If you’re a business owner or operator, you’ve likely thought to some extent (hopefully) about your relationship with your customers and clients.
You’ve likely wondered about the best ways to follow up with customers as well as prospective clients. But maybe you’re tired of making follow-up calls to customers.
Maybe you’re even wondering, “How do I follow up with a customer on the phone?”
This little aspect of “following up” happens to be crucial in running a business successfully.
The best ways to follow up with customers has to do with CRM (Customer Relationship Management). But maybe you’re perplexed and it’s daunting when you hear about things like Facebook messenger contact integrations.
CRM And How It Relates To Best Ways To Follow Up With Customers
Customer Relationship Management is about a lot more than CRM software.
Managing relationships can be tedious and challenging work, both in our personal lives and in our professional lives.
It’s doubly hard to keep all of our relationships healthy and fruitful in our professional lives, especially as our business grows.
However, as your business continues to scale, it’s going to be harder and harder to follow up and stay connected with your customers and clients.
The good news is that there are excellent tools for the best ways to follow up with customers online.
Whether you need help responding to incoming messages or replies on your posts, Customers.ai has a free autoresponder chatbot that drastically improves customer relations.
Plus, you get the attractive green “Very responsive to messages” badge of honor.
Defining Your Follow Up Strategy
Do you have sufficient follow up strategies? Or more like haphazard emails, messages, and phone calls that never seem to convert.
Let us quickly define exactly what is a follow up strategy.
An effective follow-up strategy happens to be whatever your plan is for the communication required to establish a relationship with a customer or potential customer.
The entire purpose of establishing strategies for following up is for you and your business to set in place a sales process that can incorporate into your business’s everyday practices, all with one intention: CONVERTING LEADS AND GROWING YOUR BUSINESS.
So, for those who were wondering, “What is a follow up strategy?” — we went ahead and answered that crucial question.
Continue Reading For 10 Quick And Effective Follow Up Strategies
Every successful business knows about the need to follow up with customers and prospective clients, but this is one of the easiest things to put off, especially for busy people.
You might start to make excuses like “I already called them,” or “it can wait until I finish all of these other pressing matters.”
But you’re just showing that you tend to neglect the best ways to follow up with customers and shy away from best business practices.
This will surely come back to haunt you and stand in the way of growing your business.
Here are some at-a-glance follow-up strategies that will help you figure out the best ways to follow up with customers
- Be available… always. One way to do this is by utilizing a customer service chatbot across your Facebook, Website, Instagram, and SMS. This is easy to do with the multichannel magic of Customers.ai!
- If you can’t personally respond to every inquiry or lead from a Facebook group, then it’s high time to learn how to use Messenger chatbot for Facebook groups.
- There are a number of best ways to follow up with customers. You’re not just limited to online efforts or direct response marketing tactics, even though the internet and various social media channels make it extremely easy.
- You can follow up with clients, customers, and prospects via handwritten letters, which always stands out, especially in the technology-fueled times we live in.
- You can also use other effective follow-up strategies like showing up in-person to a (socially-distanced) event you know your customer, client, or prospect in question will be attending. Face-to-face follow-ups will help you stand out! Even more so these days!
- Follow up over coffee, a cocktail (if you partake, that is), or even lunch. If your goal is to #StayHome, then try a Zoom happy hour.
Unicorn Tip: Provide useful materials when following up, such as news, articles, and top-shelf information. You will want this information to speak to your client and be relevant to their desires and goals.
- Send birthday cards or appropriate holiday greetings with a personal touch, if you have such information. It’s always a great idea to let a client, customer, or prospect know that you’re thinking about them. People like to feel seen and heard!
- Send happy and funny non-business-related materials, like jokes, emails, etc. But, as always, stay appropriate! This will help you build a more personal connection and drive up engagement. Chatbot drip campaigns are perfect for touching base in a non-invasive and conversational way.
- Offer free samples when it comes to your product or service. This speaks volumes!
- Send your customers or clients prospective referrals if you have the ability. This will show customers/clients/prospects that you are a valuable asset.
- Craft informative white papers and case studies. Send them around, which will show in detail the sort of results you can achieve. You can also learn how to answer FAQs with chatbots.
Fighting Your Resistance To Effective Follow Up Strategies
We don’t blame you for being resistant to effective follow up strategies.
Hopefully, you are not still asking, “what is a follow up strategy?!”
It’s just a plan! A plan for how you’re going to continue to keep the lines of communication open with your customers, clients, and prospects.
