Keeping After Potential Customers
Once you have read the following article about the vital importance of
following up with your potential customers, please share your thoughts about
having a good follow up system in place with a comment at the end.
Follow-up Marketing: How to Win More Sales With Less Effort
A study done by the Association of Sales Executives revealed that 81% of all
sales happens on or after the fifth contact. If you’re a small business owner
and you’re only doing one or two follow-ups imagine all the business you’re
losing.
Not following up with your prospects and customers is the same as
filling up your bathtub without first putting the stopper in the drain!
But
don’t be disheartened if you’re among the 90% of business owners I talk to that
don’t do any follow up. The good news is you have ample room for profitable
improvement.
Consistent follow-up creates a predictable and profitable
stream of prospects and customers that buy. Small businesses that capture leads
and follow-up with them enjoy higher conversion rates and a higher percentage of
referrals than those that don’t.
After asking many small business owners the
reason they don’t follow up I often hear responses such as, “I don’t have the
sales staff to chase down all our leads”, or “We’re usually too busy to do a lot
of follow up.” These responses automatically set off red flags that tell me that
they lack a systematic process for following up.
The problem is not that
they don’t have the capacity to follow up with prospects, it’s that they don’t
have the systems in place to do it.
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What Does a Good Follow Up
System Look Like?
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A good
follow up marketing system should have three attributes.
It should be
systematic, meaning that the follow up process is done the same way every time.
It should generate consistent, predictable results.
It should require
minimal physical interaction to make it run, meaning it should be able to run on
autopilot.
Sounds like a dream come true for most small business owners
doesn’t it? Not only can it be done, it’s being done every day. The secret to
“follow-up marketing” is to make it automatic so that you don’t have to lift a
finger but the job still gets done.
With today’s technology it’s simpler
than ever. Automating your follow-up processes gives you more time to work “on”
your business rather than “in” your business.
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Three Types of Follow Ups
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There are three types of people you should be
following up with, suspects (people in your target marketplace), prospects
(people who have responded to your marketing but have not purchased, and
customers (people who have purchased something from you.)
Each follow up
message and offer will be different for each type of person. With suspects,
you’ll want to entice them to call you or visit your store / office.
With
prospects, you need to persuade them to make their first purchase. And with
customers, you want to convince them to come back and do more business with you
and give your referrals.
Obviously the hardest type of person to follow up
with is a suspect because they haven’t shown any interest yet in a pool or hot
tub and you usually don’t have their contact information.
But that’s not
true with prospects and customers. You not only know who they are, but you
should already have their contact information.
And if you follow up with
your customers with consistency you’ll find that they will help you turn your
suspects into prospects and prospects into customers for you through referrals.
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Your Follow Up Marketing Tools
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Your principal follow up marketing
tools are the telephone, direct mail, and email. Many pool and hot tub business
owners make the mistake of jumping right on the telephone to follow up; however,
most prospects don’t want a pushy sales message right away and most prospects
have been trained to consider anyone who calls up to be a pushy salesperson.
Instead, you should try to develop a relationship of trust with your
prospect by quickly sending informational items such as special reports, audio
CDs, or videos before you make a phone call.
Remember to always include a
“next-step-offer” to accompany your educational materials. If the next step is
to visit the store, then entice them with an appropriate offer or if the next
step is to call you, entice your prospect to call you immediately.
People
move through the buying process in baby steps, especially when considering
buying high-ticket items such as hot tubs or pools. Your offer should always
help them take the next step.
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Your Follow Up
Sequence
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The power of your follow up will
lie in your follow up sequence. Your follow up sequence is a series of
communications with your prospect that are “linked” together, with each
communication building on the previous message.
For instance, you might
start your second letter by saying, “10 days ago I sent you a letter…” You
might also consider stamping the message, “2nd Notice” on the envelope to let
people know this is the second time you’ve contacted them.
Referencing the
previous communication links what you’re saying with what you’ve already said
and reminds your prospect that you care enough to continue the conversation.
Usually, when doing direct mail you should include three to five mailings
spaced out about seven days apart. When using a sequential auto responder you
can have as many follow ups as you want because using email is basically free
(that’s why you always want to get a prospects email address).
One of my
clients has over 20 follow-ups in his auto responder sequence that go out over a
six month period.
Each sequence should follow a logical argument and you
might consider bolstering the offer with each communication using a deadline as
a motivator to act now.
As an example, in the third communication you could
say, “I’m surprised you haven’t taken me up on my generous offer. What’s holding
you back?” Or consider saying, “I’ve written you three times and you still
haven’t taken me up on my offer so I’m going to pull out all the stops and make
you an offer you simply can’t refuse.”
Notice how the language always links
the previous communication and increases the boldness of the offer. It’s the
same type of conversation you might have in a regular sales conversation.
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How to Put Your
Follow Up Marketing System on Autopilot
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What I’m about to
reveal to you is the key to developing a powerful follow up marketing system
because it overcomes the number one reason most businesses don’t follow up.
You must automate your follow up system as much as possible so that there
are few, if any, physical interactions from your employees with the system. It’s
the required physical interactions (i.e. printing letters, sending emails,
inputting leads etc.) where 99% of all the breakdowns happen in well-intentioned
follow up marketing systems.
To automate your follow-ups you should consider
using robotic marketing systems and outsourcing any manual interactions to a
dedicated service.
For instance, to capture your leads you should consider
using a toll-free automated recorded message system that captures your prospects
contact information and automatically transcribes it and sends your leads to you
in a spreadsheet every morning via email.
If you’re using a direct mail
follow up system (and you should be), find a fulfillment house to do the
mailings for you. To find a fulfillment house, simply go to your local printer
and ask them to refer you to a fulfillment house in the area.
Now step back
for a moment and see the power of what I’ve just revealed to you. Imagine
running an ad, having your prospect call up and give their contact information
via your recorded message system.
Then having your leads automatically sent
to your fulfillment house via email, after which your prospect receives a
five-sequence direct mail package containing your most persuasive marketing
message — without you lifting one finger!
You can set up the exact same
type of “hands-free” follow up marketing system using an email auto responder
system. Your prospect will not only be receiving your direct mail messages, but
you can insert your email messages in between your mailings.
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What About Calling to Follow Up?
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you’ll notice that I didn’t say
anything about calling your prospect. That’s because you want your prospect to
have already received your educational marketing messages and have most of their
questions answered before they call you. An educated prospect is your best
prospect.
They already know why you’re different, what your value
proposition is, and how you’re uniquely qualified to meet their needs. In
essence, they’ve pre-qualified themselves before you ever have to spend time
physically speaking to them.
This drastically reduces the sales cycle and
increases your conversion rate because you have positioned your small business
to be their only logical choice.
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Conclusion
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Follow-up marketing will boost your closing rate and
dramatically increase your customer satisfaction. Following up with systematic
processes allows you to leverage your salespeople’s time and enhance their
productivity, which will result in more sales with less effort and isn’t that
what you want? Start winning more sales today by implementing your own follow-up
marketing system.
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