Introduction to the Advanced Course on Online Marketing Follow-up
The Advanced Course on Online Marketing Follow-up represents one of the many webmarketing courses that I have composed, and which is part of the large Marketing Management family, which represents the core business of the present blogs SergioTraversaMarketing.com and SergioTraversa.com.
This course is essentially based on e-mail marketing.
It is according to the E-mail Marketing system that I can use a professional autoresponder software to send e-mail messages, which contain the lessons of this course, to the subscribers of my list, with the logic of Online Follow-up Marketing, understood as a strategy based on subsequent messages.
These lessons were destined to become the articles of the blog, according to a very effective strategy, in terms of positioning on search engines and multiplication of subscriptions to my lists, which I had adopted until last year, and which I analyzed in a lesson of the course itself.
I temporarily abandoned this strategy, after having used a server on HostGator for years, where I had installed a well-known autoresponder software, arpReach, server and autoresponder that I will never use again due to the total lack of professionalism of its staff. owners.
I am still in the process of finding a more professional server and autoresponder, and I realize that in these times of pandemics and belligerence, which are very difficult, it will be difficult to find products and services with a good quality/price ratio.
Currently this advanced course is structured in single lessons reproduced in this blog, built with Google's free blogging platform, Blogger.
From the blog you will soon be able to download the entire course of over 900 pages in PDF format.
This course can very well be viewed on a website of those that are very fashionable lately, with pages with ample space and large characters, which represent the classic example of one page.
However, I believe I can visualize it more effectively by using a blog, according to the Blog Marketing strategies, which you can find in the Advanced Course on Blog Marketing that I am preparing to compose and which will see the light in some time.
Naturally, for those who want to approach how to use Online Follow-up Marketing in a simpler way, the simplest reading I can recommend is always that of the Basic Course on Online Follow-up Marketing, whose 12 articles represent the juice, the summary of the entire Advanced Course on Online Marketing Follow-up.
The Basic Course on Online Marketing Follow-up represents a preparatory summary to better understand what has been included in the advanced course.
The Advanced Course on Online Follow-up Marketing was originally structured into 20 chapters, and was in any case, like the current one, a step by step course to understand how follow-up marketing strategies relating to off-sales can also be applied on the internet -line, with the aim of increasing your online business, naturally with the appropriate adaptations.
This course is dedicated to a great friend, Steve Hetrick, hosting service provider and producer of self-hosted autoresponder software, a true American from Pennsylvania, who passed away in January 2011.
He was the only one who in 2005, at the beginning of my adventure on the web, showed me for free, with his lessons, that to get a business off the ground an autoresponder software was needed, through the application of Follow-up Marketing On Line strategies.
These are all line, which you will find in the details of this course, while many other, not less well-known Italian and American web marketers, would have made me pay who knows how much to provide me with this information.
It represented the evolution of the first nucleus of a course born in 2007, the Mini Course on Follow-up Marketing in 12 lessons, an e-book of only 82 pages.
I subsequently significantly increased its contents until it became what was the fourteenth edition of the Advanced Course on Online Follow-up Marketing, which will now become the seventeenth edition of the year 2024!
The Advanced Course on Online Follow-up Marketing will be made up of around 200 lessons, divided into around 30 chapters, which you can download individually from this blog, or, as I was saying, in the form of an e-book of over 900 pages
And therefore all the lessons will then be combined into a single e-book, which you can download, read on your screen or even print directly.
I hope as soon as possible to be able to automate the downloading of lessons via email, using professional autoresponder software that is not self-hosted, but belongs to the area of external email marketing services, such as Aweber, GetResponse, MailChimp, iContact, etc.
The Advanced Course on Follow-up Marketing Online is able to give very elaborate and complete answers to those who already have knowledge on the topic of the email marketing sector, or to those who have already started a certain path, to increase your online business, through the use of follow-up messages, created with direct marketing strategies or with the use of a traditional newsletter.
Certainly this course can provide solutions to all those who want to approach a new experience in the field of follow-up marketing with clearer ideas.
But above all and in particular, it is aimed at those who have already set up a lead generation strategy, i.e. the production of contacts, through the inclusion of their website/blog, equipped with a registration form, in the first natural results of the search engine rankings.
Furthermore, it is aimed at those who have decided to extend their visibility at the top of the search engine rankings, through Pay Per Click, participating, for example, in the Google AdWords program.
I trust in the usefulness of this advanced course and from now on I thank all those who want to use it for their own knowledge or take advantage of its free distribution.
In the introductory phase you will find a first chapter, containing some articles that talk about telemarketing, email marketing, autoresponders, courses sent with a direct marketing commercial follow-up, or deal with the different theme of the newsletter, introducing all the topics that will be developed in the inside this advanced course.
Thank you for your kind attention
Best regards
Sergio Traversa
CHAPTER I. E-MAIL MARKETING AND FOLLOW-UP MARKETING
1. The main concepts of this course
2. What is E-mail Marketing?
3. Broadcasting
4. Autoresponders
5. Online Marketing Follow-up
6. Front-end and back-end products
7. The importance of loyal customers
8. Professional autoresponder software
I. The main concepts of this course
Online Follow-up Marketing represents a marketing channel, with which we aim, with pre-packaged messages, sent at pre-established intervals, to contact and re-contact all prospects who have provided us with their email address on a ticket by visiting, or by subscribing to a list, entering your name and email address in a form or registration form, placed on a landing page of a website or on a blog.
