Dear Business Owner: Quit Leaving Money on the Table and Follow Up with Your Customers

I was fascinated what transpired one weekend a few years back as my wife found herself with acute appendicitis and we were forced to cancel our plans to travel to see friends for Easter.

While she ended up being just fine, what came from this seemingly bad incident for my business was awesome. I started to look at our system and marketing in my downtime as my wife recovered, and this deep thought took over my entire weekend and had me working and creating to improve my business.

Here’s what I noticed: We were leaving a ton of opportunity, which means money, on the table because of lack of effective FOLLOW-UP!

I want to share this experience with you as this may be the same happening in your business. How much money are you leaving on the table that you do not know about?

Here are the holes that I noticed needed plugging:

1. We have people go to our 2-hour Business Mastery Introductory Evening – 75% join us in the 3-day Business Mastery and 25% decide not to. This 25% has now been entered into a 365 day auto responder campaign to follow-up 30, 90, 180 and 365 days from the event to ensure we eventually get them out to Business Mastery, as we know what this will do for their business.

2. We have people go to our Business Mastery 3-Day event – some join us in programs, courses and groups and others do not. Those who do not have now been entered into a 365 day auto responder campaign to follow-up 30, 90, 180 and 365 days from the event to ensure we eventually get them into one of our groups, courses or the full Business Sherpa System, as we know what this will do for their business!

3. We have people leave our groups and once they are gone there is no follow-up to see where they are at and possibly get them back into a group to help them grow their business. We’ve now created a 30, 60, 90, 180 and 365 day auto responder program to check in with these clients.

The important part of what I am informing you about here is to think of follow-up systems for your own business.

Do you have clients that buy from you once, regularly or who you know you are not doing effective follow-up with that could be adding huge dollars to your bottom line? The same goes for prospects – can you automate your follow-up in some way or form?

As I'm sure most of you know, there are some great online systems out there to assist you with creating automatic email campaigns that can make your life extremely easy and that work for you 7 days per week and 52 weeks per year. It's all about actually doing the research, selecting one and finally putting one into place. Here are a few of my favorites: iContact, Constant Contact, AWeber, etc.

The ONE BIG piece of advice that I give you when looking at these systems is to decide what you want for the long-term in your business and that you get what you pay for.

You may decide in the beginning to choose a free or inexpensive system to do this for you, but as you grow, it needs to grow with you.

Should you decide a few years down the line that the email system you have chosen does not suit your needs anymore, then you will have to get all your subscribers to re-opt-in to your new software, because this is part of the CAN-SPAM Act. You cannot just export your contacts from one system to another without them re-opting in.

So, ensure you are taking your time to choose a system that can serve you today and as you grow. Price must be a consideration, but imagine after 5 years you have to change systems because you are too big for the current provider, or that they do not have additional features that you need.

Each time people are asked to re-opt-in you can lose up to half your database. Now, that is way more costly than the small monthly fee that you may have start with!

Your system is vitally important and you should take your time in choosing the right one!

Once this is done, start to examine all parts of your business and where you could leverage automated emails to do the follow-up for you.

This post first appeared on http://www.mymsuccess.com/. You can check out the original content here: http://www.mymsuccess.com/dont-leave-money-on-the-table/

Author: Colin Sprake is the CEO of Make Your Mark, a Canadian company of live seminars, online entrepreneur academy and live accountability groups that have helped 10,000’s of Entrepreneurs achieve rapid results in small business growth and development. Colin is a best-selling author of ‘Entrepreneur Success Recipe’ and trains for BMO, Sun Life Financial, Scotia Bank, T.D. Bank and lives by the tagline Business With Soul – putting heart back into business!