Do Your Potential Customers Forget About You?

Posted by Tom Kulzer (AWeber CEO)

Your web business probably gets product inquiries from potential customers around the globe. Inquiries come via e-mail and your web site, and you try to send information to each hot prospect as quickly as you can. You know that you can drastically increase the likelihood of making a sale by satisfying each person’s need for information quickly!

But, after you’ve delivered that first bit of information to your prospect, do you send him any further information?

If you are like most Internet marketers, 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, 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.

Consistent follow up gets results!

When I first started marketing and following up with prospects, I used a follow up method that I now call the “List Technique.” I had a large database containing the names and e-mail addresses of people who had specifically requested information about my products and services. These prospects had already received my first letter by the time they requested more information, so I used the company’s latest news as a follow up piece.

I would write follow up newsletters every now and then, and send them, in one mass mailing, to everyone who had previously requested information from me. While this probably did help me win a few additional orders, it wasn’t a very good follow up method. Why isn’t the “List Technique” very effective?

  • The List Technique isn’t consistent. Proponents of the List Technique tend to only send out follow up messages when their companies have “big news”.
  • List Technique messages don’t give the potential customer any additional information about the product or service in question. He can’t make a more informed buying decision after receiving a newsletter! If someone is wondering whether your company sells the best knick-knacks, what does he care that you’ve just moved your headquarters?
  • List Technique messages convey a “big list” mentality to your potential customers. When I used to write follow up messages using the List Technique, I was writing news bulletins to everyone I knew! I should have been sending a personal message to each individual who wanted to know more about my products.

What follow up method really works?

Following up with each lead individually, multiple times, but at set intervals, and with pre-written messages, will dramatically increase sales! Others who use this same technique confirm that they have all at least doubled the sales of various products! In order to set this system up, though, you need to do some planning.

First, you’ll need to develop your follow up messages. If you’ve been marketing on the Internet for any length of time, then you should already have a first informative letter. Your second letter marks the beginning of the follow up process, and should go into more detail than the first letter. Fill this letter with details that you didn’t have the space to add to the first letter. Stress the BENEFITS of your products or services!

Your next 2-3 follow up messages should be rather short. Include lists of the benefits and potential uses of your products and services. Write each letter so that your prospects can skim the contents, and still see the full force of your message.

The next couple of follow up messages should create a sense of urgency in your prospect’s mind. Make a special offer, giving him a reason to order NOW instead of waiting any longer. After reading these follow up messages, your prospect should want to order immediately!

Phrase each of your final 1 or 2 follow up messages in the form of a question. Ask your prospect why he hasn’t yet placed an order? Try to get him to actually respond. Ask if the price is to high, the product isn’t the right color or doesn’t have the right features, or if he is looking for something else entirely. (By this time, it’s unlikely that this person will order from you. However, his feedback can help you modify your follow up letters or products, so that other prospects will order from you.)

The timing of your follow up letters is just as important as their content. You don’t want one prospect to receive a follow up the day after he gets your initial informative letter, while another prospect waits weeks for a follow up!

Always send an initial, informative letter as soon as it is requested, and send the first follow up 24 hours afterwards. You want your hot prospects to have information quickly, so that they can make informed buying decisions!

Send the next 2-3 follow up messages between 1 and 3 days apart. Your prospect is still hot, and is probably still shopping around! Tell him about the benefits of your products and services, as opposed to your competitors’. You will make the sale!

Send the final follow up messages later on. You certainly don’t want to annoy your prospect! Make sure that these last letters are at least 4 days apart.

Following up effectively seems complicated, but it doesn’t have to be! So many potential customers are lost because of poor follow up – don’t you want to be one of the few to get it right?


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Twitter Updates for 2010-01-11

  • Iran’s Shiraz University have succeeded to make biofuel from algae, a new kind of algae for biofuel “Science Direct” reports. #
  • Sea Cuisine offered free coupons for Seafood Entrees, but they were gone as soon as they were made available. #
  • Minka Kelly attends the World Premiere of Screen Gems’ “Prom Night” at the Cinerama Dome in LA. She is known for playing Lyla Garrity #
  • Rebecca Grant’s popularity, has increased ten fold. She is known for her sultry shoots in men’s magazines such as Maxim and FHM. #

Selecting A Web Hosting Provider

Where’s your hosting?
The choice of hosting is a very important step in the process of creating a site. And the choice is not as simple as it might seem at first glance. Particularly this problem may arise for those who have come across it for the first time. So in order to make the right choice you need to know on what criteria you should choose hosting.

