Hi fellow Entrepreneur’s,
This is from one of our friends that we JV with in our Digital Scrapbook niche. BUT, it’s just as important no matter what nich you are in to know how to do this the correct way. Dawn is part of a team that knows how to do follow-up the right way.
I know I’m learning a lot from their lessons and examples both…
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The Importance of Follow Up
By Dawn Stegall
Now that you’ve added a personal touch to your newsletters from our last lesson and learned what not to do in the lesson before that, what else can we learn about effectively keeping customers via a client list. There is an old saying that says, ‘The fortune is in the follow-up.” Following up with customers and clients can be one of the most important business actions a home business owner/entrepreneur can take.
There are many ways to follow up with your clients or customers, all of them being important in their own unique ways. One of these is to follow-up with both potential new and lost past customers. This can be done very easily through sending out a regular customer e-newsletter.
To send out a client/customer e-newsletter, or to do any form of eMail marketing for that matter, it is recommended to have a fully automated autoresponder service. This will make sending the newsletters very easy. In this way, they can even be loaded into the system several months or even years in advance.
It’s no secret that people lead very busy lives and they (meaning you and I) cannot always remember to do all the things they want or need to do. Simply sending out a little email, reminding them that your business is still there may be all it takes to stimulate a membership upgrade or new sale.
Following up with your clients/customers can also make them feel more special and appreciated. Offering them a special customer/client appreciation sale (or membership renewal rate) is one way to do this. This can, again, be done through automated email marketing. Another twist is to send your customer an actual card/coupon in the postal (snail) mail.
As you can imagine from your own purchasing habits, when you feel special and appreciated by a business, you are more likely to buy more product from that business. You become a loyal customer/client. But, when you feel ignored or unappreciated, you are many times over more likely to change or avoid that business completely.
One of the main reasons that some business owners tend to fall behind on following up with their customers is due to a lack of time. If this sounds familiar, setting up an automated systems to keep things flowing can make life in your home business much easier.
If you have a service-based business (such as a green home builder or an accountant), it is also very important to follow up with potential clients on quotes and proposals you’ve submitted. When a person contacts you for potential work estimates, they may be at a starting point where they are just trying to sort out their project.
Following up with them on a regular basis will let them know you are truely interested in working with them and will serve to remind them that they need to hurry up and hire you before someone else does. That doesn’t mean you have to be pushy at all. Just sending a quick note to let them know that you currently have a little space on your calendar for them, also serves to remind them that your spaces fill up fast. This is all that is needed in many cases to get them down off the fence.
Once a business owner implements a regular follow-up routine into their home or brick and morter business, they will then open up the potential for repeat business and more consistant profits.
Well, that wraps up the easy 5 part series of how to keep the customers you worked hard to find in your business. I hope you can take away from this simple e-course a little knowledge that you are personally able to implement into your long term business. If you are a scrapbook business and would like more in-depth help with your scrapbook business, please check out ScrapVenture Pro today!
To Your Scrapbook Business Success,
Dawn Stegall
http://www.ScrapVenture.com
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As a post script…
Dawn uses Aweber for her autoresponder and I use AutoResponse Plus hosted on my own server for mine. The size of your list is going to be the biggest determining factor in whether you choose an autoresponder service or surve up your own…
to your success…
Wes Waddell
www.SpidersMarketingWeb.com
www.SpidersMarketingWeb.info
www.ColoradoSpringsBusinessOwners.com
