Do Your Potential Customers Forget About You?

Do you have a follow-up strategy for online customer inquiries, one that includes adding your prospect to your email list for future marketing efforts? If your Web site is working as it should, you’re receiving product or service inquiries on a regular basis. But after you’ve delivered that first reply with the information your prospect requested, do you send him any further information? If you’re like most small business owners, you don’t.

When you don’t follow that initial message with additional information later on, you let a valuable prospect slip from your grasp. This is a potential customer who may have been very interested in your products or services, but who lost your contact information, or was too busy to make a purchase when your first message reached him.

Often, a prospect will purposely put off making a purchase to see if you find him important enough to follow-up with later. When he doesn’t receive a follow up message from you, he will take his business elsewhere.

Are you losing profits due to inconsistent and ineffective follow-up?

Following up with leads is more than just a process – it’s an art. In order to be effective, you need to design a follow up system, and stick to it, EVERY DAY! If you don’t follow up with your prospects consistently, INDIVIDUALLY, and in a timely fashion, then you might as well forget the whole follow up process.

Honestly, this has been a weak area for us, but we’re addressing this issue head-on. We already use AWeber for delivery of the e-mailed version of Inside Line, but we have yet to use that service to set up a specific autoresponder series to provide information to people who contact us about products or services. I’ll blame it on lack of time, but that’s an omission we can no longer afford … and I’m betting that you can’t either, especially when it’s so easy to set up and get the ball rolling.

Stay tuned because I go into greater detail in our next post. Meanwhile, we’d like to hear about your follow up challenges. Let us know why you’ve delayed your follow-up, or what you’ve implemented to correct that.