Therefore it represents a channel that falls within the field of E-mail Marketing, as all the rules that belong to the latter apply to it, such as, for example, style, composition, structure and formatting in html or just message text.
But Online Follow-up Marketing falls within the field of E-mail Marketing, from another point of view, that of the purpose for which E-mail Marketing is used by an entrepreneur.
The main aim that an operator sets himself, using an online follow-up marketing strategy, is that of direct sales, through offers and/or promotions of products and/or services.
Marketing experts have now identified four genres of email marketing depending on the purpose for which each of them is chosen.
First of all, the best e-mail marketing plan is composed of the integration of the four email marketing formats identified, and this combination is linked above all to the period of the life cycle of a prospect and/or a customer, in which the latter is placed or contacted.
The first of the four formats by far most used is represented by e-mail marketing that is aimed at generating new revenue for a company, either by converting prospects into customers, or convincing customers to make additional purchases.
A second e-mail marketing format instead has the aim of building customer loyalty, gaining their trust, and at the same time trying to keep your brand alive, in your customer's mind, and their loyalty, for example, in using your website, product and/or service, instead of going to your competition.
Since it is not set up for direct sales, you will not obtain great benefits in terms of economic revenue from this e-mail marketing format.
A third format of email marketing is about trying to keep existing customers and ensuring that they remain customers who return to purchase and/or visit your website again and again.
Unlike the second previous format, the latter is mainly aimed at taking the customer into consideration from the point of view of the offers made and the purchases made.
And comparing the latter with the first format examined, that of emails conceived as a pure sales tool and revenue increase tool, the third one is specifically tailored to ensure that your customer continues to purchase, maximizing revenue by that customer, and that the latter continues to consider your website as a source of information about your products and/or services.
The fourth type of email marketing is the one that aims to recover lost customers, that is, those who have abandoned your product, service, business and website, but it is also the one that involves greater investments, together with the third type , compared even to the acquisition of new customers, for obvious reasons connected with the commitment required to maintain the customer and what is necessary in terms of time and money to recover the lost one.
The types of email marketing that come into consideration when examining online follow-up marketing are essentially two: email marketing which has the aim of earning revenue from direct sales, and e-mail marketing which has the objective of loyalty. of your customer and which aims to keep your personal or corporate brand alive in their minds.
In reading this course you will find that Online Follow-up Marketing has as its object the advance preparation of a series of messages, sent at defined and programmed intervals with professional autoresponder software, before sending it to a mass of recipients.
And it will be easy to understand that the E-mail Marketing discussed in this course is essentially that which aims to generate revenue through direct marketing.
But all this discussion would be very reductive of the concept of Follow-up Marketing Online.
In fact, speaking in a more general context of Online Follow-up Marketing, we already know that it includes all the actions that are carried out via email, to contact and contact prospects, customers and loyal customers so that they become the classic lifetime customer value.
And among these actions we also find the setting up of a newsletter.
This is not made up of pre-packaged messages sent at scheduled intervals before sending, and indeed, whoever is responsible for drafting a newsletter must be able to recover all the new material to be included in the messages, precisely in the period of time that elapses between the last number sent and the next number to send.
Yet the newsletter belongs both to the Email Marketing genre, as regards the style, formatting, composition and contents of the messages, and to that of Online Follow-up Marketing, as regards the general idea of making oneself heard. with repeated contacts over time, so that the customer feels at the center of the sender's attention and remembers him.
Certainly the newsletter, as a process, is made up of a series of messages which ideally should reach the recipients within specific deadlines, as these were promised by the manager or delegating owner of the newsletter.
The fact that these deadlines cannot be respected is another problem.
What is mainly of interest here for the purposes of Online Follow-up Marketing is that messages will be sent, from a comprehensive perspective of the two types of applicable email marketing, precisely with the aim of making the recipient feel at the center of attention and maintain the recipient's interest in the sender's offers and products and/or brands.
We will also see the concept of broadcasting later on, which for now we will summarize as exceptional or unrepeatable wide-ranging communications via email, to an audience of subscribers to a newsletter, or even directed to subscribers to a previously set list with a simple follow. -up canned messages before sending.
Normally in the newsletter, broadcasting has the aim of sending all subscribers a message that contains absolute news, or crucial information, which must be made known immediately, without further procrastination.
Differently happens when sending pre-packaged messages, which have the purpose of direct sales.
In the latter case, in fact, broadcasting has the aim of provoking behavior that helps the sender create segmentations of prospects or users, depending on their reaction, and this especially if a survey is included within it.
Therefore the real difference between a newsletter and a series of messages sent in a series of follow-ups lies not only in the lack of pre-packaging of the messages, but also in the main intent, because the e-mail marketing that applies to the newsletter, as we have already seen and repeat here for clarity, has the aim of maintaining the customer's loyalty towards the company and its website, and of branding to keep the company's image alive in the customer and his interest in it.
