner who understands lifetime customer value as it
relates to customer acquisition has a tremendous advantage: He is
willing to spend more to acquire new business, because he knows
its true value.

Example: A company selling books to corporate librarians planned
a marketing campaign to get new corporate accounts to start
ordering books from them.

I asked the owner what he would be willing to spend to get a new
account. He said about $300.

Forget advertising, I advised. Just open up an account for every
company you want as a customer – and put $300 in it!

Send each prospect a personal letter telling them they already
have an account with you — and that it contains $300 they can
use at any time this year.

Instead of a sales or marketing campaign, my client gave the
money he would have spent to generate leads and makes sales calls
directly to his key prospects, so they could try the service at
no cost. It worked like a charm!

Today online trading services use the same tactic. They send you
a letter telling you they have opened an account for you with $75
or so in it. You get the money when you do your first trade.

Need to stimulate business? Calculate lifetime customer value,
decide what percentage of that amount you want to spend on
acquiring new customers (10% is a common figure), and invest that
amount of money to acquire new customers.

It will likely be more than your competitors think they can
spend, giving you a huge edge in winning new business.

Sincerely,
Bob Bly
Copywriter / Consultant
590 Delcina Drive
River Vale, NJ 07675
Phone 201-505-9451
Fax 201-573-4094
www.bly.com

Help! My Business Sucks is the brainchild of Andrew Lock. here is an sample of his one hundredth show.

When it comes to developing continuous relationships with customers, but also continuously marketing to them, putting together an email marketing strategy and plan is crucial for many companies to do. Email marketing campaigns are inexpensive compared to other marketing techniques like television and billboard advertising, while being useful and targeting your market. Using email-marketing software helps to carry out marketing promotions and campaigns to existing customers and to leads that can become customers to your company.

The strategy of email marketing software is raising conversion rates with your marketing efforts. The higher your conversion rate, the better sales you will have and more profit you will in turn make. However, the dilemma here is that a marketing strategy is needed to turn potential clients into paying customers, or inactive clients into paying ones, through a follow up purchase.

Developing a Customer Service Relationship

The first thing to consider when using the email marketing strategy is that you should be able to develop relationships with clients prior to throwing advertisements or promotions at them. Often times it will take about seven email messages to be sent before someone will buy a product or service from you. Once this number is reached, the chances for purchases from other individuals on your list increases exponentially.

The strategy now relies on what you should do and say in the first seven or so emails you send out with the automated email marketing software. You can use this time as a sort of trial honeymoon period for the relationship between your business and new leads. Regardless of how it seems, the first few emails are undoubtedly a trial to your new subscribers.

During this trial period, you need to offer useful information. Consider sending messages through your Email Marketing Software that include “top ten” lists of important things your contacts should know. Make your Email Marketing messages seem like staying enrolled in your mailing list is worth pure gold to them by giving solid information about solutions to your subscribers’ problems.

In this time, it is important to offer helpful tips and useful information. Consider messages to send that include top ten lists of valuable facts your contacts should know when you are using the email marketing software. Make the automated messages seem fresh and have clients want to stay enrolled on your list. Make them feel as though this information is a solution to their problems, or potentially good advice for the future.

It is the Time to Begin Marketing

After a relationship is established with customers and leads through your email marketing software, advertisements and marketing promotions can begin to be solicited. Sending out emails of product endorsements, affiliate marketing links, as well as new product or service announcements are great examples.

However, be aware that you do not flood your client contact list with messages that are too frequent. Using the email marketing software, you can time emails to be sent appropriately spaced out: bi-weekly, monthly, quarterly or just about any other interval time period. Even after beginning to send promotions, continue to nurture your clients with valuable tips and important information to keep clients consistent in checking your email.

The whole email marketing process used with the email marketing software can help to create, manage, and send successful campaigns from beginning to end. There are all kinds of programs today that easily help create email marketing campaigns and databases. This allows business owners and marketers to focus more on marketing techniques and less on the technicalities.

Of course, you probably will not become an email-marketing guru over night. But, the sooner you start, the sooner you can begin building this new skill, which with today’s intuitive software will happen rapidly. One you really get good, you’ll be amazed at the ROI that email marketing can produce.

Despite any advice you take, you will not become a successful email marketer instantaneously. Though, the sooner you start, the sooner you can begin to expand on new found technique and skill in marketing, which will rapidly increase your success. When you are quite talented at utilizing email marketing you will see the improvement in sales that it can make.

Continuing from my last post…

Automated prospect follow up is a fantastic way to learn to sell more online, and promotes back end sales. The variety of email marketing automation software allows for sophistication in follow up, while others are simple and user friendly.

From the marketing perspective, a software with minimum features would be automated database management, a list server for multiple list organization, managing and tracking requests and follow ups, import and export features, contact data to and from the database, and finally auto-responses lined up for sequential follow ups.

