The Importance of Follow Up with your Clients

The Importance of Following Up with Your Clients

Once you have a client, whether it's a short-term project or a long-term one, it's important to follow up with them. Your former and current clients are likely one of the best sources for future clients, and it doesn't take much to please a former client when you follow up with them. A nice short note, a birthday card, or a congratulatory tweet, can all go far in keeping you in the forefront of their mind for future projects.

The Little Things Matter

People are touched more than you realize by the little things. A handwritten note and a newspaper clipping from an article you read, a quick email regarding a new product or service you are offering, a link to new software that you thought might work for them, a small note telling them they're awesome, will mean a lot if it's done in an authentic way.

Clients Are Referral Generators

Current clients can be great sources of new referrals. This is because they are happy. Keep your current clients informed about all the different types of work that you do outside of the work you do for them. Offer incentives for referrals too, as keeping connected will result in more clients.

Stay on Their Mind

This is most especially true if the client was a short-term project based client. By sharing information with the former client, and sending them periodic information about what you're doing, things you've achieved, as well as congratulating them on their achievements and life milestones, you'll stay on their mind. When they think of a project that involves the work you do, you'll be the first one they think about.

People Get Busy

The client may have been meaning to contact you to talk about a new project but life just keeps getting in the way. If you are the one who reaches out, they're much more likely to follow through with a new project. They just got busy and kept putting the idea of the new project on the back burner. You can help move new projects to the front burner by proactively contacting your clients on a regular basis.

Take It Easy

It's important to follow up without being irritating. Don't bombard your client or past client with continuous streams of emails. As a service provider, you're in a different place than an email marketer, and while you do want to grow and develop your prospects list, once someone is or has been a paying client, if you bother them daily with marketing messages they're just going to tune you out.

Remember to segment your audience. Short-term project clients should be on a different email list than current paying clients. Both should be on a different list than prospects.

Prospects you want to contact at least weekly, if not daily. Current clients you can get away with contacting at least monthly. Past clients you may only want to contact every 30 to 90 days. It depends on your audience, but one thing is for sure - following up with style and class will convert them all over again.

How Your Personal Story Can Attract Clients

Telling the best story of why you do what you do can attract clients. In fact, telling your story can do a better job at client attraction than listing the features of the work you do. The trick is weaving the story with the solutions you provide and how that benefits your future clients.

Stories have been used for ages to convey an idea, suggest solutions, and teach morals to others. Stories define our childhood, and give meaning to our lives. Your story, told in the right way, can attract more clients that you thought possible.

Stories can be used to tell who you are, why you're here, what you do, your vision for your future, and teach others something important while demonstrating your values. Telling your personal story of how you came to be what you are now can be a very powerful motivator for prospects to decide to become clients. And telling your story well is an art form that you can learn.

* Tell It at the Right Time - The context in which you share your story is almost as important as the story. When you are sharing something of a personal nature, make sure the tone of the story matches the emotions you want to evoke for a particular event. You probably have many personal stories that can be shared, so pick the right one, for the right audience, at the right time.

* Be Authentic - Only you can be you, so it's important to be real. Telling your story in a way that demonstrates who you are, why you're here and what makes you tick is important. You can show your vulnerable side, talk about a time when you experienced failure and how that affected you and what you did about it, and more...as long as you are being authentically you.

* Set the Stage - Stories need a beginning, middle and end. You want to remember to evoke all the senses in your story, telling it so that your prospects are emotionally connected to you by the end of it. Remember that people often go into their mind and imagination during a story, and you want them to bring up the right feelings. Words, context and tone matter.

* Understand Your Purpose - To help you choose the right story to tell, and to tell it in the right way, consider the purpose of sharing your story. Are you trying to explain who you are, why you're here, teach something, pass on your vision or something else entirely? If you know your purpose you can find the right story, words and phrases easier.

* Practice - Like with most things in life, you'll get better with practice. Whether you're typing out your story, speaking your story into a recording device, or telling it to a live audience, it all takes practice. You want to be able to tell your various stories at the drop of a hat when the appropriate time comes up with your potential clients, and practice will assist you in developing this skill.

You've heard it before, and you're going to hear it again. We have two ears and one mouth for a reason. Listen to others twice as much as you speak. Giving other people your full attention will go far in helping you attract clients with whom you can share your story in the first place.