And this is evident from a series of elements, among which, the fact that a newsletter has a specific editorial line, which avoids the inclusion of too much advertising, banners or other links, which lead to a negative judgment on the part of the recipient.
Of course, you can't turn the messages of a direct marketing follow-up into a series of advertising flyers, but the fact remains that without a doubt the contents of a newsletter are much less promotional than sequential follow-ups.
A newsletter must contain news, which are not just the usual new products of the respective company, but also information that is important for the reader, and inherent to the sector to which the company itself belongs.
The brand emerges due to the authority of the person who compiles the newsletter.
From this perspective, it is very useful to include the classic page with the expert's opinion.
For the rest, as I was saying, the rules of email marketing that have to do with form, style and content fully regain their force, not only for pre-packaged email messages, but also for the newsletter.
In conclusion, in this Advanced Course I will talk about online follow-up marketing as a strategy that specifically addresses the problem of acquiring more and more customers and sales, and I will address the problems associated with the creation of a newsletter, in which they operate very different e-mail marketing concepts, connected above all with the diffusion of its owner's brand.
Finally, I anticipate that I will talk extensively about newsletters in this Advanced Course on Online Follow-up Marketing.
2. What is Email Marketing?
Surely you have already heard of it!
Here, rather than translating the term, I will try to clarify its meaning.
E-mail Marketing means, in short, communicating with a market, through the use of e-mail, and represents one of the most powerful and effective tools of Internet Marketing and will remain so for the foreseeable future.
Before going into the details of E-mail Marketing, I remind you that it represents a Marketing strategy and that Marketing is a branch of Economic and Financial Science, which includes the set of strategies that are the basis of any promotion or advertising ' to transfer goods in exchange for money.
In fact, I would say that it is the best long-term marketing tool for those who have an offline or online business, or one that includes both of these types.
In this course I will show you everything I have discovered about email marketing and how I have used the contents of this course to increase the power of the internet and generate continuous earnings.
Let's start from this fundamental concept which represents a very important rule in Marketing: whatever your sector, whether offline or online, contacting potential customers and/or acquired customers again or making sure to remember them has the effect of expansion of our message and consequently they too will remember us and what we offer or what we are going to offer.
And we will see how all this is necessary to increase the success of your business.
Among the tools for contacting a potential customer and/or an acquired customer, which are currently available to you, you can use the telephone, fax and e-mail; they are all means that can be well used not only for off-line commerce, but also and above all for online commerce.
Regardless of how the data of the people to be contacted are obtained (i.e. whether personally, off-line, or via an online registration form) the use of e-mail has favored the creation of a global strategy that has become the subject of a real discipline, which is described in this Advanced Course on Online Marketing Follow-up, which represents a fundamental part of Email Marketing.
But here are the usual fateful questions!
Why use email marketing, when maybe you have already invested enough to have a website?
Why create a website alongside an email marketing system?
It's easy to answer: you must be present on the web and have the ability to contact users who have shown interest in your product and/or service with e-mail messages, and if you don't contact them you will only be able to make some sporadic sales, but nothing more.
The main tool for contacting them is e-mail marketing, that is, the marketing channel based on sending e-mail messages, means that are very simple to use.
But not only are they easy to use: there are no limits on sending or shipping costs because e-mail messages cost almost nothing, apart from the time it takes you to compose and send them.
The question of how long it takes to compose them is just a question of experience.
In fact, by continually trying and trying again, sending test messages, sooner or later you will be able to refine your writing style and be increasingly quicker in drafting them, as you can learn in my advanced course on persuasive writing.
As for the sending problem, if you use normal email software, as we will see later, you will drown in endless copy-paste processes, which will irreparably damage your business, making you waste a lot of precious time and energy.
If you use professional autoresponder software, you will be able to send messages to your target within a few minutes!
E-mail marketing has the advantage of giving you an immediate market response, unlike all other standard advertising channels, for which considerable investments are required and whose effectiveness can be measured in a relatively longer time.
In fact, the results of your e-mail marketing campaigns are quickly measurable: and this will allow you, in an equally immediate way, to make any changes to the settings, form and contents of your messages, to verify which ones obtain the results improve and set up your new campaigns, significantly improving the performance of your online business.
Generally we talk about e-mail marketing as Direct Response Marketing (DRM) or immediate or direct response marketing, precisely to indicate the immediacy and measurability of the results obtainable by the target market.
Furthermore, you will be able to segment the target of your messages based on the specific needs of the recipients, something that advertising messages on billboards, newspapers, radio and television cannot do, or rather, they can also obtain results of a certain importance, but in of huge investments.
You can send an email message whenever you want to those you know well or even to those who perhaps you do not know directly, but who have given you their consent in advance to receive it.
It is considered irreplaceable, given that it does not fear competition from RSS Feeds, still relegated to 10%, if not less, of the global sector of online communication tools used in the field of commercial promotion.
Furthermore, email marketing allows you to make a profit even if you don't have your own product to market online!
But I would not be complete if I limited myself to such statements.
