After The Sale? 2 Words, 1 Action = More Money For You: Follow-Up

Do you follow up with customers, affiliates, or employees?

Many businesses believe that once a sale is made the follow up process should end. Unfortunately they are losing a significant opportunity to build additional rapport, satisfaction, trust, credibility, lower returns, and increase knowledge of items purchased.

Follow up is for more than just prospects.

** Customer Follow Up:

Post purchase follow up is overlooked by many businesses. Utilizing this process after a sale can benefit overall consumer satisfaction significantly.

- Training to teach a customer how to use a product.
- Answer commonly asked questions before they are asked.
- Teach about lesser known features.
- Reduce returns.
- Provide support contact information. An auto-responder can integrate with any existing shopping cart system utilizing a feature known as "email parsers". These permit the ability to automatically build a list of customers within an account.

** Affiliate/Reseller Follow Up:

In most affiliate or reseller programs over 90% of affiliates never do anything. By properly following up with new affiliates you can help increase the percentage of affiliates that actively promote and see results.

- Provide promotional material.
- Teach effective promotion techniques.
- Product education.
- Reminders to get the affiliate to take action.

** Employee Follow Up:

Training new staff members on various company policies and procedures is a perfect example of effective follow up. Dumping a big manual on their desk the first day is likely to never be read. However, if you "drip" that same information to them over a period of time they are more likely to read and retain that information.

** What's Next?

Learn how autoreponders enable blog and RSS publishers to take advantage of their data to increase repeat visitors and ultimately overall revenue. If you're serious about getting your message in front
of thousands of eager prospects, then you've got to
seriously check out an autoresponder system.

Split testing allows you to test an idea or change to see if it helps improve results.

For example, if you were testing your web form to improve the number of people who sign up for your newsletter you might try two different colors for your headline. One in black and one in red. You then alternate showing each form to different visitors as they come to your site. The one that generates the most new subscribers has the resulting best conversion rate.

** Web Form Split Testing:

Creating and testing different web forms is easy with an Autoresponder. Web form generators allow you to easily create different versions of web forms and then automatically rotate them on your website to see which one generates the best conversion rate.All of this is easily accomplished by copying a single line of HTML to your website.

Tips for testing web forms:

- Type of web form. Embedded in the page, pop over, pop under,exit popup, regular pop up.
- Location of the form. Top of the page, bottom, side bar.
- Headline text.
- Headline length.
- Headline color.
- Headline pictures.
- Field order. Ask for the name, then email or email then name.
- Number of fields. Does asking for phone number, address, or otherincome affect opt-in conversion?
- Time delay for pop up appearance. ie 5 sec, 10 sec etc.
- Link to privacy policy.

** Broadcast Newsletter Split Testing:

In the same way you can split test web forms, split testing anewsletter can have a measurable impact upon overall conversion.In this case you might be trying to achieve higher open rates ormore click thrus. A good
autoresponder provides the ability to test up to 4 different versions of a broadcast and easily measure the open rate and click thrus of each version.

Tips for testing broadcast newsletters:

- Subject line variations.
- Subject line personalization vs. no personalization.
- Subject line date inclusion.
- HTML vs Text
- HTML with images vs. HTML without images.
- Different HTML layouts and colors.
- Pricing variations.
- Call to action variation.
- Time of day sent.- Day of the week sent.

** What's Next?

Learn how follow up can be extremely important for prospects before they buy but also for customers after they buy, partners, employee training, and many other uses.