So having developed the concept and design of your website you certainly encounter another problem. You probably wonder about how to place your website on the Internet. It goes without saying that you are interested to choose a quality web hosting service. What factors should be considered when choosing hosting? This article will give you some practical advices on the choice of hosting.

The first and basic tip on choosing a web hosting provider is not be in a hurry. Learn all available information, visit sites of some hosting providers and compare the list of services and tariffs. In any case, before you give your money, you need to find out about a web hosting provider as much as possible. Also it’s very useful to make inquiries from other users of this company.

In fact there are three main features that should interest you when choosing a quality web hosting provider. So you should be interested in services provided for you, their cost and finally their quality.

As for services you should memorize that first you need to determine the size of your site in megabytes. This will be required when choosing the tariff plan for this particular hosting. You will require choosing a tariff, which provides enough space for your site, preferably with a reserve.

Next you need to define what technologies should be supported by this particular web hosting provider. I mean CGI, PHP, MySQL, Perl, SSI and so on. You must have a clear idea about what additional features you may need, before you finally choose your web hosting service.

It goes without saying it’s also important to have a certain way to download information. And it’s provided by hosters by different means. All paid hosting services support FTP. I should say that to my mind it’s the most convenient way for you to upload new pages and multimedia files on your website. To say honestly you can also upload files through the web interface but it is designed mainly for beginners and it is not so preferable. The matter is that if you upload only through the web interface then you obviously can not see any cgi – bin or your databases.

An important parameter when choosing host is certainly the volume of your traffic. If the tariff plan has some limitations in terms of traffic then you should calculate the anticipated level of traffic to your site in order to be sure that you meet the limitations of this hoster.

Most of people think that the choice of the best web hosting starts from reading the reviews. Well, the idea is not bad, but you can have very big problems if you follow this idea.

The problem is that nowadays web hosting companies need to fiercely fight for the clients. And these companies cracked the review thing long ago: they are buying reviews or flood the market with fake reviews, that look like written by real clients. And they give a proud name of best web hosting even the junky service.

So, indeed you should read the reviews, but look through with this best web hosting propaganda – look into the nutshell.

Right now we are living in the world where info makes life easier.

That is why if you are properly armed with the info in your sphere of interest you can rest assured that you will always find the solution to any bad situation. So, please make sure to visit this blog on a regular basis or – best of all – sign up to its RSS feed. In such an easy way you will have your hand on the pulse of the latest informational updates here. Blogging can be helpful, you just need to know how to use them.

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-01-10

Twitter Updates for 2010-01-10

Twitter Updates for 2010-01-09

  • SEO Tip: Answer questions on Yahoo Answers. You’ll get links (NoFollow) traffic, signups and conversions. Leave your URL in the resource box #
  • Tommy Tuberville will be the most highly regarded football coach ever hired by Texas Tech according to Tim Griffin. #
  • Sharrif Floyd has picked The Florida Gators At The Amry All-American Bowl #
  • Cole Marcoux, is an unheralded quarterback prospect from the Upper West Side of Manhattan. #
  • Google Gravity is an experiment which loads Google’s frontpage then makes all it’s elements fall to the bottom of the browser. #
  • Link building tip: use comment kahuna to simplify the task and speed up the process of finding blogs to comment to. #

Ways to use twitter for business

Here is a short list of some of the things you can do with twitter (please add yours in the comment box). If appropriate I will edit this list (with credits and link to your website):

PLEASE CONTRIBUTE BY MAKING A COMMENT ABOUT THIS POST…

  1. Create Buzz for your products and services
  2. Tell your followers where and how they can find you
  3. Promote your website
  4. Announce a new product or service
  5. Help with the branding of your company
  6. Offer discounts
  7. Establish authority
  8. Get targeted traffic for your blog
  9. Promote events and time sensitive information
  10. Educate clients/prospects
  11. Connect with people you want to hire
  12. Find out who’s talking about you/company
  13. Find prospects/new clients
  14. Find quick answers to your business questions
  15. Find a virtual assistant
  16. Feed your blog with your tweets
  17. Offer customer service
  18. User Social Mention to get alerts about your business
  19. HELP OTHERS !!!

Tweet away…

Marketing Planning during a recession

A recession calls for innovative marketing planning to keep a business afloat, even when dollars are short.

All experts agree the worst thing a company can do during a downturn is to slash the advertising budget and fall off the radar entirely. “A lot of business people hunker down during a recession, hoping they can just ride it out without creating too many problems.

That’s actually more risky (and scary),” writes DJ Francis over at the Experience Matters blog. “It’s OK to be afraid of new marketing tactics, but it’s not OK to allow that fear to stop you from taking risks.” Given the current climate, there are many reasonable market plans that will give you a good return on your investment.