Initially it was used to send large quantities of commercial messages to users who were happy to receive them, because for them it was an absolute novelty.
However, over time this caused the immeasurable growth of spam, to the point that a large part of public opinion was of the opinion that the time had come to change the system, considering e-mail marketing as the tool preferred by spammers, which seemed to even justified a lot of distrust towards him.
Subsequently we came to the anti-spam reaction of recent years, in which the way of doing e-mail marketing has changed radically.
First of all, through the legislative instruments of the various countries and the technologies offered by internet service providers and anti-spam organizations, an attempt has been made to drastically reduce the phenomenon of spam, so that e-mail marketing can regain the trust of users. end users and companies.
This effort has had, on the one hand, a very partial success, I would say, because spam has not yet been eradicated, and on the other hand it has contributed to determining a slight slowdown in business concluded by online operators who act in a discreet manner. all legal, due to the anti-spam filters placed at the level of the provision of internet services and at the level of the final consumer or recipient of the messages.
However, in the economy of the global system, and despite the reported defects, E-mail Marketing continues and will continue to represent the most used commercial tool because it is effective and because it is accessible, as it is very economical, to those who want start creating an online business without too many economic risks, overnight, that is, overnight!
Furthermore, there has been a notable leap in quality in relations between companies and consumers: the computer is no longer considered a simple support for end users, destined to passively accept advertising messages.
With the use of new technologies, the computer is increasingly becoming a tool that allows surfers to interact with companies offering themselves on the market, both through e-mail marketing, as well as positioning themselves in the search engine rankings. , or by participating in the Google Adwords program, or by using blogging and social marketing.
Even thanks to cloud computing today we are witnessing a better allocation of company resources, with an average saving of 25% on an annual basis, as it allows us to avoid waste in economic resources, IT supports, optimization of times in all company processes, and everything can be further improved with email contact optimization, based on email marketing.
But there is more, because we are currently witnessing the continuous creation of new strategies to motivate the customer to contact, in order to find the solution to a problem, and therefore we no longer find only the offer of information and /or the promotion of products and/or services.
What I mean: simply that it is true that the main function of e-mail messages is to promote products and/or services, but it is equally true that other very creative ways to communicate with customers are emerging, always through e-mail, and which are able to acquire increasingly important market shares.
These creative ways of using email constitute a system for offering prospects and customers highly personalized professional solutions, consisting of services supplementing the products and/or services purchased, which can make the difference between a successful site and a site that sells normally.
In fact, we will see in the courses how a long-term e-mail marketing strategy requires not only the setting up of a series of sales messages, but also the configuration of more specific services, such as the creation of questionnaires and responses (FAQ ) and surveys, sending instructions for use, obtaining feedback, etc.
Therefore, we are seeing the use of E-mail Marketing not only to promote one's own products and/or services, but also to support additional services that represent added value, to clearly differentiate one's offer from that of the competition and to always be able to win new customers.
Going into concrete terms, an E-mail Marketing system can, for example, manage an accountant's clients, to automatically send them certain messages, such as reminders for certain deadlines.
In this sector, our tool could facilitate invoicing by making this operation automatic, and allowing a considerable saving of time, which can be dedicated to more profitable business and is no longer wasted in useless and repetitive actions, especially in cases where the sums of money are always the same and to be sent by the same deadlines.
It can facilitate the automatic receipt, via e-mail, of medical certificates, diagnostic results or hospital discharge cards.
It can allow you to build a list of frequently asked questions and answers to offer your customers a quick and comprehensive assistance service.
It can help you create opinion polls and collect your results to set up targeted email marketing campaigns, organized on the analysis of the responses obtained.
And it is also possible to communicate news and university courses to students of a faculty, perhaps by sending links to the video lesson posted on the web, etc.
You will be able to send a small series of messages to your examiner, with a view to further interviews to be hired by that company.
You will be able to communicate with your company's workers, in view of a course to be attended online, on a periodic basis, also obtaining feedback.
You can put all this into practice using the Follow-up Marketing strategies, which I will tell you about in the course, and which consist of advanced E-mail Marketing tools.
Therefore, as you will be able to examine in the chapters of the course, these advanced E-mail Marketing strategies can take on the most varied connotations, depending on the maximum satisfaction of customer needs, with the result of ever-increasing success for those who know how to use this tool with the necessary expertise.
And all this can be organized, obtaining the maximum result from your email marketing campaigns, only if you are equipped with a powerful professional autoresponder software!
Finally, know that the meaning of E-mail Marketing encompasses the more specific meanings of Broadcasting and Follow-up, which I will explain to you in the next lesson.
Furthermore, email marketing can be considered the most powerful (and economical) form of marketing that has ever been conceived in the world.
Gone are the days when you had to pawn your house or car to create a sales letter for a product that could earn you a fortune.
The Internet is the only place on earth where you can sell every day with the investment of a small sum of money, if you know how to do it.
Fortunately or unfortunately (depending on your point of view) only a small portion of internet marketers really know how to use messages correctly in a profitable way.
But not only that, because many internet marketing experts operate with email marketing in a very different way from what the evidence suggests, and which has been transfused into my courses on online follow-up marketing.
