Did you know that your wholesale merchandise business is losing money if you aren't trying to get the contact information of your potential customers, as well as those who have already bought from you? If someone buys from you the first time, you need to make sure you can contact them again the next time so that you can let them know of your other offers.
After all, they've already bought from you once, so why not make them buy from you again! As you may understand, there are potential customers who visit your site, look at your offer and decide to leave without buying.
If you don't have a way of being able to contact them again, there's little chance they'll come back to your site.
That's almost a guaranteed fact! Know this from tested experience: potential customers need at least 7 or 8 repeated exposures to your sales message before they buy from you.
This is why it's important for you to capture a potential customer's e-mail address and follow up 7 or 8 times more about your offer.
However, there is an art involved in following up with potential customers and getting them to buy your products.
One of the more effective ways of making the sale is by sending personalized e-mails.
You can do just that with such e-commerce business with the help of an "autoresponder," which is a script or service that keeps e-mail address and names of potential customers.
With an autoresponder program, you can load several follow up e-mail messages and set their delivery intervals (e.
g.
, every 3 days or every week).
You can even personalize each e-mail message.
There are web hosting companies that include autoresponders as part of their hosting packages.
You'll also find companies offering autoresponder services if you'd rather not deal with hosting an autoresponder program on your domain or the one you have has limited features.
These companies offer advanced features and allow you to create targeted campaigns, e-courses, OTOs (one time offers) and special promotions.
Their autoresponder system would also have customizable forms that will allow you to capture all the information you want about your customers.
You will have to pay a monthly fee to avail of this type of autoresponder service, but it usually affordable and worth it.
Thanks to spammers, those who send bulk, unsolicited commercial e-mails, there is now a law in place in order to protect consumers and marketers alike.
If you want to capture contact information of prospective customers, you will have to use an opt-in or double opt-in method.
Prospective customers fill out a form with their e-mail address and submit it.
The double opt-in method is one wherein customers who fill out a form with their e-mail address must confirm their interest to be in your mailing list by clicking on a link contained in the e-mail sent to the e-mail address their provided.
If they don't, they won't be added to the list.
Many marketers now use the double opt-in method because this ensures that they are getting valid and serious people.
Be aware that e-mail deliverability has become a serious problem.
Just because you see an autoresponder program sending your follow up messages to your contacts doesn't mean that the messages actually reach their inbox.
E-mails can get filtered or worse, not get delivered at all.
The big autoresponder services go to great lengths to work with the different ISPs to make sure that e-mails coming from their servers don't get filtered as spam or get rejected.
Keep the above information in mind when you come across free autoresponder programs or services.
There is no guarantee that your follow up messages will be delivered to your contacts.
Paying a monthly fee of $20 can be worth it because you can be assured your e-mails will be delivered.
Another thing you must keep in mind is that if you sign up with a free autoresponder service, you are likely not going to be able to transfer your list to a paid service.
Your list members must opt-in to your new list.
Don't lose your wholesale merchandise agenda with your prospective customers.
Set up an autoresponder so you can capture their contact information and send them follow up messages.
An auto responder is the very powerful way you can build your list of prospective customers and increase sales in any e-commerce project for good!