We already know what a follow-up is.
Follow-up is a tool that is used to enhance, strengthen and expand the effects of an initial approach, creating the conditions for establishing subsequent contacts and which creates a predictable and profitable flow of prospects and customers who purchase.
But why talk about Follow-up Marketing Online?
Because it is essentially a channel that uses the internet and e-mail to function, and that it is a practically zero-cost system, and that does not require major maintenance, apart from the initial work of setting up and drafting the messages to be sent .
If you're only doing one or two follow-ups to your prospects you're wasting time.
Not contacting your potential customers is the same as filling the bathtub without first putting the plug in the drain!
One study revealed that 81% of all sales occur on average by the seventh contact.
But don't be discouraged if you're among the 90% of entrepreneurs who don't do any follow-up.
The good news is that you always have the option to start with ample room for profitable improvement.
Small businesses that follow up with a good follow-up campaign enjoy higher conversion rates and therefore a higher percentage of sales than businesses that don't.
After asking many small business owners why they don't follow up, I hear responses like, "I don't have the sales staff to chase all of our leads," or, "We're often too busy to run intense campaigns." follow-up."
These answers tell me that there is a lack of knowledge on how to start a systematic process to create an online follow-up marketing strategy.
The problem isn't that they don't have the capacity to follow up, it's that they don't have the automatic systems to do it.
What can a good automated follow-up system do?
A good online marketing follow-up system should have three attributes.
1 - It should be systematic, which means that the follow-up process must be activated in the same way every time, so that infinitely repeatable results can be obtained.
2 - It should generate consistent and predictable results.
3 - It requires minimal interaction between prospect and system for follow-up to work, which means it should be able to run as if there were an autopilot driving it.
Sounds like a dream come true for most small business owners, doesn't it?
Not only can it be put into practice, but it works every day.
The secret of "online follow-up marketing" is to automate targeted bidding actions so that you don't have to lift a finger while the work gets done when you sleep, you're on vacation or you're automating another business.
With today's technology this is easier than ever.
Automating follow-up processes gives you more time to work on your business, rather than in your business.
There are basically three types of Follow-Up.
In fact, there are three types of people with whom you should proceed with a follow-up marketing strategy, namely users, or people who belong to your target market, for whom you will have optimized your website, prospect people who responded to marketing, i.e. subscribers to your list, who have not yet purchased, and customers, i.e. people who have purchased something from you at least once.
Each follow-up message and offer will also need to be different for each type of person.
Visitors must be enticed to visit you on the web or at your store or office.
Those who are already more familiar with you, i.e. the subscribers to your list, need to be convinced to make their first purchase.
And with customers, you will have to proceed in convincing them to return and make more purchases of your products and/or services and in recommending your name to other potential customers through word of mouth.
Obviously the most difficult type of person to convince with a follow-up is the user, the visitor, because they have not yet shown any interest in your product and usually you do not have any information to contact them, while they are the ones who may already know you because you targeted them.
Differently it happens for subscribers and potential customers or for actual customers, because you already have the contact information.
And if your system is consistent you will convert your users and visitors into subscribers and the latter into customers.
When you use an autoresponder you can enter an unlimited sequence of messages because using email messages is basically free.
Therefore, even when you have meetings at trade fairs, open houses and company open days, offer your business card and ask for that of your interlocutor.
One of my clients set up a follow-up with more than 20 email messages, reaching his subscribers and contacts over a six-month period.
I myself am planning a follow-up of 72 messages that will reach the recipient within 25 weeks, i.e. six months, with three messages a week.
Each sequence must follow a logical reasoning and consideration should be given to how to strengthen the offer, for example by proposing the principle of scarcity, motivating to act now, subjecting the generous offer to a very specific deadline.
For example, in the third message of the follow-up sequence, an inexperienced operator might say, “I'm surprised you haven't yet considered my generous offer, what's stopping you?”
