If you’ve been in business very long, you know that marketing has changed a lot even within the last decade. And, it’s going to continue to change. Companies are relying more heavily on their computers as a way of keeping in contact with their prospects and customers. And, that’s great! But are businesses using the Internet to its maximum capacity? To gain real success, companies must ditch the old, forget the new, and start with Automated Followup.

What is Automated Followup? Traditionally, the word Automated Followup refers to marketing efforts made without manual maintenence. Well, Infusionsoft is changing the meaning of Automated Followup. Automated Followup refers to any marketing effort that uses the electronic medium of the internet. It includes websites, email deliverability, fulfillment processes, e-commerce, and ERP. So, what does that mean to you? It means Automated Followup provides you with simple ways to stay in contact with your customers, sell more, and ultimately make more money.

Why is Automated Followup better? With Automated Followup, you are making the transition from new marketing techniques to marketing techniques that are way ahead of their time. Automated Followup successfully incorporates every aspect of effective marketing. With Automated Followup you can harness the power of the Internet AND use the Internet to continue marketing in more traditional forms. Automated Followup takes typical marketing efforts and super charges them.

How can Automated Followup help me? Automated Followup is not for everyone. For the average small business owner, other marketing techniques are still adequate. For a small business owner that wants to grow quickly and profitably, Automated Followup is the answer. With Automated Followup, companies can better reach their contacts, manage their overhead, and update their entire business.

Automating Followup is the newest, freshest, best answer to marketing concerns. For more information on Automated Followup, and how it is changing the way small business grow and manage their companies, view an online demo today.

Automating Lead Follow-up: Build the Relationship
If a small business owner is going to successfully market to the average person in a larger scale, they must perfect their automation of lead follow-up and build relationships with their prospects. Automating lead follow-up helps the small business owner build a relationship in larger scale by: keeping in front of the prospect, focusing on the individual, and offering the individual something of value.

Automated lead follow-up can significantly increase the number of prospects you guide to a sale. You see, with automating lead follow-up, you are constantly keeping your name in front of your lead. When leads are caught up in their own lives, it is difficult for them to think about other things- particularly your business. With automated follow-up, your lead doesn’t have to remember or think about who you are. Your lead follow-up does it for them.

When small business owners keep a prospect database like Infusionsoft, automated follow-up becomes possible. Think of how much easier it will be to sell to a prospect if you remember their name and other personal details. The key to automated follow-up is to take what you know about your prospect and cater your message to them. The follow-up should discuss the benefits of your products or services that will most appeal to your lead. By doing this, you are making your lead feel important, appreciated. And, when they are ready to buy, they will come to you because of these simple automated follow up techniques.

Finally, withautomated follow-up you can give your prospects valuable information. Provide them with ideas, interesting stories, and other things that they will appreciate. When your automated follow-up causes your prospects to look forward to hearing from you, you become the welcome guest instead of the unwanted pest. Once this relationship is developed, selling to your customer becomes a much easier process. With automated follow-up, you can quickly and easily send valuable information to your leads…All while you’re doing something else!

With automated follow-up, you can build a relationship with those individuals that are not yet your customers. With automated lead follow-up, you stay in front of your prospects, focus on the individuals, offer valuable information to your lead, and overall build a relationship that will help you sell more easily.

About Infusionsoft Infusionsoft provides award-winning small business CRM software that automates business management, sales, marketing and customer service to liberate small business and allow them to grow faster, better and more profitably.

Find out how: Start building relationships automatically – Try out Infusionsoft – Free!

Let me pose question: how much money do you spend generating leads? What happens to all of those leads, particularly those that don’t purchase right now? Automating lead follow-up might well be on of the most effective ways of increasing your sales. That being the case, why don’t more companies take automating follow-up more seriously?

What is the primary purpose of automating follow-up? It is to keep track of those customers who weren’t ready to buy today, but who will buy in the future. In other words, automating follow-up prevents companies from having to continually track down leads to make another sale.

So, now we get into the math. What do you typically spend every month to generate leads? You might get leads online, purchase them from a lead generating company, or send mailers and other direct response pieces. Now, imagine that you never do any lead follow-up. What is the return on your lead generating investment. In other words, of all the leads you received, how many bought from you right away? Divide that by the amount of money you spent generating leads.

Now, let’s see what happens when you incorporate automated follow-up marketing. Imagine that by using automated lead follow-up, an additional 50% of your leads turn out to be buyers. Think about how much money you spent to generate the leads. Then take the number who bought and increase that by 50%. What is your new return on your lead generating investment?

Alright, so maybe that math wasn’t super simple. Nevertheless, lead follow-up is. Lead follow-up is the key to making the most of your marketing dollars. With lead follow-up, you have an entire selection of buyers (in different stages). By not taking the time to do any lead follow-up, you are tossing all those buyers out the window, and allowing someone else to pick them up.