Attracting New Clients through Community Involvement

There are several ways in which you can attract new clients to your service-based business, but one of the most effective is via community involvement. Don't get worried. Community involvement can happen both on and offline. There are communities that exist only online and there are communities that exist only offline. You can do both for best impact, but if there is a reason you can only participate online that is fine too.

There are two types of communities you can get involved in. You can involve yourself in a community of your peers, or a community of your audience.

Peer Groups

In terms of peer groups, there are peers with whom you are in direct competition and those who offer complementary services to yours. Both can help you get clients but the complementary group will be more beneficial to you because they are not direct competition. Consider that when you get involved in any particular group.

Business focused groups, mastermind groups, industry focused groups and so forth all exist to help you educate yourself further and provide connections. You can get clients through word of mouth when a peer group member feels you would be right for a position because they have come to know you. Peer groups also offer opportunities for joint venture (JV) partnerships which can widen and expand your audience.

Niche Groups

Audience or niche groups are the best place for you to spend your time because you can find groups full of your ideal clients. You can locate these groups by looking at local meet-ups in the area, searching for groups on LinkedIn.com, and searching for and joining message boards devoted to a particular niche.

The key making niche groups work is to join the group, freely answer questions for them and let them come to see you as part of the group. Let your signature line speak for itself, and do not try to sell your services at all. They will come to you when they see that you offer what they want via your normal sharing mechanisms.

Understand the Pros and Cons

Be a free and open source of information regarding your niche. This is how people will get to know you and trust you and start seeing you as someone to refer to others or hire. There can be problems with choosing to spend more time in communities of your peers than in communities consisting of your niche audience. Doing so can result in a problem finding your ideal clients and being stuck in a bubble of competitors.

You want to focus on spending more time in communities that are made up of your ideal audience than with your peers but you want to also participate in peer communities so that you can become known as a community expert.

Finally, when you join either type of group you want to realize that when you first join, you are the new person and you are unknown. No one is going to trust you immediately - whether they are meeting you in person or online. Take the time to get to know others before offering your services in any manner, and get to know the culture of the group. Let your business card or your signature line do the selling for you. Make participation your goal and more clients will be the result.

ow to Create an Email Marketing Campaign to Attract More Clients

First, it's important to realise that email marketing is about conversions more than attraction. Your list-building campaign is about attraction; your email marketing is about making connections and building trust so that they convert to clients. All marketing campaigns start with pretty much the same requirements: understanding your goals and knowing your audience.

Attraction is made up of various events such as blogging regularly, participating in social media, and offering something of value in exchange for a potential client's email address. Once the lead signs up, attraction continues with your willingness and ability to deliver something of value to their inbox.

A converting email marketing campaign incorporates the following components.

Audience Segmentation

The people on your various email lists are there from a particular place or due to particular event. They either signed up for your free item, low cost item, via social media or they are actually already a client. At the very least, separate your email list members between buyers and those who have not purchased yet. Segmentation allows you to personalize the messages going to your list members, which will help you attract more paying clients.

Compelling, Well-Made Content

Create content that speaks directly to your list members. Targeted, relevant, and valuable messages tailored directly to the specific audience will be effective in converting the curious into a customer. Once they've converted, it's important to move them to the buyer's list and off the lead list. Content can't be that compelling if it's not targeted correctly.

Frequently Delivered Content

Your audience needs to receive regular email updates from you. Believe it or not - no matter how excited your audience was to sign up for your list, if you don't contact them with valuable information on a regular basis, you'll lose them. Contact them at least weekly, if not daily, but only if you have good information to share that adds value to their life.

Frequent Tests of Effectiveness

At every stage of your marketing campaign, it's important to conduct tests. Test two headlines; test open rates; test reaction to your call to action; test your deliverability rate. When you test something, note what can be improved upon, then seek to improve it immediately. If you improve upon everything as you move forward, you'll make your email marketing campaign that much more successful.

Continuous List-Building Activities

You should always be conducting activities to build your list with targeted members. The more people who want what you have to offer that sign up for your list, the more likely you are to convert them to actual clients. It's a mathematical fact that the more people you attract to your email list, the more people you'll attract as a client. It's in the numbers and it's the truth.

When you work to improve your email marketing based on facts learned when you check your metrics and test your assumptions, you will create a customer attraction email marketing magnet. You'll convert more sign-ups to paying customers over time.