The key ingredient to a successful online business for most people, starting an online business from scratch can be a very difficult and frustrating process. 

At first, new business owners are very committed and enthusiastic and dream of grandeur and luxuries that they will be able to enjoy once they starting making massive money online. 

But as time goes by they start to realize that it’s not quite as easy as they first thought and each passing day brings them closer to the realization that maybe, just maybe, they need to change what they are doing to make their business work. There’s one universal reason why most people aren’t having the level of success they had hoped for in their online business.

They Don't Have A Follow-up System!

While most people write reasonably good ad copy and focus on generating a decent level of website traffic to their site, they’re still missing the big picture. Don’t get us wrong, writing ad copy and generating web site traffic are both extremely important ingredients to success.

But neither of these are the key ingredient to success. A majority of sites are missing what we consider to be the most important aspect of an online business, being able to follow up with your visitors. Most of the web sites that we've see haven’t implemented an adequate system that allows them to follow up with their visitors once they have left their website without making a purchase. Monitoring your inbox and answering queries from your subscribers or customers is great service, and is a very important part of success, but this is NOT follow-up.

The thing is, this is a far too common problem and most online business owners haven’t yet grasped the importance of this process. In fact, many online business owners are only earning a fraction of the profits they could be by leaving up to 80% of their sales on the table because they have no idea how critical it is to follow-up with their visitors. Market research has proven that it will usually take between 5 to 10 contacts with a prospect before you are able to gain their trust and instil enough confidence in them to make a purchase from you.

It is highly recommended that you first build a relationship with them before you present your offer to sell. Using the results from this research, it’s an accepted rule that the standard number of contacts that most internet marketers use is no less than 7 contacts. If it takes at least 7 contacts with your prospects to make a sale, what are you doing to make sure you reach that number with every prospect? No longer can you sit back and take a passive approach to marketing and hope that when someone visits your web site they will come back at a later time to check it out again and maybe make a purchase.

If you want to be successful online you must have a follow-up system in place to capture the contact details of your visitors so that you can stay in contact with them at a later time. It is vital that you completely understand the importance of this concept. Why? It’s not unrealistic to expect that over 99% of your web site visitors will not make a purchase on their first visit.

On average, less than 2% of your visitors will make a purchase on their first visit to your website. But if you’re new to the Web, then in most cases this level can be anything from 0% to 1%. If that shocks you don’t be alarmed. With the right knowledge and the right tools you can turn any negative into a positive.

In order to make this work, all your marketing has to be proactive. In other words, YOU are the one who has to make sure you contact your visitors at least 7 times by implementing a systematic follow-up email campaign so you can get maximum exposure to promote the benefits of your products or services. 

How can you do this? 

As an internet marketer you have access to the most powerful tool in the entire marketing world to contact your prospective customers, yet only a small portion of marketers are taking full advantage of it.

That tool is email. At the time of writing there just isn’t any other tool available where you can follow-up and communicate with many thousands of prospects every single day of the week and not spend a single penny. If you followed this daily follow-up system using direct mail it would cost you a fortune. In fact, you would send yourself broke in a matter of weeks. With email you can send many thousands of follow-up emails for zero cost as often as you like. 

If you don’t currently have a system in place on your site to capture your visitors contact details to allow you to follow-up with your prospects, don't make excuses, just do it. Make a commitment to start collecting your visitors contact details and start building your follow-up system.

Structuring Your Follow-ups

The structuring and formatting of your follow-ups are as important as the content itself. It is important that you create a consistent structure for your follow-up right from the start, because this is key to creating familiarity and building credibility. If you send a follow-up that looks completely different from one issue to the next, your subscribers will have difficulty recognizing it. Each issue you'll be starting all over again, rather than building a relationship.

There are a number of ways to make your follow-ups appear professional and pleasing to the eye, and to effectively lead your subscribers through the material. One of the most important is the header and footer. Because a consistent look is your key to appearing professional, it is extremely important that you use the same style footer and header in each edition of your follow-up.

For the header, include the name, the date, issue number, and title at the top of each follow-up.

For the body, format your text the same width as header and footer, normally 60 characters in text version. HTML can be the entire width of the page if desired.

For the footer, include your contact information, unsubscribe method, and additional content you may want your subscribers to know about.

Using dividers and white space to separate different sections (if any) of your follow-up messages will break up the text, making it easier to read it. Shorter chunks of text are easier to read, especially on a computer screen.

Of course, one of the most vital tools that you'll need is a reliable follow-up service. You'll want to use a list manager that can handle unlimited campaigns with tracking on all broadcasts. Select such a service that has a user friendly control panel with instruction or a tutorial to help you along the way. And one to schedule in advance unlimited follow-up messages to your subscribers and customers.

Before you send out that first follow-up, make sure you comply with the spam laws. Every email message that is sent commercial in nature must include a few things.

The Can-Spam Act 2003 requires businesses to: 

- Clearly label commercial e-mail as advertising. 
- Use a truthful and relevant subject line. 
- Use a legitimate return e-mail address. 
- Provide a valid physical address. 
- Provide a working opt-out option. 
- Process opt-out requests immediately.

Content of Commercial Email:

Every commercial email must include an opportunity for the recipient to unsubscribe from receiving such email in the future. Such requests to unsubscribe must be processed promptly and the recipient should be informed of the length of time required for processing.

Commercial email must not include "from address" fields, subject lines and message bodies that are misleading, false, or deceptive. Subject lines must not mislead as to the content and purpose of the message.

In summary, Use your follow-ups to cultivate your prospect, not overwhelm them with advertising. You will find that you will also accumulate friends who trust what you have to say and become comfortable with purchasing whatever it is you are selling. Now you can start your follow-ups in your targeted list that will eventually become the lifeblood of your business.

 © Rent-A-List.com (All Rights Reserved)

Featured Links

Advertising Channels

Free Account