Lead follow-up is the fastest, most cost efficient way to get more buyers. Using lead follow-up will dramatically improve your sales. Automated Lead follow-up is the key to making more money and creating more customers, and actually having time to live your life!

About Infusionsoft Infusionsoft provides award-winning small business CRM software that automates business management, sales, marketing and customer service to liberate small business and allow them to grow faster, better and more profitably.

Find out how: Start capitalizing on your hard earned leads – Try out Infusionsoft – Free!

Automate Follow-up to Create Consistency
It happened again. A local dentist sent out a mailer. One, random mailer. Like the one he sent out at Christmas time. When companies are inconsistent with their marketing messages, they are doing little more than wasting marketing dollars. With automated follow-up marketing, your message will be consistent, predictable, and much more effective.

When you automate follow-up, you are creating a relationship with your prospect. With no extra effort (thanks to the automated follow-up feature) you are able to send frequent, consistent messages to your prospect. Think about it this way: if you only heard from your good friend once or twice a year, what would you think? With automated follow-up features, you can be the one consistent friend that your prospect can count on. With automated follow-up you can show how much you truly care.

Follow-up should be organized and predictable, and so should your message. When you automate follow-up, you create a system that prospects learn to trust. Have you ever been in a meeting without an agenda? When ideas or messages are randomly tossed around, your prospect will feel discombobulated. Automate follow-up and keep your message organized and predictable.

Automating follow-up does not need to be difficult. In order to keep that consistent message with your prospect, preplan your follow-up messaging. An automated follow-up feature allows you to send a comprehensive, well thought out…and most importantly, consistent message. Automate follow up not only to simplify your life, but to ensure the best message is sent your prospect at the right time.

With automated follow-up features, your message will be consistent. Not only will you be building relationships that last, you can automate follow-up to be organized and preplanned, and ultimately more effective. You could be like the local dentist, and send random messages at random times. But to be the most effective in your marketing, utilize automated follow-up.

About Infusionsoft

Infusionsoft provides award-winning small business CRM software that automates business management, sales, marketing and customer service to liberate small business and allow them to grow faster, better and more profitably.

Implement what you learned: Take a peek at the platform designed for automated follow-up – Try out – Infusionsoft Free!

Have You Lost Touch
How many friends have you lost touch with over the years? How many of those did you promise you would never lose contact with? Lack of follow-up is usually unavoidable. You’re busy. You have a lot going on, and taking a minute to write an email or letter is just not on your list. However, my guess is, you would really like to hear from your long lost friends. You appreciated your relationship with them and would like to continue to have one.

So, how is the lack of follow-up any different to your customers? It’s not. Sure, they aren’t your best friend, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have a relationship with them. Which is why Infusionsoft makes it easy to automate follow-up. When you automate follow-up, you are accomplishing three important goals.

First, with our automated follow-up features you can continually send messages to your customers, letting them know how much you care. Although you know how easy automated follow-up really is, your customers don’t. They will appreciate the time you took to contact them. With a better relationship (built through an automated follow-up tool) you’re much more likely to have your customers do business with you again.

Second, once you have built this relationship, you can use the automated follow-up tool to send your customers information about sales and new products. By what other method can you send information as quickly as you can when you have automated follow-up capabilities?

Finally, you can build customer loyalty–leading to even more sales–when you follow-up with your customers after a purchase. Can you imagine how pleased your customer will be to get a message from you asking how the product or service is working out? With automated follow-up features in Infusionsoft, doing this is easy.

Learn more ways to benefit from automated follow-up features. Join us for a free trial of Infusionsoft.

About Infusionsoft Infusionsoft provides award-winning small business CRM software that automates business management, sales, marketing and customer service to liberate small business and allow them to grow faster, better and more profitably.

Until recently there has been no solution to help manage the complex tasks involved with multi-step, multi-media follow up campaigns.

People have been forced to come up with “creative” ways to get the follow up done… and I’ve seen some amazing creativity.

And now, just for you here are…

5 Mistakes Small Business Owners Make when considering Follow Up

1. “I’ll Just Try To Do The Follow Up When I Have Extra Time”

This is the most common really bad idea of small business owners in America today. After all, is it really worth your time to sit down and start stuffing envelopes? I see a few problems with that:

• First problem: “Extra Time”… yeah right! When did any entrepreneur you know have any “extra time”?

• Second problem: What is your time worth? If you’d wanted to be stuffing envelopes and licking stamps, that’s the job you’d have gone for, right?

• Third problem: Complication. It’s too hard to keep track of all of this stuff on your own.

• Fourth problem: It’s not scalable. If you get a big response one day, you may not be able to keep up. Your tongue will fall off.

