To effectively follow-up with your customers, you need to incorporate a sequence of well-written emails to be sent after your initial contact. This is one of the most important marketing tools to use.
If you want your customers to buy, you need to build trust. Following up at pre-determined time intervals helps to convince your prospects that you are professional and should be taken seriously.

Web surfers see a lot of web sites in a short period of time, and it is often difficult for them to remember what they saw where. These web surfers who have shown interest in your offerings may have simply forgotten about you, and just need to be reminded to visit your site again. You need to build a relationship with your customers and remember to keep selling additional products and services to them.

After you get the order. Customers want to be taken care of, especially after the purchase. They need reassurance that your product or service was the right choice, that you will be there to help with after sales service, and they want to know that their business is important to you and appreciated.

Contacting customers post purchase is the best way of selling additional products and services. This is also referred to as “selling the back end”.
This follow up process can be automated with the use of autoresponders.

Autoresponders

An email autoresponder is a program on a web site or service provider’s server that is set up to automatically respond to an email enquiry or request.

A sequential autoresponder is a whole sequence of autoresponder messages going out at pre-determined time intervals. For example, one might go out immediately an email is received, message two might go out two days later and so on for as many messages as you might want. The best part is that it is all done automatically once the customer makes the initial contact.

If you subscribe to the theory that a number of contacts (emails) will need to be made prior to a sale then you can see the advantages of using automated autoresponders.

Autoresponders Working on your Site

Here are a range of ways to put autoresponders to work on your site:
Follow up prospects after they make the initial contact with you.
Create a series of emails that are part of an ongoing marketing contact with customers.
Deliver special and timely reports to build your company image.
Follow up buyers of your products and services and sell them your “back end” products and services.
Maintain your relationship with your total customer base.

What to look for in a Good Autoresponder

Some of the most important features to look out for in an autoresponder would include the following.
The facility for unlimited text length so you can make your messages as long or as short as needed.
No restriction on the number of updates to text. You must remember that things are constantly changing and you will need to modify your text from time to time.
Auto reply messages should not be triggered by keywords. What would happen if your customer misspells the keyword – there will be no reply message sent, which could result in lost business.
Recipient notification from the autoresponder must be sent to you so that you can initiate follow up procedures.

Autoresponder Text

Email has to present itself as you would in a face-to-face meeting.
Autoresponder text should be written with the following points in mind.
 The messages should be short, informative and easy to read. Blend the sales pitch into each document. The focus has to be on the target market. The message has to be completely customer focused. What’s in it for me.(WIIFM).
 Always highlight the benefits of your products and services not the features.
 Make sure the message tells the reader what action to take next, once they have read your message.
 Offer incentives such as free report or free software to entice your reader.
 Make sure there are no spelling or grammatical errors.
 Make sure the layout is easy to read. (Make effective use of white space).

Develop a Sequential Autoresponder

If you are going to use a sequential autoresponder the first message you send should
 Introduce yourself to your new member.  This lets them know they are dealing with a real person.
 Outline what the member (subscriber) can expect with follow up messages. Tell them exactly what they will receive in subsequent messages.  Let them know when and how often they will receive further messages.

 Offer them something like a discount, free shipping or other bonus if they stick with the total sequence of emails.  This will decrease the number of subscribers that unsubscribe prior to the completion of the messages.  If they stay with the sequence of emails your chances of making other sales is greatly improved.

By following the above process, you can expect your subscribers to stay with the sequence of emails provided what you are sending them is quality information.

Note:  Make sure an unsubscribe facility is provided with every autoresponder message you send out including the first message.

Turn Prospects into Customers

What you now need to do is to turn these prospects into customers.  To do that you need to;

 Build trust and credibility.  Present your information in a professional manner.  Make sure the information is relevant and useful.  That way you build trust in you, your product and your business.

 Give them a reason to buy.  Always highlight the need or desire that your product or service will satisfy.  Help them to justify in their own minds why they need your products or services.

