We’ll be examining what makes follow up to prospects/customers so important on our online world today.

Are you familiar with this scenario?

• Joined an affiliate program with good pay-out.

• Send an email to everyone you know and/or send an email to a list of people

• Didn’t make any sales

• Change to another affiliate program

Well, I am.

This never ending cycle is what I used to do.

Until I stumble across a training article from Six-Figure Income Marketing Group – “The Fortune is in the Follow-Up! I wake up.

I was clearly informed of this statistics:

The average sale is closed as follows:

• 2% on 1st contact

• 3% on 2nd contact

• 5% on 3rd contact

• 10% on 4th contact

• 80% on 5th-12th contact

-- The National Sales Executive Association

I then think: if follow up is so important what information can I give to my prospects?

The answer is easier then I thought it could be...

That is, I can get plenty of informative articles and e-books from the affiliate programs that I've joined.

Gathering all the articles and e-books I can utilize from my entire affiliate program is the next step I took in forming my own follow-ups.

What I need now is a good autoresponder that can do the work for me 24/7.

Throughout my research I found that a free autoresponder is good for short term follow-ups (approx. 20 emails).

If you want to use a free autoresponder be sure to find one that is third-party ads free! You don't want your competitor's ads showing up and get all the customers from you!

I often use free autoresponder for short term training courses when prospects joined under me.

I then use a paid autoresponder to organize a long term email campaign!

Most of the paid autoresponder gives unlimited follow-ups which is the key point to follow-ups and sales conversion.

After you’ve found the best autoresponder for you or you could follow the link in the resource box below to find out some of the *good quality* autoresponder that I recommends.

You can now start thinking about organizing your follow-up emails.

Here are some of ideas to help you sort out your articles in order:

1. Send all articles and e-books belong to one affiliate program together

2. If that particular program provides both articles and e-books, interchange them. I.e. Send one emails with the articles, send another emails with the thank you notes and a link for your prospects/subscribers to download the e-books.

3. Unless you are sending a series of articles, e.g. Part 1 to part 5 of Effective Ways of Promoting Your Affiliate Products, send the emails every 3-5 days, but never longer than 7 weeks. You don’t want your prospects to forget who you are.

4. Always send a welcome email to your prospects to introduce yourself and ask the prospects to email you back. A good technique is to ask open questions to your prospects. Open questions allow your prospects to tell you more about him/her instead of yes/no answer.

5. Always provide an easy way for people to unsubscribe themselves from your list. Your autoresponder should do this job for you quite easy and fast.

Caution!

If you are buying or using free email lists is sure to double check with the list providers the sources of their leads.

You don’t want to end up with a lot of spamming warning!

Reminder: To build relationship is the key element to bear in mind when following-up with your prospects.