Follow Up Failure: Are you Guilty?

You put your heart and soul into a creating a product. You’ve made sure it contains professionally written content. You’ve marketed it diligently, using social networking, article marketing, guest blogging – all the tricks. 

You’ve even created a follow up plan.

But it’s not working. The extra sales they promised you just haven’t done more than trickle in.

If you’re wondering what went wrong, check out these common mistakes:

1. Your content is great – but it’s not content your unique subscriber or customer will drool with delight over. In other words, you skipped the research stage. Not all the content in the world is going to make the new subscriber who downloaded your free but useless-to-her special report interested in taking out her cash.

2. Your subject line simply doesn’t intrigue her enough into opening your email… or it doesn’t speak to her deepest need. “Turn One Customer into Two” is not going to excite her if she doesn’t actually sell products or services.

3. You have no affiliate program. Think about it… if you could by a great sales course from someone who has no affiliate program, and someone who does (and it pays 85% commission) who are you most likely to buy from, if you’re like 75% of all online marketers and augment your income with affiliate marketing?
 
4. You have an affiliate program – but you didn’t bother to mention it in your follow up emails. (See above.)
	
5. You’ve outsourced your follow up to someone who isn’t qualified. You may or may not know it. You may be using them because your budget is tight and they were cheap… or you may be blindly trusting someone without having checked their work (or even credentials.)  Even if you do outsource, you need to direct operations enough so that your customers feel as if the contact really is coming from you.

It doesn’t matter whether it’s a “sin of omission” or just something done sloppily – not thoroughly planning your follow up, and anticipating or fixing problems, is a risk you simply can’t afford to take.