However, if you use email marketing the way you like it and you are getting positive results, go ahead and do what you are doing, don't change, you can't change the team that wins!
Furthermore, I am sure that the contents of this Advanced Course on Online Marketing Follow-up will truly give you positive results.
3. What is Broadcasting
A term that sometimes occurs in the functions of autoresponder programs is "broadcasting".
It can literally be translated as sending a single exceptional occasional wide-ranging message, that is, to all your subscribers.
This term indicates the sending of a single message for a particular occasion, such as new information or new strategies, the launch of a new product, including that of others, the sending of a weekly or monthly newsletter to all subscribers.
But what function does a message sent via broadcasting have?
Are you going to send an occasional message to your subscribers or plan to use a newsletter?
Then you will be able to write and send it only after updating the contents with the news that you have managed to gather in your sector.
But if I didn't send innovative content it would no longer make sense to talk about one-off messages or newsletters!
Furthermore, in general, the concept of broadcasting as a broad-based sending implies a general and non-targeted sending, while the main purpose of sending a series of follow-up messages is always aimed at personalizing your offers based on a clear segmentation of your targets, identified based on needs, tastes and propensity to purchase.
However, I had also said that broadcasting can also be used to carry out a survey, so as to be able to segment and target your reference market.
All this allows for a more targeted sales and loyalty strategy for acquired customers, but obviously does not exclude the possibility of sending occasional broadcast messages also for target segments.
The reason why I explained to you again the meaning of broadcasting is because this last term is closely connected with the function of a newsletter, which you will have to clearly distinguish from the object of this course, which is Follow-up Marketing , and later I will explain further how follow-ups and newsletters differ from each other.
4. Autoresponders
Another of these Anglo-Saxon terms is "Autoresponder", corresponding to our very Italian, but little used "Autoresponder".
It is simply a system that allows you to send a request for information and obtain an automatic response, with obvious time savings, simplifying certain activities, through the use of the most varied communication tools.
If the system is IT, an autoresponder allows you to request certain information and automatically issue a response message using email.
In the field of Email Marketing, the main function of an autoresponder is to automatically send a response message to those who have left their name and email address, subscribing to your list.
However, you will see that with an autoresponder you can create many other functions, with which you can gain the trust of your subscribers and create that added value with which you can clearly stand out from your competition.
Let's see again in concrete terms how an autoresponder works.
Say a visitor comes to your website and sees that you are offering a free report on an item they are interested in.
He enters his name and email address in the registration form and in the blink of an eye the report is sent to his email inbox.
This not only allows your visitor to immediately download the information he was looking for, but allows you to send it to him automatically, meaning you don't have to perform manual copy-paste and send actions to send the report via email.
And here comes the beauty!
In fact, you just added a new subscriber to your list!
Without an autoresponder you would only have single visits from surfers who will never return to visit you again.
Instead, with the help of an autoresponder program, your subscriber will become the recipient of your promotions, every time a visitor has expressed the desire to be part of your list, in order to receive your email marketing campaigns.
Once you learn how to use an autoresponder, you may wonder how you ever thought you could operate online profitably without its support.
If the idea of no longer having to waste your precious time manually sending your promotional messages, with copy-paste, excites you, rest assured that this is not the only advantage you can get from an autoresponder .
An autoresponder is not just a tool that inserts an automatic pilot into the management of your follow-ups, but can help you make dozens and dozens of marketing strategies profitable, which you will have the opportunity to examine in this new advanced course on follow-up marketing.
5. Online Follow-up Marketing
The term that interests us most and that you will find most often in this course is "Follow-up"!
The term Follow-up could be translated as "set of subsequent contacts", as part of a generic off-line commercial strategy, based on repeated visits to a specific potential or even already acquired customer, to sell one's products and/or or services.
In the specific sector of E-mail Marketing, it represents a "sequence of messages", which has the aim of gradually gaining the trust of the subscribers of a list with the aim of transforming them into customers and then into loyal customers.
Follow-up represents the cornerstone of the system I am about to illustrate to you.
With a professional autoresponder software, you can automatically send a series of sequential or follow-up messages to users who have subscribed to your list.
The sending process is automatic because, after having written all the messages in the series in a few hours, and having inserted them into the autoresponder program, the software will send them, from first to last, to each new user who starts to the sending-receiving process, through the simple registration, by entering your data in a form on the homepage of your site.
You will be able to choose the time interval between one message and another and also the precise time at which your subscribers should receive it.
So you will have created and processed your series of sequential messages or follow-ups!
And so, if perhaps you were a little struggling to understand the distinction between broadcasting and follow-up, now you will perfectly understand the difference between the two terms.
In fact, with a follow-up you will be able to insert contents into the messages of the series that do not constitute anything new, but only an in-depth analysis of topics that you have already dealt with previously in a summary way, perhaps on a page of your website, in order to entice them to sign up for your online course, developed in multiple messages, in order to have further details.
Or you can present various offers in the same follow-up messages, and then to convince them to sign up you will offer a free report when they sign up.
