Follow-Up Marketing: How to Win More Sales with Less Effort

According to a recent study, 80% of sales usually require an average of five follow-up calls after the initial meeting. If you’re a small business owner and you’re only doing one or two follow-ups, imagine all the business you’re losing. Not following up with your prospects and customers is the same as filling up your bathtub without first putting the stopper in the drain!

But don’t be disheartened if you’re among the 90% of business owners I talk to who don’t do any follow-up. The good news is you have ample room for profitable improvement. Consistent follow-up creates a predictable and profitable stream of prospects and customers who buy. Small businesses that capture leads and follow up with them enjoy higher conversion rates and a higher percentage of referrals than those that don’t.

After asking many small business owners the reason they don’t follow up, I often hear responses such as, “I don’t have the sales staff to chase down all our leads” or “We’re usually too busy to do a lot of follow-up.” These responses automatically set off red flags that tell me that they lack a systematic process for following up. The problem isn’t that they don’t have the capacity to follow up with prospects, it’s that they don’t have the systems in place to do it.

What does a good follow-up system look like?

A good follow-up marketing system should have three attributes:

It should be systematic, meaning that the follow-up process is done the same way every time.
It should generate consistent, predictable results.
It should require minimal physical interaction to make it run, meaning it should be able to run on autopilot.

It sounds like a dream come true for most small business owners, doesn’t it? Not only can it be done, it’s being done every day. The secret to “follow-up marketing” is to make it automatic so that you don’t have to lift a finger, but the job still gets done. With today’s technology, it’s simpler than ever. Automating your follow-up processes gives you more time to work “on” your business rather than “in” your business.

Three Types of Follow-Ups

There are three types of people you should be following up with: suspects (people in your target marketplace), prospects (people who have responded to your marketing but have not purchased), and customers (people who have purchased something from you.) Each follow-up message and offer will be different for each type of person. With suspects, you’ll want to entice them to call you or visit your store/office. With prospects, you need to persuade them to make their first purchase. And with customers, you want to convince them to come back and do more business with you and give you referrals.

Obviously, the hardest type of person to follow up with is a suspect because they haven’t shown any interest yet in your product or service, and you usually don’t have their contact information. But that’s not true with prospects and customers. You not only know who they are, but you should already have their contact information. And if you follow up with your customers consistently, you’ll find that they will help you turn your suspects into prospects and prospects into customers for you through referrals.

Your Follow-Up Marketing Tools

Your principal follow-up marketing tools are the telephone, direct mail, and email. Many pool and hot tub business owners make the mistake of jumping right on the telephone to follow up; however, most prospects don’t want a pushy sales message right away, and most prospects have been trained to consider anyone who calls up to be a pushy salesperson. Instead, you should try to develop a relationship of trust with your prospect by quickly sending informational items such as special reports, audio CDs, or videos before you make a phone call.

Remember to always include a “next-step offer” to accompany your educational materials. If the next step is to visit the store, then entice them with an appropriate offer, or if the next step is to call you, entice your prospect to call you immediately. People move through the buying process in baby steps, especially when considering buying high-ticket items. Your offer should always help them take the next step.

Your Follow-Up Sequence

The power of your follow-up will lie in your follow-up sequence. Your follow-up sequence is a series of communications with your prospect that are “linked” together, with each communication building on the previous message.

For instance, you might start your second letter by saying, “10 days ago, I sent you a letter…” You might also consider stamping the message “2nd Notice” on the envelope to let people know this is the second time you’ve contacted them. Referencing the previous communication links what you’re saying with what you’ve already said and reminds your prospect that you care enough to continue the conversation.

Usually, when doing direct mail, you should include three to five mailings spaced out about seven days apart. When using a sequential autoresponder, you can have as many follow-ups as you want because using email is basically free (that’s why you always want to get a prospect’s email address). One of my clients has over 20 follow-ups in his autoresponder sequence that go out over a six-month period.

Each sequence should follow a logical argument, and you might consider bolstering the offer with each communication using a deadline as a motivator to act now. As an example, in the third communication, you could say, “I’m surprised you haven’t taken me up on my generous offer. What’s holding you back?” Or consider saying, “I’ve written you three times, and you still haven’t taken me up on my offer, so I’m going to pull out all the stops and make you an offer you simply can’t refuse.” Notice how the language always links the previous communication and increases the boldness of the offer. It’s the same type of conversation you might have in a regular sales conversation.

How to Put Your Follow-Up Marketing System on Autopilot

What I’m about to reveal to you is the key to developing a powerful follow-up marketing system because it overcomes the number one reason most businesses don’t follow up. You must automate your follow-up system as much as possible so that there are few, if any, physical interactions from your employees with the system. It’s the required physical interactions (for example, printing letters, sending emails, inputting leads, etc.) where 99% of all the breakdowns happen in well-intentioned follow-up marketing systems.

To automate your follow-ups, you might want to consider using robotic marketing systems and outsourcing any manual interactions to a dedicated service. For instance, to capture your leads, you could consider using a toll-free automated recorded message system that captures your prospects’ contact information, automatically transcribes it, and sends your leads to you in a spreadsheet every morning via email.

If you’re using a direct mail follow-up system (and you should be), find a fulfillment house to do the mailings for you. To find a fulfillment house, simply go to your local printer and ask them to refer you to one in the area.

Now, step back for a moment and see the power of what I’ve just revealed to you. Imagine running an ad, having your prospect call up and give their contact information via your recorded message system. Then imagine having your leads automatically sent to your fulfillment house via email, after which your prospect receives a five-sequence direct mail package containing your most persuasive marketing message — without you lifting one finger!

You can set up the exact same type of “hands-free” follow-up marketing system using an email autoresponder system. Your prospect will not only receive your direct mail messages, but you can insert your email messages between your mailings.

What about calling to follow up?

You’ll notice that I didn’t say anything about calling your prospect. That’s because you want your prospect to have already received your educational marketing messages and have most of their questions answered before they call you. An educated prospect is your best prospect.

They already know why you’re different, what your value proposition is, and how you’re uniquely qualified to meet their needs. In essence, they’ve pre-qualified themselves before you ever have to spend time physically speaking to them. This drastically reduces the sales cycle and increases your conversion rate because you have positioned your small business to be their only logical choice.

Conclusion

Follow-up marketing can boost your closing rate and dramatically increase your customer satisfaction. Following up with systematic processes allows you to better utilize your salespeople’s time and enhance their productivity, which will result in more sales with less effort. Isn’t that what you want? Start winning more sales today by implementing your own follow-up marketing system.

Happy follow-up marketing!

Written by David Frey, Marketing Best Practices Inc.

Disclaimer: The content on this page is for information purposes only and does not constitute legal, tax, or accounting advice. If you have specific questions about any of these topics, seek the counsel of a licensed professional.