“If firms blatantly go out and increase their spending on marketing, a lot of them are going to fail,” warns Dr. Gary Lilien, author of a Penn State study about recession business marketing planning. He says successful firms need three characteristics in order to succeed during an economic downturn. First, he says, “You need a marketing emphasis. You can’t all of the sudden start focusing on marketing… but if you know how to do it, if you had a marketing emphasis before, that’s one characteristic.”

He adds that companies also need to have the guts to increase marketing. “You need the will to do it, which is characterized in our research by an entrepreneurial culture, a willingness to say, ‘Things are getting bad, should we push harder?’ Firms with entrepreneurial culture are used to doing that,” says Dr. Lilien. Lastly, you need the capital. “The technical term is slack resources, in other words, having the budget to do it. Even if you have the first two, a marketing emphasis and an entrepreneurial culture, it’s risky. Make sure you’ve got the resources to do it,” he said. “The firms that had all three characteristics did very well in a recession. But firms that are missing any one of them, they’re in trouble. Frankly, most firms in our analysis cut their [marketing] budget in a recession.”

Despite the recession, some companies can arrange their marketing planning to get ahead, Dr. Lilien says. “Companies that run their business on customer intelligence; Amazon is the first that comes to mind. They understand their customers, they experiment with everything, and they’ve got resources,” he explains. “Companies like Amazon – I don’t think they’re going to cut back at all.

This is a good opportunity for them to knock off some flies and probably pick up some relatively inexpensive acquisitions along the way. Companies that have been looking at marketing as an investment, and not an expense, and have been running their business through customer knowledge are the ones that are going to come out of this [recession] really, really well.”

As Henry Ford once said, “A man who stops advertising to save money is like a man who stops a clock to save time.” Indeed, it is futile to give up on marketing planning so soon. During a recession, allocate some of your big budget funds — like street promotions, billboard ads, magazine spreads and radio ads — to digital avenues like email, marketing newsletters, web articles, blogs, social networks and pay-per-click advertising. “It is well documented that brands that increase advertising during a recession, when competitors are cutting back, can improve market share and return on investment at lower cost than during good economic times,” adds John Quelch, a professor at Harvard Business School.

Do not waste any more minute moping around and trying to wait for the agent to come along. Check the internet and contact Rene Lacape now. He is one of the best agents in the insurance industry. Be one of the many satisfied clients of his.

Twitter Updates for 2010-01-08

Links building in 2010 – what works now

Link building in 2010
Link building in 2010

Lots have happened in the year 2009: real time search, twitter and facebook surpassing google in terms of traffic, pagerank sculpting, google new algorithm caffeine, personalized search and much more.

Let me give you some recommendations for the year 2010 and beyond:

  • Careful with easy to manipulate links like blog rolls, sponsored themes and paid blog links. Their value decreases day by day.
  • Banner ads and image links are still OK. Use them in paid and non-paid contest.
  • Time on site is a huge factor: if you manage to get traffic but your visitors are not staying on your site then you do not have anything valuable to offer hence you do not deserve traffic.
  • Visitors are using search.twitter.com more and more. Make sure your twitter posts contains a keywords at the very beginning of your short post
  • Blog comments – make sure you are adding value, if you’re planning to comment with something like “great post” don’t bother.
  • Answer questions on Yahoo Answers – you’ll get links (NoFollow), traffic, signups and YES conversions. Leave your URL in the resource box
  • Schedule your tweets. Remember Twitter is about what happens right now so, you want to leave messages often without spending too much time doing it.
  • Focus on DoFollow social bookmarking sites only. The rest (other than the big guys liek Digg and StumbleUpon) is not worth your time.
  • Website age seems to be a little more important so, if you are planning to buy some old domains (with link jouice) and doing a 301 redirect make sure you do it right.
  • There is going to be more emphasis on social media links (not social bookmarks) but links and stories that have the power to go viral
  • Use Google hot trends (http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends) and tweet about it. Pick topics relevant to your business
  • Community building will take most of your internet marketing time. Make sure you measure ROI and you use your time efficiently
  • Publishing press releases still has the power to make your story go viral. It isn’t so important as it was in the past in terms of link building.
  • Although videos are still incredibly powerful their importance is a little scaled back with the advent of he new Google algorithm “caffeine”.
  • Caffeine also shows a slight value increase to exact match domain names.
  • FriendFeed seems to be more important than Facebook and Twitter. Take advantage of it before it’s too late.
  • With personalize search (even if you are NOT logged into your Google account) will render your SEO ranking software obsolete. Do not bother buying the new and update version
  • Focus on traffic; your analytics package will tell you if your strategy is working or not

Hope this helps, feedback in encouraged