Otherwise, a good online follow-up marketing expert should use stronger motivations by saying: "I wrote to you three times and you still haven't taken my offer into consideration, so I decided to give you a further discount, but only if you purchase within a week."
And this certainly represents an offer that is difficult to refuse.
Don't you notice how the language always links back to previous communications to give the idea of a logical flow of behaviour, so that we can then increase the boldness and tone with which the same offer is presented.
And it's the same type of conversation you could have in a sales relationship between real people.
How to set up your own Online Follow Up Marketing system as if it were an autopilot
What I'm about to reveal to you is the key to developing a powerful online follow-up marketing system because it eliminates the number one reason why most companies prefer not to plan such a system.
You need to plan your follow-up system to be as automated as possible in order to keep your employees' physical interactions with the system to a bare minimum.
Physical interactions, such as, for example, printing letters, or manually sending e-mail messages, or even inserting electrical cables into power sockets, are the main causes of 99% of all failures, which may have consequences for your autopilot follow-up.
But I confess that this is a relative problem because 100% of the interactions between your follow-up system and your prospects and customers take place with the support of an unreachable and employee-proof remote server.
Therefore, to automate your follow-up you will have to consider the use of an autoresponder software installed on a remote server or the use of outsourcing, consisting of external email marketing services, therefore choosing between a software that requires your manual intervention initial, and dedicated services, with which you can simply set up your email messages, without having to worry about having to install software on a remote server.
However, there are also many advantages that you can have from using an autoresponder software for which you have purchased the license, which will remain yours forever.
In ogni caso, se utilizzi un software autoresponder per la gestione dei follow-up, occorre l'iscrizione ad una lista, cioe' l'inserimento dei dati dei tuoi utenti iscritti in un modulo inserito nella tua landing page, che poi il software automaticamente immagazzinera' e ti inviera' via e-mail, ed altrettanto automaticamente quel software inviera' le sequenze di messaggi in follow-up ai tuoi iscritti.
If, however, you wanted to use an external direct mail system that would send your sequence of messages, you could turn to a service like those provided some time ago by a group called MailBoxes Etcetera.
Take a step back for a moment and see the power of what I just revealed about email marketing.
Now imagine you publish an ad, and your prospects have contacted you with their information, which has then been recorded in your messaging system.
Therefore, after having automatically sent the information obtained from your contacts to the communication company, your prospects could well receive a sequence of messages with the most persuasive contents, and without you having made the slightest effort.
Likewise, you will be able to plan the sending of messages by planning an online follow-up marketing system without lifting a finger, using an autoresponder program.
What would you think if I invited you to call your prospects who are the recipients of your follow-ups by phone?
You must have noticed that I didn't tell you anything about calling them by phone.
And in fact calling the recipients of your follow-up messages by phone has no purpose and no sense, because if your list were to grow you would spend your days on the phone or force your employees to make phone calls that are of no use if Don't waste time.
It would be in a certain sense like telling the recipient of the phone call that you are not sure of the results of your online follow-up marketing campaigns.
This is because you will certainly have planned that your prospects have already previously received your informative and educational messages and therefore this means that they have received answers to their questions before contacting you.
In fact, a prospect who has been informed and educated on your way of presenting yourself and marketing will always be the best of your prospects.
With this in mind they already know that you are better than your competition, what your best selling proposition is in your presentations and that you have qualified yourself as an expert who can solve their problems.
Essentially, they are set up to receive your offers before you even need to spend time talking to them directly.
This dramatically shortens your sales cycle and increases your conversion rate because you will have positioned your small business to be their only logical choice.
In conclusion, Online Marketing Follow-up will become an indispensable support for increasing the conversion rate and then the closing rate of subsequent contracts and will contribute to significantly increasing customer satisfaction.
Follow-up planned as a systematic process allows you to optimize the time used by your salespeople and leads to a marked improvement in their productivity, and this will translate into an increase in sales, with a significant reduction in the effort normally used.
Then start making more sales today by including the Online Follow-up Marketing channel in your marketing system.
Happy online marketing follow-up!