The following article was written by the president of my one of my marketing partners:AWebber Communications‡

Written by Tom Kulzer (AWeber CEO)

Your web business probably gets product inquiries from potential customers around the globe. Inquiries come via e-mail and your web site, and you try to send information to each hot prospect as quickly as you can. You know that you can drastically increase the likelihood of making a sale by satisfying each person’s need for information quickly!

But, after you’ve delivered that first bit of information to your prospect, do you send him any further information?

If you are like most Internet marketers, you don’t.

When you don’t follow that initial message with additional information later on, you let a valuable prospect slip from your grasp! This is a potential customer who may have been very interested in your products, but who lost your contact information, or was too busy to make a purchase when your first message reached him.

Often, a prospect will purposely put off making a purchase, to see if you find him important enough to follow up with later. When he doesn’t receive a follow up message from you, he will take his business elsewhere.

Are you losing profits due to inconsistent and ineffective follow up?

Following up with leads is more than just a process – it’s an art. In order to be effective, you need to design a follow up system, and stick to it, EVERY DAY! If you don’t follow up with your prospects consistently, INDIVIDUALLY, and in a timely fashion, then you might as well forget the whole follow up process.

Consistent follow up gets results!

When I first started marketing and following up with prospects, I used a follow up method that I now call the “List Technique.” I had a large database containing the names and e-mail addresses of people who had specifically requested information about my products and services. These prospects had already received my first letter by the time they requested more information, so I used the company’s latest news as a follow up piece.

I would write follow up newsletters every now and then, and send them, in one mass mailing, to everyone who had previously requested information from me. While this probably did help me win a few additional orders, it wasn’t a very good follow up method. Why isn’t the “List Technique” very effective?

• The List Technique isn’t consistent. Proponents of the List Technique tend to only send out follow up messages when their companies have “big news”.
• List Technique messages don’t give the potential customer any additional information about the product or service in question. He can’t make a more informed buying decision after receiving a newsletter! If someone is wondering whether your company sells the best knick-knacks, what does he care that you’ve just moved your headquarters?
• List Technique messages convey a “big list” mentality to your potential customers. When I used to write follow up messages using the List Technique, I was writing news bulletins to everyone I knew! I should have been sending a personal message to each individual who wanted to know more about my products.

What follow up method really works?

Following up with each lead individually, multiple times, but at set intervals, and with pre-written messages, will dramatically increase sales! Others who use this same technique confirm that they have all at least doubled the sales of various products! In order to set this system up, though, you need to do some planning.

First, you’ll need to develop your follow up messages. If you’ve been marketing on the Internet for any length of time, then you should already have a first informative letter. Your second letter marks the beginning of the follow up process, and should go into more detail than the first letter. Fill this letter with details that you didn’t have the space to add to the first letter. Stress the BENEFITS of your products or services!

Your next 2-3 follow up messages should be rather short. Include lists of the benefits and potential uses of your products and services. Write each letter so that your prospects can skim the contents, and still see the full force of your message.

The next couple of follow up messages should create a sense of urgency in your prospect’s mind. Make a special offer, giving him a reason to order NOW instead of waiting any longer. After reading these follow up messages, your prospect should want to order immediately!

Phrase each of your final 1 or 2 follow up messages in the form of a question. Ask your prospect why he hasn’t yet placed an order? Try to get him to actually respond. Ask if the price is to high, the product isn’t the right color or doesn’t have the right features, or if he is looking for something else entirely. (By this time, it’s unlikely that this person will order from you. However, his feedback can help you modify your follow up letters or products, so that other prospects will order from you.)

The timing of your follow up letters is just as important as their content. You don’t want one prospect to receive a follow up the day after he gets your initial informative letter, while another prospect waits weeks for a follow up!

Always send an initial, informative letter as soon as it is requested, and send the first follow up 24 hours afterwards. You want your hot prospects to have information quickly, so that they can make informed buying decisions!

Send the next 2-3 follow up messages between 1 and 3 days apart. Your prospect is still hot, and is probably still shopping around! Tell him about the benefits of your products and services, as opposed to your competitors’. You will make the sale!

Send the final follow up messages later on. You certainly don’t want to annoy your prospect! Make sure that these last letters are at least 4 days apart.

Following up effectively seems complicated, but it doesn’t have to be! So many potential customers are lost because of poor follow up – don’t you want to be one of the few to get it right?

————-

AWebber Communications provides email follow up and newsletter delivery tools and services–Click here to find out more ‡

From BNET.com

Worst Twitter Post Ever: Ketchum Exec Insults Fedex Client on Mini-Blog

There are two major free Office Suite Zoho Office (zoho.com) and Google Documents (docs.google.com) that I am aware of.  Both are competent suites but they have limited functionality. Google Documents includes a word Processor, spreadsheet and presentation application.  Zoho has the same as well as a number of other applications including an organizer, invoices, and CRM. The office applications are free but some of their other applications are subscription based.

