Email Follow Up – The Perfect Customer Retention Machine
Email follow up works. Salesmen of old may not have had email, but they knew of the same principle, and salesmen of today know it too. If you can’t get the sale first time around, all is not necessarily lost. However, all too often businesses that should know better give up when the first attempt to get the sale fails. They then seek out another prospect. Sooner or later they get the sale first time around. Then the process starts all over again.
There’s a much better way. In the old days it wasn’t email follow up, it was by letter or even by a salesman knocking on the door in person. The sale wasn’t realistically expected to be secured after just one exposure to the sales message. They knew that it could take five, six, seven or even more exposures to a sales message before a prospect finally decided to buy. In the latter part of the 20th century it suddenly became very, very easy to expose a prospect to multiple sales messages. Email follow up through an autoresponder is a salesman’s dream. It’s the perfect customer retention machine.
Even though many who read this may be thinking that surely everyone and his dog knows the benefits of using an autoresponder to get a sales message out time after time to a prospective customer, it remains a sad fact that many small businesses are not maximising their potential in this respect. They may capture email addresses, but they then use them for the occasional promotion – often a special offer type thing. This probably works well enough, but it could be made to work so much better with just a little imagination and effort.
Most businesses use mail follow up to send out a message to their entire user base every time. This is not good management. A user base of any size usually consists of those who have previously bought and those who are interested, but have yet to buy. If several different products are involved, then the user base can be further divided by product category.
In effect, the business has several lists that can be emailed to. The messages sent to each list will depend on what stage that list is at. If it is a buyers list they should be treated differently from a list of merely interested prospects. Email follow up is a vital means of communicating with those people who are buyers and prospects. They each need their own targeted message, depending on where they are in the cycle. Properly used this then becomes the perfect customer retention machine.
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