Is Your Marketing Adding Value To Your Business? Or Costing You Money Instead

• A Concise Call to Action
• Targeted & Segmented Lists With A Message to Market Match
• A Compelling Offer & Guarantee
• A Unique Delivery Device and Compelling Headline to Get Noticed Amongst The Clutter of Other Messages
• Use of Multiple Media & Integrated Marketing Systems
• Follow-Up

It sounds easy, doesn’t it? It’s a pretty simple formula. The place where most LGBT businesses and entrepreneurs fall down a little bit is on the follow-up. You probably get the rest of the equation pretty much right. Right enough to have a nice business, but you could be making a lot more money, in most cases tens, possibly hundreds, of thousands of dollars every year, if you just put some simple systems in place for follow-up.

How many times have you asked for and received a free audio or CD, video or DVD, or other information from a company you were considering doing business with? In other words, you’re considering buying from them, spending some money with them so you ask for some information, you ask to receive their free material and you never heard from them again?

It’s happened to all of us. It probably happens more times than you can remember, because you so quickly forget about the company and spending money with them – especially when you don’t get the information you requested in a timely manner.

The question to ask yourself is are you letting clients slip away because you haven’t put good follow-up systems in place? I’m not talking about an auto-responder or two that thanks them for their order and then puts them into your weekly ezine or tip.

That’s not really following-up.

I’m talking about powerful stuff that will make a lasting impression. Things like:

• Free bonuses you didn’t ask for and they aren’t expecting
• Show stopping content presented by you in a way they’ve never heard before that’s so compelling they have to stop to get through it
• A hand-written note from you thanking them for requesting your complimentary information
• A live customer service phone call from your staff asking if they have any questions or if you can help them in anyway
• Direct mail asking them to take the next step with you in your funnel

It really doesn’t do you any good to spend money on the front-end marketing to people if you aren’t going to follow-up on the backend to actually make the sale.

We know most people aren’t going to buy the first time they hear from us anyway, so if you aren’t willing to, and planning to, follow-up with your prospects and clients, you might as well save your money and not waste your marketing dollars. And, if your marketing to a LGBT consumer, you already know it might take a bit longer to capture them as a client because our community tends to take a little longer to check new products and services out, as we’re a bit more skeptical.

It’s worth the effort on your part, especially in the LGBT community because we tend to be very loyal buyers once we buy from you and are satisfied (or wowed).

Recently, we designed and implemented a marketing campaign for a client where 50% of their sales came through the follow-up sequence that was put in place. It’s really amazing when you think about those numbers. Half of the sales from the campaign would have been lost had he not been willing to invest in the follow up campaign.

Even if you have smaller ticket items you’re selling – say a $297 program or course, and you develop a campaign and sell 50 of them, bringing in $14,850.00. Based on the above example, with a properly constructed follow-up campaign in place, you would have added $7,425.00 more to your bottom-line. Even if you only brought in half of that, it’s still an additional $3,712.50 in sales. Not too bad for sending a few follow-up messages via email, fax, and mail, huh?

Don’t disappoint your prospects and clients by not following up with them after they ask for your information. If you do, you’re leaving a lot of money on the table and losing clients with lifetime values of tens of thousands of dollars, probably more.