Having worked extensively with the Google Applications, my general feeling is that it is good for basic word processing and spreadsheets, but if you are interested in slightly more sophisticated formatting, you will be disappointed.   Google Does not allow you to create columns, and embedded table formatting is quite limited. 

I’ve looked at Zoho as well, and tried some basic formatting on it as well and came to the same conclusion. While the tables have more formatting options, it also doesn’t support columns. Overall, I think that Zoho has better features than google, and its worth a look.

While I don’t do the most sophisticated formatting on my documents, I do like to have a certain level of features,  and I don’t feel that either of these free suites will suite meet my needs. If you choose to use them for your primary office application make sure that they will do what you need before you throw away your PC based software. I think I’ll stick with OpenOffice for now.

If you know of any other suites, please feel free to let me know in the comments.

An Entrepreneurs’ Guide To Public Resources A good list of resources from Forbes.com

“entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem”
(entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity).–Occam’s razor

Given that I write a blog, I spend  a lot of time reading other blogs, both on general business subjects and on blogging business. Over the past two weeks I read (and commented on) two posts that really got me thinking about social media.  The first post was on the DuctapeMarketing  blog. It was an post about creating a special role or position in a company for the person that handles Social Media (“Adding a Chief Conversation Officer” ); I got into quite a rant on this one. The other article was on Graywolf’s SEOBlog, where he discusses the fact that Social Media is so complex that its not possible for there to be experts on the subject (“Is There Really Such a Thing as a Social Media Expert“). After reading both these postings and ruminating on the subject for a while I came to a realization– Social Media isn’t new, and its mostly hype.

What we call social media on the Internet has existed in some form since the  the beginning of time. Since the invention of printing with movable type, there have been newspapers and letters to the editor; since the 1960’s there has been some form talk radio; since the late 70’s there have  been call in TV shows. Twitter is the Internet equivalent of a cocktail party, where you can get involved in  conversations on different topics with various groups of people. In the late 80’s and early 90’s people wrote books about ‘networking’ at these types of events, there were even (and still probably are ) seminars on how to ‘network’. Facebook, Linkedin, et all, are quite similar to regular social or business luches with friends or colleagues. Before Digg, if you wanted to know what people were reading, you could check out your coffee shop, or hotel lobby, or even a park at lunchtime. The big difference between non-internet versions of ‘being social’ and the new Internet ’social media’ is access and speed.  The concepts and skills manage these activities have not changed much.

Once you get past the hype, and objectively look at social media, you will see that most of the skills you use to be social, will work with social media too. Now, don’t get me wrong, there are technical nuances and issues that you will need specialists to help you with, but the overall strategy and tactics have been around for hundreds of years. Just look at Martin Luther, who nailed a listing of his criticism’s of the Catholic Church to a church door, perhaps he was one of the earliest bloggers. And if you want to know how to drive traffic to your blog, spend some time studying the tactics that Benjamin Franklin used to increase the circulation of his brother’s newspaper.

1. Don’t buy a Cadillac when all you need is a Chevrolet. Microsoft has lured us into believing that we should have software with every feature possible. We will never use most of these features, but we still pay for them. Only buy what you need. There are plenty of free and inexpensive applications out there that will get the job done.  For example OpenOffice vs. Microsoft Office, Quicken Home and Business vs. QuickBooks. Make sure you are getting what you need, not paying for what you don’t need.

2. Technology doesn’t solve problems. People solve problems, and sometimes they use technology to do it. For example If your accounting person cannot accurately write checks by hand, a piece of software won’t solve the problem–I know from experience. Your technology is only as good as the people who are using it, and the procedures you have in place to run it. Make sure you have the right people and procedures in place before you get new technology.

3. Don’t buy a solution looking for a problem. Too many people (me included) will get the newest gee-whiz tool out there, and then try to come up with a justification for using it. For example buying a PDA when you Paper Organizer works fine; all that’s going to happen is that your going to be disorganized until you go back to the paper organizer.

4. If you are putting in new technology have a plan. It is true with technology that those who “fail to plan, plan to fail”.

5. Keep it simple. If all you need are two computers that can share files, don’t put in a full fledged network with file servers; Don’t host your own email if you don’t have to; Don’t write software if you can buy it; and so on.

This is the third post in my series on Cloud Computing. Click here for the introduction and index.

Email is the obvious place to start with cloud apps because its both one of the oldest cloud based applications, and because its one of the most common. Almost every email provider has a web based email program, so its pretty easy to get your mail on the web. the problem with most of those web based applications is that they only allow you to read one email account at at time. Since I have personal email address, a business email address, a blog email address, and an email address that only my in-laws use, I don’t want to be going 4 different places each time I check my email.  PC based email programs like Outlook Express, and Mozilla Thunderbird let you pull and send from different accounts in the same program, I want to be able to do this on the web too.