But you can also insert, in the series of messages, contents described in a superficial way, to encourage your prospects to purchase the product, which addresses that specific topic with greater precision.
Therefore, you will be able to predetermine and draft in just a few hours all the contents of your follow-up messages, which can be sent, let's say, even six months from now!
But the term follow-up has taken on an important role, even outside the scope of E-mail Marketing strategies, so much so that it now constitutes a branch with a certain autonomy: Online Follow-up Marketing!
In fact, with Online Follow-up Marketing we can indicate not only a set of sequential messages, sent via email, but also each offer contained in the various subsequent messages, inserted in the web pages of your site and resulting from a main offer.
We will see, when we talk about up-selling, that the main offer is called front-end, while the subsequent ones will generally be back-end and in other subsequent lessons we will go into these details further.
We are therefore entering the field of up-selling or cross-selling, which essentially consist of the offer following a first purchase, while the salient feature that distinguishes them is the longer period that characterizes the interval between the first front-end purchase and subsequent back-end offer, which distinguishes cross-selling, compared to up-selling.
You will then see that follow-up marketing is not just successive messages in an email-based follow-up sequence.
In fact, with a follow-up, in all cases there is a second offer, and then a third, etc., the offers can be inserted in the pages of one or more linked sites, giving rise to a follow-up of web offers based.
Afterwards you will understand why Follow-up Marketing has become the object of a particular online sales strategy, which has generated sensational profits for all those who have worked hard to apply it and which you too can learn by continuing to read !
6. Front-end and back-end products
Back-end product is simply a product sold immediately after your customer has just purchased your main product and/or service, called front-end, or front.
Remember that this little sixth lesson represents the main gist of this entire Advanced Course on Online Follow-up Marketing!
In off-line commerce, a classic example of a relationship between front-end or front-end product/back-end product is that of supermarket flyers, containing amazing offers, which convince you to visit them to buy that product at low cost, or facade product.
These offers rely on further (back-end) purchases made according to the principle of: “While I'm here…!”
Now imagine that one of your affiliates or a search engine, or some other tool for attracting visitors, has suggested your site to a surfer and that he has signed up to your list to receive offers and promotions that you will send with a follow-up of messages.
Following the registration of the new potential customer, to whom you are automatically sending a series of follow-up messages to sell a single product, if after a certain number of messages the subscriber purchases, you will have sold your main product, perhaps , as usual, at low cost, if not even below cost, just to attract him and make him your customer.
In general, after the first purchase, a thank you page for the purchase will automatically open and/or a thank you message for the purchase will be sent to the buyer's email address: if on the same page and/or email message you offer , to your new customer, a product, complementary to the product previously sold, or of which it is a natural consequence, even at a significant cost, and from this a new purchase should arise, then you will have sold your back product- end.
Please note that in online commerce, activated through e-mail marketing, the main subject of this page, unlike ordinary e-commerce, which you may find on the web and off-line commerce, the complementary relationship between the front and back-end product represents an essential requirement.
We will look at this topic more in the chapter on follow-up and back-end sales.
7. The importance of loyal customers
Loyal customers, obtained with back-end sales, are important because, according to the basic principle or law of Pareto, an illustrious economist of the nineteenth century, and which you will examine in a next lesson, from 20% of loyal customers you will be able to obtain the '80% of your sales.
And this principle represents the goal of any company that wants to remain on the market and be successful!
Hence the importance of having built a system of subsequent contacts, or sequential messages or follow-ups, to retain your new customers with back-end sales.
Naturally, to build it you will need to equip yourself with the most professional autoresponder software suitable for the purpose, which I will carry out an in-depth analysis of on this site.
Therefore, once you have acquired a good number of loyal customers, if you continuously offer back-end products with your follow-ups, you can increase your profits more quickly.
In fact, it is statistically proven that your loyal customers will be able to guarantee you at least a certain number of purchases each in the medium term, compared to new customers who have purchased just one product for the first time, and furthermore a loyal customer will be yours forever.
Repeated sales to the same now loyal customer are so profitable that it is very convenient to sell the so-called front-end or front-end products at a negligible price or below cost.
This is best done to obtain a customer's first purchase, and then have subsequent purchases of back-end products from the same.
And remember that it is not important that you have your own product to sell at all costs.
There are thousands of possibilities to sell products from other companies, which you can affiliate with online.
Now imagine that you have invested time and money to obtain the attention, credibility and trust of a prospect, who has become your customer, with his first purchase.
This is the most difficult and also the most expensive phase of the relationship with customers.
It is generally believed that online follow-up, like off-line follow-up, is composed of two processes: the acquisition of new customers and the continuous sale to loyal customers.
The most profitable and simplest process is undoubtedly selling to loyal customers, while the process of acquiring a new customer requires greater investments in time and money.
Just think about the planning, advertising, promotional activities you need to set up to get a first sale!
Once you acquire that customer, you can develop a relationship that can last a lifetime.
And this is why it is often said that 80% of the turnover comes from 20% of the customers, while on the other hand it is also true that 20% of the sales efforts must be directed towards loyal customers, while the remaining 80 % of resources should be used to find new customers.
