Why is customer follow-up important? It’s not enough to get your customer to buy. You need to keep them buying by building a long-term relationships. One key to doing this effectively is to offer sincere, timely follow-up customer service. Through follow-up customer service you continue offering valuable content, keeping lines of communication open, communicating your appreciation to the customer, and offering more deals, while strengthening the confidence in their decision to buy from you and increasing the likelihood of future referrals and testimonials or reviews.
Smart business people spend a great deal of time, work and effort on effective customer follow-up, and this is why automation can help. Automation takes over routine tasks and does them for you so that you can focus on more important things.
The “Thank You” Message
Probably the most important part of your follow-up is the “thank you” message. This is a quick and simple note letting the customer know that you appreciate their service. Keep in mind that they can buy from anybody else at any time. This email lets them know that you know that, and you appreciate their choosing you.
An Email Course
When your customer buys from you, you have a great opportunity to build a relationship with them through your follow-up care. A great way to do this is through an email course. I use my course on Mastering AWeber for this purpose. This is a series of emails that teaches your customer how to do something. Identify some problem they face and help them solve it. Each email is an individual lesson. This can be done through an autoresponder email marketing software program.
Customer Loyalty Program
Another great automated follow-up option is the customer loyalty program. This is a program that offers incentives for customers to buy more from you. After so many purchases, the customer gets a reward of some kind. Entire customer loyalty programs can be automated through services and software programs.
Customer Feedback
An important part of customer follow-up is getting the customer’s feedback. As part of your automated follow-up care, you can send the customer a survey or form asking them for their opinions. This has two purposes. First, it lets the customer know that you’re concerned about them and listening. Second, it gets you valuable insights into how your customer feels.
What NOT to Automate
Automation is extremely useful for customer follow-up, but there are times when it’s inappropriate. When people need to speak to another human being on the other end, automation makes them feel like they’re dealing with a faceless corporation that doesn’t care about them.
When a customer needs to reach you for any reason, you should be available to them. Provide them with plenty of ways to reach you easily and take care of their problems, questions or issues as soon as possible. Use automation where it’s appropriate, but make sure there’s a real human when your customer needs one.
This wraps up the 5 part series “Ideas to Automate Your Business”. If you missed any of the earlier posts, here are the links:
#1 Reason to Automate Your Marketing
Marketing Automation First Step is Social Media