 People buy on emotion but they need that backed up by a logical reason.  So, outline reasons why the potential customer should buy your products or services.

 Remind them that they made the right choice.  Use a follow up email after purchase to reaffirm to your new customer that their decision to purchase was a great idea.  Again, highlight the benefits of your product or services.

Keep The Prospect Interested

To improve the chances of a prospect staying with the sequence of autoresponder emails it is important that the following steps are followed.

The quality of your follow up messages.

The emails need to be useful and contain relevant information.  They want to learn something, not be sent a sales pitch only.  If you teach them, then they will be back for more.

Personalise your message.

It’s even better to include the prospects name in the subject line.  A message that looks like it was sent directly to the prospect will be much more appreciated and has a better chance of being opened and read.

Offer the option to receive either text based or HTML based emails.

Give them the option when they sign up.  HTML based emails are rich text formats such as a web page, so you can design your emails with pictures and colours.  However not everybody has email software that can read such emails, and those prospects would see a very different and very difficult to read email, therefore you can provide the option for them to read the emails as text based. Most HTML email these days provide a text-based link at the top of email messages in case the recipients email reader cannot handle HTML emails. The email could also include both text and html versions within the same email.

Always include a “unsubscribe” link in all your messages.

If a prospect does not want to receive any more messages from you, then they are probably not a potential customer.  Let them out of the arrangement easily. Make it easy for them to unsubscribe from further email messages.  Use a confirmation page to unsubscribe and possibly include a survey question such as why they want to unsubscribe.  Do not ask too many questions or you will not get any replies.  You could even consider a free bonus for completing the very short survey.

Newsletter

Another tool to use in building your relationship with customers is a newsletter. But before you rush off and publish your first newsletter, you have to be absolutely clear on your mind what exactly it is you wish to achieve with your newsletter.

How To Write Your Newsletter

You need to incorporate all the principles outlined in this information to write a compelling newsletter.  In addition to that you need to consider the following additional aspects to create a valued newsletter that your target market wants to receive.

Create compelling content
Deliver something of value to your readers. This can be anything from news, opinions, sales, educational, how to and so on.

Solve a problem or address a need
Successful businesses have the ability to solve a problem for someone or they can in some way address a need.  Your business could

• Save time.
•  Save money.
•  Make money.
•  Entertain.
•  Inform.
•  Educate and so on.
• Which one of these or combination of these will your newsletter address?

Provide a newsletter that is unique

What you need to write for your newsletter needs to be something that your competitor is not doing, or is significantly better that your competition.  Your newsletter needs to deliver value in a unique way.

Make the newsletter specific or relevant

You need to focus your newsletter on something that is highly relevant to the specific subscribers you have targeted.  The content cannot be too specific for only a small section of your database, nor can it be too general for the entire database.

You may even find you have to write different versions of your newsletter for different subsets of your target audience.

Style Of Newsletter

The style of newsletter you choose will be dependent upon your target markets needs and wants.  In general terms there are three types of newsletters

 Promotional – this style of newsletters main aim is to generate sales, discounts and promotional information.  It may even include product introductions

 Advertorial – this style of newsletter is a combination of advertisement and editorial content.

 Editorial – this style of newsletter is an information based message.  Any promotional material is relatively limited or non-existent.

Your newsletter may even be a combination of the above.

 Loyalty Building

The key to long term success is to keep your customers loyal. To do that you will have to continually build and maintain your relationship with your customers.

Always provide your recipients with quality goods and services.

The reason why loyalty to your business is so vitally important is because

1. The world is full of companies vying for customers and attention.
2. Competition is fierce, someone will always be trying to attract your customers attention and their business.
3. It is far more expensive to acquire new customers than it is to retain your existing customers. In fact some research has indicated that it is 6 to 7 times more expensive.

No wonder loyalty is such an important issue.  Email marketing is ideally suited to building your customer relationships and customer loyalty.

