Follow up in marketing simply means sending useful information to your customers in time to time basis. When you build your customer list, it will be no use if you do not follow up with them in right ways. Customers will forget you after sometimes and follow up is the secret to make them remember you. Most people think follow-up as constantly contacting your customers to purchase products from you. But this is wrong. Because if you constantly ask someone purchase from you, it will irritate them and reduce your brand value as spammer.
So here I will show you how to follow up correctly so that it will increase your brand value, convert leads to customers, getting sales from new customers, getting repeat sales from old customers and finally earning lots of money.
1) Create useful info for your customers:
Go back your target market research and find out all the pain and pleasure of your target customers. Then create useful blog post related to solve their pain and give them pleasure. For example, if you have a cloth store, you can create blog post regarding how to choose best shirt/pant for winter, unboxing of a new design shirt/pant, latest coupon of your store etc. the possibility is countless. Similarly, if you have a electronic store, you can create review of a latest product, unboxing of a latest product, latest coupons, news regarding upcoming product, how to make right decision in purchasing any electronic items etc.
I hope you are understanding what I am trying to say. Basically here you will create some blog post related to your business. You do not need to be an active blogger for this. Just create 2-3 simple blog post per month. You can see what is trending related to your business in internet and create a blog post regarding this. You can also create a coupon for discount and create a blog post regarding this describing how to use this coupon to get discount. You can create blog post regarding any updates of your business. You can create blog post regarding behind the scene of your business. If you have created some video for YouTube, you can create blog post with your YouTube video link. You can see the common thing here. In every blog post there is something which will make your customer engage with you.
2) Find channels to follow ups:
Currently there is 2 ways you can follow ups. One is by SMS and second is by email. Observer what platform your customers are mostly using. In India most people do not check email that much, so I focus largely on SMS. But if your customers are checking email more, you can use both email and SMS for following up. For me, I use emails for my international customers only.
3) Set up SMS Marketing Channel:
For sending SMS, you need to purchase SMS service from third party company. You can’t send more than 100 SMS from your mobile number. So you will be required to use third party SMS service for sending SMS. There are lots of third part SMS service company. Personally I prefer MSG91.com. Because for me it feels easy to send SMS here. Also there I can track who is clicking on my follow up links and who is not. If you love other SMS service, you can choose them too.
Also it is important to know that you need DLT registration for sending SMS. DLT registration means simply registering your business with telecom operator as legal entity to send message to your own customer and it show you are not spamming. Without DLT registrations your SMS will not be delivered correctly. DLT registration is easy, you just need your business documents like your pan card & GST registration certificate. Once you are verified as genuine business, you can send SMS easily in India.
4) How to send follow up SMS :
So here 1st create some blog post. Then create some SMS template with the link for your blog post and also create some other template related to your product purchase.
Below are some SMS template examples.
“Hi, watch this unboxing video of latest Samsung S10 pro from YOURSTORE NAME. You will love it. Click here.” (Give link to blog post)
“Hi, find out which design saree you should wear in your next marriage party. Click here to read more.” (Give link to blog post)
“Dear customers, get 30% discount for this awesome NEW PRODUCT NAME from YOUR STORE NAME. Offer expired tomorrow. Click here.” (This is a sales related template, give link to your shop or product page)
So this way you can create lots of SMS template and use them to follow up with your customers.
While following up keep balance in sending blog post and sending sales related post. Also different business needs different type of follow up strategy. Personally I send 2-3 SMS per week, among which 2 are blog post related and 1 is sales related. Also in other business I send less blog post and more sales related. After following up some times you will easily understand what strategy work best for you. Because every business is different, so you need to find out how much SMS and what types of SMS is best working or your business yourself.
Let me give you an example of how your SMS follow up will help you earning lots of money every month for your life. Suppose you followed this marketing strategy and collected 10000 leads in few month. Then every week you send 3 to 4 follow up SMS to these 10000 leads every week. If you get 10% conversation ratio, then you would be selling 1000 products every week to your customers. Even if your conversation ration is less than 10%, still you will be selling hundred of products every week easily just by sending 3 to 4 simple SMS. Here the secret of success is to increase your customer list. If you have large customer list, then even if your conversation ratio go down, still you will be selling hundreds or thousands of products every week.
Please do remember while collecting their mobile numbers, swear to them that you will never spam them by just sending sales SMS. You should give a option in your website where your customers can unsubscribe from getting your SMS. This way your customers will trust you more to give their number and willingly open your SMS when you send them.
5) Email marketing follow up:
If you found most of your customers are using emails in their life, you can use emails to follow up with them. Here the technique is same as SMS marketing with little changes.
Here as usual you will create useful content to engage your customers (blog post). Then create email templates and send them to your customers every week 2 to 3 times. As most people are using emails for spamming, most email providers have created strict rules on quality of emails. In sort, your emails must not look like spammy. Also here for better deliverability of your emails, you need to use third part email provider service to send better emails. I use the service of mailchimp.com as here you can send 12000 emails per month for free. This is more than enough for many customers.
I am not writing many things related to email marketing here as you will find lots of email marketing tips for free in internet. To know more about email marketing, just make a google search.