And this, I repeat, is valid both in off-line commerce and in online commerce, with the difference that online, managing the acquisition of new customers certainly requires much less energy than offline commerce.
8. Professional autoresponder software
In this course on follow-up marketing I will show you how professional autoresponder software is essential for scheduling your follow-up messages in order to:
1 – transform your visitors into loyal customers;
2 – give your site new opportunities for success;
3 – prevent your target from turning to the competition.
And I guarantee you that here we are not talking about theories of computer technology, but only about a practical system for earning money.
These are simple explanations to use and concrete steps to take if you want to get on the road to online success.
But how did I come to understand how fundamental an autoresponder software was for an online business??
About 15 years ago the need arose to purchase an autoresponder program, worthy of the name and at an affordable price, to manage contacts with customers.
So within two years I purchased about ten autoresponder software and, after testing them, I published reviews on a site I had some time ago, autoresponders-review.net, comparing price, product quality and assistance. , frequency and free of charge of upgrades, possibility of translating the administrative interface into Italian.
At the end of the test I was so enthusiastic about an autoresponder software that I will reveal to you at the right time, despite it being in English and not in Italian, that I returned, one at a time, all the other software purchased, recovering the cost incurred for the period test.
Indeed, not only did it prove very useful in managing our contacts, but then I realized that it could become an excellent source of income, so much so that I proposed it on the Italian market, obtaining three clients in 2009, not many but in the following period a big family problem kept me away from the web, so I had to shut down and shut up.
Apart from that, that software really turned out to be the tool that allowed thousands of online companies from all over the world to increase their business on the internet.
Why not be part of this group of... lucky ones?
Although you certainly know better than me that fortune favors the brave!
But now you will understand even better the usefulness of a professional autoresponder software.
You will surely have noticed that the strategies you have applied so far have not given you any results.
And this happened for a simple reason!
You mistakenly believed that it was enough to have a website and be ranked high on search engines to have sales after sales.
In fact, the reality is very different: it is now known that only a tiny percentage of visitors will purchase on their first and perhaps only visit.
Most of your prospects will leave after less than 30 seconds, never to return, and will forget about you and your site.
Do you realize what you're losing in lost revenue by not knowing how to contact your visitors?
Do you know that you are irremediably leaving your prospects to the competition?
But the worst is yet to come!
In fact, not only are you missing out on earning opportunities, but you are literally burning your investment in search engines!
You will certainly have experienced for yourself that being at the top of the charts costs time and money.
So what's the point of all this if your visitors don't buy anything and, what's worse, they never come back to your site again?
Therefore it is absurd to make such an investment to be at the top of the rankings, when you are unable to take advantage of the situation to transform your visitors into loyal customers.
Plus you're wasting your time and energy on useless repetitive actions!
In fact, you are manually responding to requests from subscribers and customers, because you use a normal email program, such as Outlook, Eudora, etc.
Well, you are inevitably destined to lose all your current contacts, because, pressured by hundreds of copy, paste and send operations, you will not be able to send, within the expected and announced times, the answers that your prospects expect to receive on time. .
And so they will forget about you (which I guarantee is the worst thing) and if you reply, and you will necessarily do so with a considerable unjustified delay, you may be blocked by anti-spam filters and possibly find your IP address on the blacklists.
At this point you'll want to close the deal!
But think for a moment!
Do you really want all this and give up on the hoped-for success?
I absolutely don't think you want that!
So I'll tell you that the solution to the problem is very simple and you will be stunned for not having thought of it before!
I'm once again telling you about the solution that finally allows you to contact your prospects whenever you want and forever.
Only by always and constantly contacting your prospects, with a series of sequential messages, will you be able to transform them into loyal customers.
And this is because the majority of people do not buy immediately on the first visit, but the purchasing process requires a certain number of messages.
The number of messages necessary may vary depending on the type of product, the price, or the reference market segment, but know that it ranges from a minimum of five to a maximum of ten messages in sequence, so that a visitor decide to purchase a product or service.
Here are the two main advantages of an autoresponder:
1) provide an immediate and automatic response to anyone who sends you a request by email, or an informative email following a contact made through telemarketing;
2) always sell to your target, after having gradually gained their trust, through a constant flow of messages.
The mailing system I am describing to you is based on Follow-up Marketing!
The secret that I will reveal to you here lies in the power of sequential messages, which can be configured through a professional autoresponder program.
And all this will allow you to increase your earnings only if you transform your site into an automatic pilot to produce profit, so much so that you can dedicate less time to your first online business, to be able to create new ones, in an exciting and incessant exponential economic growth!
All you have to do is let your sequential message system be at the center of your online business!
Through your follow-up system or sequentially scheduled messages, you will be able to build your credibility, an essential requirement for success online.
There are no further secrets: installing your automated sequential message system is essential to transform your subscribers into loyal customers.
And don't forget to have invested time and money to have a decent amount of visitor traffic on your site, positioned at the top of the search engine rankings.