2. “I’ll Create A Card/Folder Tracking System”

Oh yes… there have been some pretty creative tracking systems built using multi-color file-folders, index cards, and multiple sheets of pre-printed labels. I’d love to see you try managing a 37-step multi-media, multi-step, multi-branch campaign to a list of  137,343 and not end up in the crazy house.

Come on… can you imagine what 137,343 index cards even looks like? Where the heck are you going to keep them all? Under the stairs?

3. “I’ll Hire Staff To Manage The Follow Up”

Once people burn out of doing the follow up themselves, they usually hire more staff to help get it all done.

And the really funny thing about staff is how quickly business owners hire someone to “fill a hole” and pay them $30,000 or $40,000 a year but then shudder and moan and gnash their teeth at the thought of investing 1/5th that amount in the tools to make their marketing successful! It’s insane!

Now, there’s no problem with hiring more employees if that is what you want to do. But when you hire people you have a couple of things to deal with.

• First problem: Payroll

• Second problem: They aren’t perfect. They get tired and cranky. And they don’t suffer quite the same way you do if they get it wrong. They’ll phone you at 7:00am and say “I’m not feeling too well, pity about those 10,000 stamps you’re going to have to lick yourself now, isn’t it?”

• Third problem: Burnout and cost of training new employees

4. “I’ll Just Outsource It”

I’ve seen people create relationships with vendors who will manage their marketing for them. I have seen this work fairly well for small runs of really Really REALLY simple print-only follow up.

But there are problems with this, as attractive as it sounds:

• First Problem: I haven’t seen anyone who can handle an effective follow up that includes mail, email, phone, fax, etc.

• Second Problem: List maintenance becomes a problem because they don’t know when people are buying and can easily send follow up pieces to those who have already purchased or who have opted out.

• Third problem: I bet you can’t show me one single outsourcing firm who cares as much about getting your mailing right as you do.

5. “I’ll Pay To Have Follow-Up Software Built”

I’ve known entrepreneurs that hire software developers to create a program to manage all  this follow up and keep it all straight.

Some people make the mistake of hiring a college student, or some guy who’s “taking a break”, or a programmer who just doesn’t “get it”… and they end up with something resembling half a car battery and a microwave held together by a few rubber bands.

Listen, you need a solution like this… like a fish needs a bicycle.

And even if you find competent programmers who “get” this direct marketing thing… you still run into problems.

• First Problem: Cost. They can easily drop $20,000 to $100,000 trying to develop a comprehensive software package. Heck, they can easily drop $20,000 to $100,000 just coming up with a “feasibility study” (in which they’ll tell you it can’t be done without another feasibility study).

• Second Problem: The project drags on forever. If you’ve even been involved in software development, you know what I’m talking about. It’s called “feature creep”. A good way to calculate how much a software project is going to cost is to ask the programmer for his “absolute maximum” and then multiply by 4.791.

• Third Problem: Technology becomes obsolete so quickly that you should plan on rebuilding within a couple of years to keep up. That’s going to be another $20,000 to $100,000 for the feasibility study. You did know that, right?

6. “I’ll Buy ‘Off-The-Shelf’ Software To Manage This”

Now we’re getting warmer… It does seem like with all of the technological advancements we have made that we should be able to go into a store and pick up a software tool that will help us follow up.  Makes sense, right?

I hate to be the one to break it to you, but you should expect to be disappointed for a few reasons:

• First Problem: Most entrepreneurs really don’t “get it” when it comes to direct response marketing and follow-up, so what kind of a chance do you expect software geeks to have?  If they don’t “get it” then how are they going to build you a tool that will work for you?

• Second Problem: You lose TONS of efficiency and effectiveness because you’ll have to build a patchwork of computer programs to do all of the things you need to with your follow up. You’ll need a “Contact Manager” like ACT or Goldmine, plus a “Shopping Cart” program, plus an “Email Autoresponder” program, plus an “Order Processing” system, plus a “Lead Management” tool for your sales reps and you’ll still probably need Microsoft Excel or some other spreadsheet program to manage the data you couldn’t find any other place for!

I get a headache just thinking about it!

Then you’ll still have to find vendors to send voice broadcasts, fax broadcasts, direct mail, etc.  As you can see, this really starts to be a big mess!

• Third Problem: Orchestrating your follow up becomes almost impossible because you have your prospect and customer information in a gazillion different systems. How would you send out carefully timed sequences where the email, voice broadcast and direct mail are all synchronized?

The End

(but, hey, you can always try again!)

About Infusionsoft

provides award-winning marketing software that centralizes, organizes and automates lead generation, lead conversion and client fulfillment. Unlike any other software available on the market today, Infusionsoft is an “automated follow-up marketing” solution built specifically for marketers, entrepreneurs and successful small businesses.

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