The GKIC group provides top notch advice. Providing some of the best material and courses on the subject of marketing. Your initial membership is free. Once you try it you will see what I mean about top notch.
Nick Loise is one of the head guys at GKIC now, and provides 4 great tips about follow up and customer service. I never fail to get something out of the newsletters and emails that GKIC sends out. This is a primary reason why I share their material on a regular basis.
Follow up is important to any sales process. Using both online and off line methods can work to build strong relationships with your customers. Follow these simple tips to help promote your business.
Don’t Stop After One Email… Follow The Rules Of Engagement!
In the best interests of your business, your marketing follow-up strategy needs to tick a number of boxes. The real money is in the follow-up. As a business renegade you need to focus on more than just your product and its sales… how you reach out AFTERWARDS is also crucial to success.
Bob Stone once said, “A follow-up to the same list within 30 to 45 days will pull 40% to 50% of the first mailing”. HOWEVER… sometimes, the follow-up can outstrip your initial sales efforts!
Here’s four pointers I think are important to consider when implementing your follow-up process.
- Relationships
Building long-lasting relationships is key to any business in our over-competitive marketing world. Simply having ordinary testimonials and case studies makes this difficult, because they are both quite impersonal.
You could send your customers social proof that increases the value of what you’re selling, such as video testimonials. Teach your customers about your business THROUGH success stories, and you’ll guarantee they’ll start coming back to you for more.
Calls work, too. When people can hear your voice, they are automatically drawn to you. Videos are more personal because people get to put a name to a face AND a voice.
We always remember the ‘know’, ‘like’ and ‘trust’ elements of building customer relationships.
Following up with people on a personal level adds to each of these three elements, which boosts the value of your products and YOU as a business owner.
By considering this point, you can extend your customer relationships past the initial monetary exchange for the product. Who knows- further down the line you may hold a special offer, and the people who you spent time following up with could be the first to click ‘buy’.
- Direct Mail
If you’re sending offline follow-up, take our founder Dan Kennedy’s advice and DON’T re-fashion it this way:
“It never makes sense to me to denigrate your message by putting it into a “junk mail” format”.
A traditional envelope will do the trick. Humble, handwritten envelopes work, as do quirky wax seals and ribbon, and of course you want to make sure your direct mail stands out from the rest of the pile on the doormat. Size-wise, 9”x12” tend to work best, and also 6”x9”.
““—Malcolm Decker.
That’s right. Bright, different colored pieces are essential in direct mail. Red spells urgency, don’t forget.
Think about it- how many times have you personally ignored an envelope addressed to you? Envelopes outperform other mail a staggering 80% of the time. Even if your recipient picks up their pile of mail and your envelope falls out, you want to ensure it isn’t left on the floor, or immediately discarded.
You don’t necessarily have to be offline for your whole campaign, either. A customer may have bought from you online, but sending an offline follow-up could solidify your relationship with them on a further scale.
And vice versa; your sales letter may have gone out in the mail, but your follow-up could be an automated email sequence.
The possibilities are endless.
- Q&A Option
No matter how thorough and concise you are in your sales efforts, there will always be questions customers have that you can’t cover initially.
Why not follow-up with a ‘Q&A’ process? If you have a customer care team, this can work perfectly to your advantage because your customers will feel able to reach out and find out more, they’ll receive personal treatment and thus will be more likely to remain a loyal customer.
For example… your customer buys your product. Wait a couple of days, and then send out an automated email that ‘checks in’ to see how they’re getting on.
Make it clear that if they have any further questions, they must feel free to contact your customer care team.
- Most Importantly…
Nurture your growing fan base, or leverage an affiliate/membership system.
If you’re following up with people and building all these solid relationships, why not create a place for them to interact?
At GKIC we have a Membership program AND an Affiliate program. Our Membership spans over Gold, Diamond and Platinum tiers, for savvy marketers who want to get the very best out of themselves AND the GKIC learning experience.
Our Affiliate program gives marketers a chance to boost their income and success rates by selling GKIC products, which lets them profit from our founders’ high-profile reputations, ongoing support and perks such as weekly mailings and competitions to help them stay on top of their game.
So there you have it, food for thoughts during your next campaign setup. DON’T hold back on the follow-up, as you can guarantee it will outstrip your original sales pitch at some point!