Generating leads and following up with potential customers is vital the success of your internet business. Statistics show that on average a visitor will require 7 points of contact before they make a purchase.

Whilst this is an average and will vary depending on the product or service you provide, collecting data from your visitors and following them up with great information about your product or service will greatly improve sales.

This is probably one of the most powerful strategies available to us as online marketers yet widely under used and in many cases completely overlooked. What’s more is that the whole process can be completely automated.

Think of a visitor looking for information about a product or service. They will more than likely use a search engine which will deliver thousands if not millions of websites appertaining to their search phrase.

The visitor will then start clicking through the results back and forth until they either make a purchase, enquiry or life gets in the way and they give up all together.

Now if your site was one of the ones this visitor clicked on and you didn’t collect their data, then I’m afraid they’re gone for good and you have no way of getting back in front of that person again.

However, if you collected their contact information you can continue to build a relationship with them until they’re ready to make a purchase.

There are many ways you can achieve this. The most basic way is to ask them to subscribe to a newsletter.

However, you’ll get far better results if you’re a little more creative, for example, why not give away a free report on the information they are looking for and then set up an auto responder series which automatically sends out follow up’s asking if they found the information useful or if they have any questions etc… The possibilities are almost endless.

So what’s the easiest way to set this up?

We have used many different software products in the past but by far the easiest way to get started is to use a service like icontact.

Icontact is extremely cheap and easy to use and with a free trial you could be on your way in just 5 minutes.

We’ve found that using a service such as icontact allows you to quickly and effortlessly start building relationships with your visitors without the need for purchasing expensive technical software.

As always any questions can be left in the comments box below or why not e-mail me on jp@marketingtipsuk.com

Jon Stringer
Marketing Tips UK

This entry was posted on Monday, July 7th, 2008 at 11:47 am and is filed under E-mail Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.