The ability for software to data merge for personalized email to potential customers, prospects, newsletter subscribers, employees, organization or team members, affiliates, associates and general network marketing persons is incredibly important, as is the automatic adding and removing of contacts from the database.

In addition to the previously mentioned properties, software should allow for seamless input of prospects in terms of the website’s front end, and when they are received on the back end, all necessary information should be present to make a well-rounded decision to buy a product, join an affiliate list, or join a marketing network.

Technically all software needs to feature the capacity to operate email sending via your ISP server, or an integrated mail system to bypass ISP servers, moreover allowing you to avoid using up the bandwidth. It is necessary with lists of greater than 1000 contact names, emails, etc.

Other features to consider when chosing email marketing software is the capacity to send email through several threads at once, like 10 or more, sending an average of 15 emails per thread, and an email verifier to verify email addresses of contacts and keep your list free of fake emails given.

Furthermore, the email automation software has to deal with the entire user unknown, undeliverable or bounce back messages received without making a mess and crowding the system. Keeping a clean list is important because it will prevent you from being filtered by many ISP servers as spam, because of undeliverable messages clogging bandwidth procedures.

An email marketing and database management software featuring the above services allows a marketer or internet business manager to create, operate and manage programs, marketing campaigns, all while simultaneously running clients special offers.

For internet start up companies, business owners or those involved in network marketing, software of this kind can do even help to train associates, affiliates and others, via email, by distributing workbooks, marketing materials or instructions for a great start.

Lastly, if you are an online publishing company, the software available can provide broadcasting for newsletters and online publications, like magazines (ezines), in addition to submitting each article to dozens of ezine editors at one time.

Automated email and database management help business owners and marketers to capitalize their internet client developments, and follow up on customers, potential clients, affiliates and more. Again, launching a number of marketing campaigns at the same time improve back end sales and overall profit.

Email marketing automation generates interest, traffic, and sales for an online business; and, its just amazing the amount of work and time that it saves. I cannot imagine someone marketing or doing business on the internet without email marketing automation software like this.

Email marketing automation generates interest in products, website traffic, and total sales for an online business; this is best demonstrated by the time and work it saves. It is nearly impossible to recall internet industry without today’s email automation software.

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How to Expand in Database Marketing and Increase Back-end Sales to Raise Overall Profits

Establish a number of simultaneous promotional campaigns with a promotion automating email applications that will improve results for your web business sales, while growing in opt-in lists, prospects tend to follow, increasing back-end finishing sales, and bottom line profits.

Follow up is important because when you don’t follow up prospects or repeated customers with additional products and information, valuable potential sales opportunities are escaping from your reach. They will instead go to competitors, have their wants and needs fulfilled, and do it at the expense of what should have been your sale.

There are potential customers that may be interested in your products, but lose your information or were too busy for your sales pitch when it was given. Some customers will choose companies to buy from that follow up on inquires in a timely manner and friendly way. When they do not receive feedback, or the feedback is vague, their business is taken elsewhere.

Though everyone’s experiences are different, a commonality seems to be that just about everyone doing business on the internet has had that happen to them because of failing to follow up. Even customer follow up at preset times with a standard thanks or message has a huge effect on returning customers and thus increase in sales.

Those who have relatively automated marketing campaigns, email lists and database management, tend to follow up with personalized marketing software for email. Thus, the return in back end sales and bottom line profits increases.

Though raising profit margins and increasing sales is important, automation marketing is a time saving feature, as is email marketing. Both of which are important aspects of database marketing and gaining back end sales.

Doing internet business with email marketing automation comes with many benefits. One of which it to follow up old clients and make them prospective clients again. While following through, you will be collecting leads, prospects, customer contact information and personal data, all from a scope within your target market. Growing an opt-in list is important and vital as managing lists on multiple servers and using a number of marketing campaigns with many automatic responses.

Regardless of spam filters that have been recently employed, email is still the most effective medium for a number of reasons:

• It can be used to keep customers in touch with your new products and services
• It promotes continuous communication with website visitors
• It is a proactive way to keep clients interested and reaffirm brand loyalty
• Keeps organized all contacts and email communication
• Gives prospects a mode to ask questions

That list can be elongated by a series of other important functions of the email follow up. This has unlimited possibility for increasing return clients and following up well with prospects, aside from perhaps technological or software limits to follow up.

More to follow in your next post…

Related articles business owners must know:

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Give your customer a strong reason to come back to you. Create your own Unigue Selling Proposition (USP) and get more customers calling you.

Marketing Tip #3

As salespeople we know how important it is to follow up with our customer. We don’t want to be intruding and we certainly don’t want to be annoying. Here is a brief video to show how you can approach the subject of follow up with your customer before he leaves with his purchase.

Follow Up With Your Customer Sales, marketing, loan officer …

Image via Wikipedia

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Follow

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Image via CrunchBase

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