(pssst… Facebook Messenger has 1.3 billion active monthly users! As of November 2020.)
It’s incredibly natural to resist the best ways to follow up with customers.
Maybe a potential or existing customer didn’t return your last phone call or email. Perhaps a client never seems to be available or has expressed hesitance or lack of interest altogether.
In such cases, it’s good to fight your resistance. With so many best ways to follow up with customers, you can mount a multi-faceted strategy to successfully get in touch with those with who you desire to get in touch.
So Many Channels To Follow Up On And So Little Time
You have the power to call prospects via phone, text, or you can also email your clients to keep in touch and follow up.
Go ahead and send them a letter! Take advantage of our tried and true postal mail system. How good is this lead? Maybe consider sending a little care package or free sample via overnight delivery.
Even a simple text message follow up will let your client or customer know that they’re on your mind. Better yet, go ahead and text them an entirely automated conversation with a Customers.ai SMS text chatbot drip campaign.
Facebook message a prospective customer online! You don’t even have to do it yourself. With intuitive conversational chatbots available, there are no excuses!
Keep the flywheel spinning and the funnel flowing with automation!
These are only some of the various communication avenues you can explore for effective CRM.
Remember that the types of messages you send your customers and prospects can (and should) be much more varied. Instead of simply asking customers to do more business with you or prospects to do business with you for the first time.
Stay away from sounding salesy and stale.
One great way to master CRM is with an effective Facebook post autoresponder, which will help you successfully add engagement to your Facebook business page.
Turn your Facebook Business page commenters into leads and prospects and, ultimately, help you engage in the best ways to follow up with customers.
Your After Sales Follow Up Efforts Are Important, Too
How you respond to your customers with who you’re currently doing business is crucial and should never be overlooked.
Sure, finding new customers is one important aspect of running a successful operation, but so is tending to your list of current customers and clients.
The Harvard Business Review reports that it can cost between 5-25 times more to sell or provide services to a new client than to service an existing client.
Aim to continue to provide excellent existing services, not to mention new services and products to an existing customer or client. Such measures will always help boost your sales and revenue.
Make sure to send your gratitude to existing customers. Check in with them when it’s appropriate and timely to do so.
Keep your communication materials concise out of respect for everyone’s time.
Keep The Second Sale in mind as you continue to preserve and strengthen your lines of communication with those who are currently doing business with you.
It never hurts to request referrals from your clients and customers. Especially if you’re giving your current business associates an amazing return on their investment.
Often, current clients will be happy to spread the word for you. It’s called “Word of Mouth Advertising,” and it may seem old-school, but this is extremely effective in helping you grow your business. The sky’s the limit!
Best Practices In Sales Follow Up Content
Maybe you’re wondering about other ways to follow-up with customers, such as how to write a follow-up sales email? Or you’re looking to get a sample follow-up email to a client after sending a proposal.
The same is true in your Facebook chat follow up efforts. Read on for a few Unicorn marketing for business tips when it comes to creating successful follow-up content.
First, try to avoid using old and tired expressions and phrases. For instance, avoid anything similar to these:
“Hello, just wanted to check in with you…”
“I’d just like to follow up on our previous conversation…”
“Hey, just circling back to follow up with you…”
Sure, there’s nothing necessarily wrong with this type of wording. However, you will want to make sure that your words do not come across as uninspired, impersonal, and, essentially, lacking in the value department.
The last thing you want to do is sound robotic.
Remember to keep things brief, but try to include a personal touch in the message you craft. Or use our free Facebook Messenger templates for easy peasy chatbot conversation design.
Study your customers as well as your competitors.
Differentiate yourself with your message body, not to mention take the time to craft a unique and grabbing subject line.
Get to your point quickly, and always demonstrate value to your clients and customers.
Use concrete data to back up any claims you make while executing your follow up strategies.
Customers.ai, THE Easiest And Best Way To Follow Up With Customers
Customers.ai makes becoming a CRM wizard incredibly easy to do, and you can customize and change-up your messaging styles to fit your mood, not to mention the distinct circumstances you currently operate under with a current or prospective customer.
Getting in front of problems (or even ahead of issues before they transpire), well, that’s just effective CRM. Knowing Facebook Messenger rules and best practices will also help you avoid unwanted problems down the road.
Sign up for your free edition of Customers.ai today! One chatbot with a single user-friendly dashboard can make your multi-channel CRM efforts effectively incorporate the very best follow up strategies into your growing business.