Essential Follow-Up Marketing Systems

For the bricks and mortar business owner who relies on customers (or clients/students/patients) to walk through his or her business front door to buy products or services, properly designed follow-up marketing techniques and campaigns are critically important for these important reasons:

• They differentiate your business from your competition.
• They delight prospects and customers.
• When automated, they happen without you having to think about them.
• They add more bottom-line profits to your business (by adding a few specific follow-up marketing campaigns, you will convert more prospects into customers and create more sales from existing customers ALL WITHOUT ADDITIONAL ACQUISITION EXPENSES!).

Having the first right move to get somebody’s valuable attention and response is practically worthless if you don’t have strategic follow-up moves in place and ready to go, literally at the press of a button. This is why we are hosting a special one-day Fix Your Follow-Up Workshop this June 1 in Philadelphia, PA. Our goal is to help business owners plug these profit-sucking leaks, once and for all.

To get you started with your own business audit, we’ve identified 12 specific follow-up marketing systems we believe every bricks and mortar business owner should have in place, including:

1. Lead Generation Follow-Up System
2. Prospect Call – No Visit Follow-Up System
3. Prospect Visit Follow-Up System
4. New Customer Follow-Up System
5. Long-Time Customer Follow-Up System
6. Online & Offline Review Solicitation System
7. Referred Customer Follow-Up System
8. Referral Partner Follow-Up System
9. Event Marketing Follow-Up System
10. Upset Customer Follow-Up System
11. “Lost” Customer Follow-Up System
12. Internal Team Member Follow-Up System

Simply reviewing this list and thinking about your own business is a valuable exercise for you, however the real magic happens when you start filling in the blanks for each of these and building these systems in your business.

While I don’t have the space here to go into great detail on how to build each of these important systems (we’ll do that on June 1), I can tell you there are two BIG keys to success with effective follow-up marketing; proper planning and automation of the systems.

Good, profitable follow-up marketing requires concentrated focus and thought to build out the entire system, including all the steps and pieces required. Do not rush this important effort. Then, for maximum benefit and profitability, every follow-up marketing system should be automated so it happens 100% of the time.

To get you thinking even more about your own follow-up marketing, I want go into greater detail on each of these systems. As a reminder, a lead is somebody who is interested in your products or services, but has yet to visit your place of business or call. A prospect is somebody who has visited/called, but has not purchased. A customer is somebody who has made a purchase from you. As you read through these, check-off the ones you need to work on.

Lead Generation Follow-Up System – The purpose of this system to have an effective sequence of touch-points to get a qualified lead to visit or call you.   This is the only call-to-action and special incentives/offers may be offered to make this happen. Depending on what information you have available, follow-up includes direct mail, email and a phone call.

Prospect Call – No Visit Follow-Up System – If your front-end marketing is driving a person to call your place of business and they end up not visiting, you need a specific follow-up system like the one above to get them to visit. Reminding them of their call is important in your follow-up.

Prospect Visit Follow-Up System – We call this Presentation, No Sale and it’s one of the main follow-up systems we automate for our clients. The proper implementation of this system requires you to have a thorough assessment of some sort when a person visits your business, so you can determine their specific needs and wants. Then during the follow-up marketing, various types of tools are used to remind them why they need to take action.

New Customer Follow-Up System – This system thanks your customer (multiple times), checks in with them periodically (via email, direct mail and personal phone calls) and if necessary (depending on what you sell), gets them to consume your product or start using your service.

Long-Time Customer Follow-Up System – Following-up with long time customers is important for many reasons – the biggest being most business owners tend to forget their best customers and only worry about acquiring new customers. Birthday and
anniversary of purchase marketing is just one effective strategy for following-up with long-time customers. Another important technique is the simple “just checking in and seeing if all is good” communication. This simple touch-point alone can generate goodwill and new purchases.

Online & Offline Review Solicitation System – These days having a considerable amounts of social proof your business is worthy of other’s money is critical. This unique follow-up system identifies individuals who are likely to offer positive reviews while also giving you a pre-emptive opportunity to follow-up with a customer who is not satisfied.

Referred Customer Follow-Up System – A unique follow-up campaign for individuals who have been referred to your business from a customer. Reminding them who referred and why is critical.

Referral Partner Follow-Up System – Having a few key referral partners (typically complimentary businesses) can do amazing things for your business. After identifying them and getting their buy-in to help, it’s imperative you stay in touch with them monthly to remind and reward referrals.

Event Marketing Follow-Up System – If you exhibit at events, having a specific follow-up system in place for a specific event is critical. Every event you attend should have its own follow-up campaign in place to get the person to the next step.

Upset Customer Follow-Up System – Not one we necessarily want to talk about, but one we need to discuss. We all know there will be times when a customer is upset. Having a follow-up campaign in place to handle this is important and often over-looked.

“Lost” Customer Follow-Up System – Lost customers are customers who have not bought from you in some time. By targeting these individuals, based on criteria you establish, with very specific types of messages, can resurrect them and get them to buy again. Like every other system here, the key is to have something in place that happens automatically.

Internal Team Member Follow-Up System – This is huge and something we’ve been talking about in every issue of The Infotailer. Follow-up systems are not just for external audiences and similar techniques should be used internally for your employees and team members to remind them of critical “next steps.” If you have not quite grasped what this specific system can do for you, make sure you let us know.

Early bird pricing for the Fix Your Follow-Up Workshop ends on April 30! Don’t miss out!