Unfortunately as much as half of the customer follow up mistakes are made by marketers who have the best intentions at heart. Here are some of the most common things that need to be tweaked in many marketers’ follow up marketing plans.
Looking for Money
If you only send out emails when you are about to launch a big product, then your customers begin to dread those emails and think “She wants more money,” and then they click on the delete button with super speed and precision!
It might be too late to salvage that relationship with the already turned off customer, but you can at least prevent new ones from running off. All you have to do is make sure you send more customer follow up emails packed with useful tips and freebies than with expensive offers. People who get a present most of the time – even if that’s just one tip or piece of advice they can use – will be far more likely to open your emails – and far more likely to to continue opening your emails with your sporadic (but consistently spaced) offers.
Deficient Headlines
If you want to keep your emails from being deleted at lighting speed, then keep away from boring, glib or offensive headlines.
Boring ones like: “Open This Email Before It’s Too Late!” are so common they have become stale and almost come off like a chain letter. It also comes off as ’glib’ and doesn’t give you any incentive to open them. There’s no allure to get people to open your email.
Watch out for the word “URGENT!” on your “expiring” offer. This is another stale phrase used on emails and it’s another term that gets customers to just pass over it because things are never really that urgent to your customer! You might feel urgency about this expiring offer, but your customer, probably not so much.
If you want to do customer follow up and remind them that an offer is going to expire soon then it’s best to be open and honest about it right in your email title: “Only 3 |Hours Left for my Email Marketing Tools eBook offer.” Your customer either already knew they weren‘t interested in this offer or completely forgot about it. He will appreciate you saving him the time of clicking on the email he’s not interested in, or reminding him he’s about to miss out on your awesome deal if he doesn‘t act NOW!
People also tend to get offended at the oddest things: Like just bringing up Tiger Woods can bring up lots of anger in people. Watch out for profanity too. Unless your demographic is male, single and under thirty… it’s neither professional nor a good idea.
Being Controversial
Writing about the hottest drugs at raves may get you an age group way lower than thirty… which is fine if that‘s your target demographic. But if your target market are 50+ knitters, it’s the “delete” button again (and maybe an angry email, that you’ll have to decide if you want to spend time answering). Be careful about topics like politics or ethics. It might bring tons of crazy traffic, but you need to decide if it’s going to make you any money in the end.
If you do gain list members from posts like this, will they be the paying customers you want and are willing to put in the work to keeping?
So follow that follow up marketing plan you set up and don‘t turn off your customers with this wildly irrelevant and unoriginal headlines. If you really feel you need to be bold and make a statement, then keep it inline with your target demographic.
Contact Your Virtual Services to see how they can help!