To maintain the success of your list, observe the following rules

• Do not increase the number of emails sent if it degrades the integrity of the content.
•  Do not create offers from a whole range of other advertisements.
•  Do not always offer incentives to maintain the list base.
• Opt-in lists with profiling of the subscriber base will yield the best results for marketing purposes. This is because the recipients will receive email offers that are based on their profiles and they will be more receptive to the offer in their in box.
• Remember with your email messages the first impression is a lasting one.
• The only criteria your potential customer can judge you on is your email.
• Make sure the recipient gets the right impression.

Do Not Spam

Spamming in the online world means sending information to people who have not asked for it. Unlike the junk mail you get in your letterbox unsolicited email is seen in a very bad light on the internet.   Spamming can be defined as no attempt is made to gain the recipients permission to receive email.

As a business person spamming potential customers is a quick way to commit internet death. It could have serious consequences for the future success of your business.

Spamming can lead to “flaming” and “bombing”. Flaming is the process of those people who were spammed replying to your email in a sometimes rude manner and getting their friends to reply also. Bombing is similar to flaming except the reply email keep coming so as to crash the server and cause you problems with your internet service provider.

The correct way to use email marketing is to send emails only to those people who have asked for it. Quality opt-in email requires the individual to say, “yes I want to join” rather than say “no I do not want to join”. Always allow recipients to opt-out with each email. Success will result from maintaining the highest standards of permission opt-in and privacy.

Avoid Spam Filters

Before you send out any email you need to test to see if it is going to be blocked by spam filters.

To develop your testing process you should

Get free email accounts for testing before sending your email. Send your complete email message to these test accounts before you do a full mailing to your customer list.  Then check each email account to see if the email got delivered, keep notes on your successes for future reference. 

Install popular email clients (such as outlook and so on) and perform similar tests. Activate all email filters and test for what effect they have on your emails.

Employing the above measures, you may need to change the wording slightly if you get filtered in your tests and then test again to see if the emails get through. Email marketers are now reporting that legitimate email is also being blocked by spam filters, some set at exceptionally high sensitivity levels. However, even with filters set at moderate to low levels there remains real potential for legitimate email messages to be locked out by anti-spam software.

Even such greetings as “hello” or “hi” can increase your spam rating.

Avoid using all capital letters, long lines of text and repetitive phrases.

It is increasingly crucial to allow extra time to have your email messages tested against leading spam filters, prior to mailing to your subscriber base.

But even with testing there are no guarantees. You need to minimise the number of warning bells when composing your email messages.  You need to communicate with your customers, with effective emails that hit the target audience, but defy being categorised as spam.

Avoid words that will trigger your email to be pulled up by spam filters.

As a email marketer you will want to avoid spam filters. If you are selling products and services ensure you

1. Provide an unsubscribe link in your emails that will be effective (working) for a period of time, like a month.
2. Never use deceptive header, from name, reply to.
3. Remove recipients that no longer want emails from you as soon as possible.
4. Avoid trying to use inappropriate subject lines.
5. Avoid spammy phrases and words like click here, or greatest opportunity of a lifetime.
6. Comply with the spam act requirements.

To help with avoiding spam filters use a software solution that has a method of checking your email for spam score prior to sending your email. Many emailing software programs have this facility build in.  Email service providers have this service available as well.  If you are doing your emailing alone there are online websites that will check your email for spam score for free.  Even if you score well does not mean that your email message will not be blocked by some anti-spam filters.

 Also, you can search on the internet for what are considered to be spammy words and remove them from your emails.
An indicator of a spam filtered email campaign is an unusually high bounce rate.

Test your spam score prior to emailing to your subscribers.

If you use the services of a paid emailing service provider a whole range of statistics will be available to you to measure the success of your emailing.
There are a range of metrics you can use to measure the success of you emailing campaigns, if you are doing the emailing yourself or just want to check the success factors yourself.