Only a complete follow-up system equipped with professional autoresponder software can give you the following advantages:
to. you will be able to implement your website with the essential function such as follow-up marketing;
b. you will have the certainty that all information coming from prospects, such as name, surname and email address, will literally be captured 24 hours a day, 365 days a year and that your messages will be sent at the agreed time;
c. you will be able to manage your visitors' registrations automatically and efficiently;
d. you will be able to dedicate your time to increasing your business, while the autoresponder software will automatically manage registrations, cancellations, double registrations, rejected addresses and addresses that are no longer active;
e. you will be able to prevent yourself from being accused of spam by asking your subscribers to confirm their registration with the double opt-in, as well as proving that you are not a spammer by being able to produce their name, surname, email address, IP address, time and date registration, and also the referral id of the registration and the referring page.
Furthermore, with professional autoresponder software you can increase your business by creating an endless series of follow-up marketing campaigns for every product you want to sell.
Ultimately with a professional autoresponder software you will be able to:
• customize the thank you and confirmation pages with the subscriber's name and/or email address;
• create, if you know a little PHP programming, dozens of redirect pages, customized based on success or error results;
• use the insertion of a string of graphic characters (captcha) in a field, for greater security against unwanted registration automation or against registration by friends, acquaintances or bad intentions;
• have, always with a view to protecting against unwanted registrations, the possibility of identifying the referral ID of the registration;
• compose your messages in html with the editor inserted in the software, instead of copying and pasting from your html editor every time;
• send messages for specific days of the week and times: very useful function for sending emails to companies during working hours;
• use an important control function for the text inserted in messages, to avoid running into anti-spam filters;
• have the guarantee that your messages will be received by all your recipients.
But what is most interesting is that you will be able to avoid running into a sea of useless actions, which represent only a waste of time, into which you can fall by purchasing so-called self-hosted autoresponder software, which I have used myself for a few years, paying an incredible price.
Although it seems like a good omen for a small company to be able to keep its costs low, there are nevertheless some obvious advantages, which may be hidden from you, but which you will be able to identify after examining this list of features, which may seem difficult to you:
1 - You will pay every month for the use of the external service, regardless of whether you are sending email marketing campaigns or not.
2 - You will even be penalized by the fact that you will pay even more if your lists grow.
3 - A “powered by” link or image will be added to the foot of each email message you send, without you being able to modify it, meaning that you will increase the business growth of your external email marketing service provider rather than your business.
4 - You will share a server with hundreds or even thousands of other users, some of whom could very well be spammers and possibly destroy the deliverability of your emails, which you will have worked hard to achieve and earn.
5 - Exporting your email marketing campaigns, autoresponder messages, contacts and statistics to another software could become a nightmare, and this will make it almost impossible for you to leave these services alone.
6 - You will find yourself completely taken aback by the branding strategies of the services you are using, especially if you have a reputation as an expert web designer or if you have an agency with your loyal customers, who believe in your brand.
7 - There will be nothing you can do other than passively accept the software updates that will be imposed on you.
8 - You will be using a service, not a software, and therefore you will never be able to modify the source code to adapt the software to your needs.
9 - You will not be able to add a link or image of your personal brand at the foot of your messages, and you may be annoyed by the various powered by external email marketing services.
In the face of these obvious sacrifices, however, you will have considerable benefits, because you will no longer use self-hosted software, which despite being represented by a license, which you will pay in a single solution, and without further monthly payments or per number of emails, being able increase your lists according to your desires, nevertheless with a software of this kind you will need to purchase space on a dedicated, or virtually dedicated, server, with the monthly costs that this entails and with all the waste of time that the installation of a self hosted autoresponder software entails.
And moreover, the success of all the most well-known Italian and American webmarketers, such as Italo Cillo, JL Marshall, Corey Rudl, Armand Morin, etc., is based exclusively on the use of external e-mail marketing services such as Aweber, GetResponder, MailChimp, Mailup, iContact, ActiveCampaign, etc., because in fact they were the first to realize how useless and expensive it was to get a server and then install a self-hosted software on it.
Moreover, not even the advantage that a self-hosted autoresponder software presents in being able to be installed on your hosting service, and which guarantees you that you are the only one who manages the software, so you will never have to worry about spammers who could reduce your rate of deliverability, it could be convincing.
In fact, in external professional e-mail marketing services, the hypothesis that you may be involved in acts of spam by operators who share the same IP number as you, as well as being common to self-hosted autoresponder software hosted on shared servers, and is an hypothesis that remains relegated only to cases of external email marketing services that are very cheap and within everyone's reach.
Obviously if you want something more effective in your work as a webmarketer, you will have to dedicate a larger budget to expenses, but it will never be as expensive and fruitless as in the case of using self-hosted software.
Which I advise you to avoid like the plague!
And now try to plan the use of a follow-up and include it in your email marketing strategies.
But if you're not ready to do it yet, you don't have to worry too much because I will suggest lots of new ideas in the lessons of this advanced course on follow-up marketing.
We will see how all these strategies have the aim of successfully selling one or more products and/or services.
I only anticipate that in the lessons of the next chapters of the advanced course I will talk about how to find a product to sell, how to structure a sales page and how to be found on the internet, optimizing your site for search engines, in order to capture addresses emails and names of visitors to implement your list.