The most important thing in your business is to know who your clients are. If you know who your clients are, you can follow up their first purchase giving them lots of good reasons to buy from you again.

Most traditional local businesses concentrate on bringing in more new buyers, but neglect following up with past clients.  Yet persuading first time buyers to become repeat clients  can give far more value to your business than you get from new custom.

For Internet Businesses it is given that you must build a list of clients and prospective clients , following up and giving them good reasons to become repeat buyers, if your business is ever to be successful.

Think how much your business is spending in advertising to get a new client to visit or to buy from you   Yet most local businesses do not ask for that person’s  name, address,  email addess,  phone number, so that they can contact their clients later with other special offers that may be of interest .

Traditional Local Businesses can easily adapt the same methods as Internet Businesses to  improve their follow up process and and greatly increase the number of repeat sales they get.

Internet Marketers use a service called an autoresponder  to collect prospects name and email address. The prospective client is offered a free gift if they sign up to the list. Usually this is an emailed free report or mini-course related to their area of interest.

The  follow up messages are loaded into the autoresponder in advance, and are sent out automatically at a set interval.  The autoresponder can easily be set to personalize the email with the prospect’s name and details.

I use AWeber for this, it  is not expensive and very easy to use once setup.

Don’t confuse this process with SPAMMING, which is illegal. Using an autoresponder service like AWeber keeps the process legitimate. Anyone signing up  is sent an email with a link that they have to click in order to confirm their email address. Every email sent  also has an “unsubscribe” link so that anyone wanting to be removed from future mailings can be.

AWeber  handles all of this automatically.

An email newsletter with lots of useful information is often used to follow up, with reviews of related products, hints and tips and special offers.  The better and more useful the free information, the more likely this will convert into sales. Have your client’s best interests in mind when producing this. The newsletter should not be hard sales. A client who is being looked after well is likely to become a loyal repeat buyer, and will recommend you to others.

A Hotel or Restaurant  for example can adapt this strategy to capture guests contact information, along with details of dates of anniversaries and spouse’s birthday.  To sign up your guests can be offered the chance to enter a free prize draw for a meal in the restaurant, or a weekend break.

Your staff can be trained to offer each guest the chance to sign up, explaining the other benefits of joining, being informed of  special discount offers  and special events.

Signup can be done via paper form at your business, you staff then enter the details to AWeber. You can also have a signup form placed on your website.

After the draw, send an email to the unsuccessful guests, including a discount voucher, saying something like  “ Sorry that you were not lucky in our prize draw. However, to show that we really value your custom, please accept this as our gift to you.”

Discount Vouchers should be time limited, to encourage increased visits, and may exclude peak business dates if you wish.

If you collect guest’s  anniversary dates and spouse’s birthday, AWeber can be setup to send out Special Offers in advance. Free Bottle of Champagne with your meal, or Stay 3 nights for the price of 2.

Send out email newsletters  with notice of special events in your area, that your client’s may want to attend.   Include a voucher that they can use to book in advance for a special rate if they want to stay at your Hotel, or eat at your Restaurant . Put conditions on the voucher to ensure profit. “Not valid with any other offer”.

A printed copy of the offer can also be given to guests visiting your establishment.

You can start off by giving offers on your high end products or services.

Once you have run a few promotions you will be able to judge better how much you can spend on an offer, and still make a fantastic profit.

Dave Christie