It might sound unbelievable but I'm going to show you how doing more work can take less effort and earn you more profits. The key is automation and the process is following up.

Many marketers, both online and offline, lose vast numbers of sales, and hence profits, by not properly following up with their prospects. Some marketers don't even initially collect their prospect's contact details, but that is for another article. It takes hard work, and money, to advertise and provoke a response from a potential customer. Once you have got the prospect to visit your site and leave their email address, or email you for more information, you have achieved a great deal.

Your advertising has obviously grabbed their attention, and perhaps they even think your product or service might solve one of their problems. However unless you push  the right buttons the very first time they won't purchase. This may happen for many reasons:

   - They have just received their credit card bill and can't bear to make another purchase immediately;

-Their credit card balance is temporarily at the limit;

- the particular benefit/s you emphasize in your sales copy doesn't fit their needs at present;

- they want more time to think about it;

  - the price seems too high, even though there are many benefits you still need to tell them about;

- their computer crashes; they get a phone call or distracted; etc, etc.

 Many marketing studies have shown that it can take up to 7 contacts with a potential customer before they will actually commit to purchasing your product. This contact is needed to establish trust and credibility and fully describe the benefits of your product. This is even more the case as the price of the product rises.

   Now the question arises as to how you are going to find time to follow up with all these prospects. How will you remember what email to send them next, what benefits you have already told them about?

Classically, an organized individual would purchase a cardex system and refer to it on a daily basis in order to know which of his prospects he had to follow up. That would be fine if you have only a small handful to deal with but online the story is somewhat different. Often, replies to your ad may amount to 50+ or in the case of certain programs I promote, many 1000's!

 How could you possibly be able to follow up and deliver the required information for closing your sale when you have that amount of prospects waiting on you? It would be a full-time job just completing the cards!!

Also occasionally a customer may request you to stop sending them more information and you have to remember to take them off your contact list. This sounds like a tremendous amount of work, and believe me I have done it manually for a while and it is time consuming and also prone to errors.

If you accidentally send further information to someone who has requested you to stop, they may well accuse you of Spam which will lead to your business being closed down. I doubt if you want to be faced with that.

 The solution is to automate the entire process. The internet is a marvellous tool for saving time and automating those boring mundane tasks. If you get an enquiry via telephone or snail mail, you only need to start the information sequence once and if your prospect contacts you via email you don't need to intervene ever! Hence more work gets done with less effort. No more putting off that follow up and losing profits. No more wondering if it is really worth the effort. I assure you follow up is worth the effort if you do it systematically and put a system in place.

The tool I am referring to is called an autoresponder, follow up autoresponder or sometimes an email answering machine. Let's stick with autoresponder for short. What an autoresponder does is automatically send pre-programmed messages to your potential customer at pre-programmed time intervals. The customer can at any time remove themselves from the follow up sequence. Pure simplicity itself.

Now there are different types of autoresponders. Some only send out one message, some are free and place an ad at the top of your messages and some allow you to customise the message and refer to the person by name. Studies have shown that personalised contact will dramatically increase your response rates so it is inadvisable to use a service that doesn't offer this facility. Let's face it, your name is very important and if someone uses it, that grabs your attention.

Also I highly discourage you from using a free service. You work hard and spend money to get these people to contact you, and what do they see first - an ad from a competitor! They read the ad, investigate that opportunity and forget about your message. That's crazy -don't let someone else profit from your advertising. the small monthly fee for a reliable professional ad free service is definitely worth it. Removing that top position ad will also dramatically increase your conversion rate -more profit!

 You may be wondering what aspect of your business you could automate and make more successful with follow up? Really any business can be automated and you can always earn more profit from follow up. What do you have to lose? The customer can automatically stop further follow up, and you get the chance to inform them of more benefits and catch them when they are in a buying frame of mind unlike your first contact. You might offer a free report, follow up on them and offer a product for sale.

You offer a software download - Offer a free trial with free follow up to entice the sale. You could offer some marketing course or information product via such autoresponders. There are many tasks you might have thought of, but doing it all manually simply wouldn't be profitable or sensible. Autoresponders are your solution.

For example I offer a free report on choosing a web host from: mailto:choosehost@quicktell.com  If people want to get the report they don't have to wait, they send an email and they get a personalised response within 2 minutes. Therefore autoresponders help you satisfy the customers want for immediate assistance. You can't be available in all time zones at once, and with a global internet, autoresponders help you provide instant assistance and get to your customer while they are still interested and haven't forgotten about you.

Autoresponders have advantages in advertising as well. Many marketers advertise and simply give a website address, no email contact. When a person is reading their email, they may not have their browser open and they don't want to get distracted from their reading. Answer - put an autoresponder address in your ad. They click the email link and when they finish reading their ezine they will have the information they were after waiting in their email box. Also if you only provide an url, they may only look at your site for a few seconds. they will never be followed up on.

You probably won't even know they had visited!

An autoresponder gives you a much better chance as it will send them your message, capture their name and email address, and then follow up with pertinent information you wish to supply them with.

Now you know how powerful autoresponders can be and how much they will help you to increase your profits. However, when deciding which autoresponder service to use, bear in mind that not all services are the same. Many give you only one autoresponder address, and believe me, you'll need more than one, once you discover their helpfulness. Many autoresponders have slow response times or ads on them as discussed above. Make your decision carefully. Follow up can increase your profits but it needs to be done professionally, like the rest of your business.

Remember this is your chance to increase profits by following up, but all this extra work will take less effort.

Dale Reardon is the owner of Professional Web Hosting at http://www.professionalwebhosting.com  We personally use and recommend Quicktell autoresponders as they are fast, reliable and offer  unlimited autoresponders with no ads. They also have the industry leading affiliate program. How You Can Use and Profit From Autoresponders

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