Did I get your attention?  You only have a few days left to get this task done.  Are you are one of the many business owners or sales professionals who still have this task on your list?  You may even have a stack of holiday cards sitting on your desk ready to go.  But at some point in the past month or most likely many times you decided to put it off, wait until tomorrow, or maybe take care of writing and sending your holiday greeting cards over one of the past weekends.

And now you find yourself exactly where you don’t want to be, 15 days before the big holiday, no holiday greeting cards in the mail.  You have a decision to make…  Do you stop everything and send those holiday cards out or do you just forget about it?

The answer? STOP EVERYTHING AND GET IT DONE NOW! This may seem a bit crazy or even bias because you know I am a big SendOutCards user and often promote using SendOutCards on Follow Up Success.  Card sending is an important step in your follow up process and holiday card sending is almost at the top.

Here are my top three reasons why you should stop everything and send out your holiday greeting cards now:

1. Appreciating your customers and prospects – Every single one of your customers enjoys being appreciated and the holidays is a great time to say thank you for the past business you have received.  Prospects can easily be turned into customers by simply saying thank you for learning more about you and your business while wishing for them a great holiday with family and friends.
2. Reestablishing the business relationship – One of my goals for 2010 is to create stronger relationships with my customers and prospects.  By sending holiday cards I will reestablish past relationships that I may have let slip through the cracks.  This is important when you reach out to past customers or prospects in the New Year as you will have recent contact.
3. Top of Mind Awareness – This is the big one!  Creating top of mind awareness with your customers and prospects when they are surrounded by their closest friends and family is an essential step in your follow up and referral strategy.  If you are top of mind with your customer or prospect they are more likely to bring you and your business up in conversation or think about you for a potential referral.

Hopefully I have encouraged you to take action!  Maybe, you have already picked up that box of holiday cards from your desk or floor and have starting filling them out.  Possibly, you have too many cards to send and feel hopeless!  If you are feeling hopeless SendOutCards would be the best gift to give yourself this holiday season!  With my help within a few hours you can have all of your holiday cards in the mail each personalized with your message.  To learn more about SendOutCards or to set up your account visit my Follow Up Tools page or contact me.  I am more than happy to help you through this process!

Whether you use SendOutCards, go buy cards from the store, or use the cards you already have, just get it done!  Stop everything and do this now!  I promise you it’s worth the time.

Do you have great business success stories from sending cards?  Please tell us all about it by leaving a comment!

Related posts:

1. Increase Referrals and Attract More Clients by Sending Holiday Cards
2. Do You Still Need to Send Your Holiday Cards?
3. Holiday Follow Up: Greeting Cards, Postcards, and E-cards

There should be no question in your mind that email is a powerful follow up tool for your business and should be included in your follow up strategy.  Creating a list of customers, prospects, and referral sources who have asked you to market to them with email by requesting to be on your newsletter or specials list is brilliant!  In fact why not take a moment to subscribe to my Follow Up Success Newsletter now!

With your email list you have the ability to:

• Follow up with past customers
• Announce new product releases
• Educate past and current customers
• Continue to market additional products and services
• Share success stories with your product or service
• Maintain top of mind awareness
• Create additional referral opportunities

Now is the time to start creating a list for your business.  There are many options available when deciding which email service to use for your list.  I use and recommend both AWeber and iContact with my websites.  These are two great companies to use and are pretty similar.  Look into each of them and decide which one will work best for you or opt into the form below and learn more about how AWeber might work for your business:

AWeber just made it really easy to create great looking newsletter opt in forms for your website or blog!  Released just in the past few weeks you can now go to your AWeber account and create a new form using one of the many templates available.  Choose from many great categories like automotive, corporate, retail, money, real estate, and more.  Learn more about the AWeber options by visiting Shawn Collins Affiliate Marketing Blog.

Watch this video to learn how you can create a new form from your existing AWeber account:

You will need to set up your AWeber account to use the form generator but I promise it will be worth it!

Related posts:

1. Creating Great Follow Up With Your Clients in 7 Simple Steps
2. Creating a Follow Up Strategy
3. Two Simple Follow Up Strategies for Speakers and Presenters

There are many reasons to send greeting cards to your customers. General follow up thank you cards, birthday cards, customer appreciation cards, and of course holiday cards. All of these customer follow up greeting cards should be a standard marketing practice for any business.

One of my favorite opportunities to reach out to existing customers and create stronger relationships is Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving after all is all about gratitude and what better way to show gratitude to your customers than by sending them a Thanksgiving card and letting them know how much you appreciate their business?

I truly believe in sending Thanksgiving cards to follow up with your customers and prospects. In fact I have recent memories of handwriting over 500 Thanksgiving cards to my clients not too long ago. This was a huge and exhausting task with each card containing two or three lines of personalized text. I spent well over two months completing this process! And while I was all gung-ho to send out holiday greeting cards to my clients as well… It was just not going to happen. I had all the holiday cards on my desk but could not get them completed in the two remaining weeks I had left. At the time I remember thinking there must be a better to get this done… Of course there is a better way and I discovered it about six months later. The next time I mailed Thanksgiving cards to my clients I sent 600 and did them all in about four hours instead of two months! I used an incredible system called SendOutCards and you can learn more about this process by visiting my Follow Up Tools page.

There are many reasons to send out Thanksgiving cards to your clients, prospects, and referral sources. The main one being appreciation. Everyone likes to be acknowledged and appreciated and when you do this your clients will do more business with you, prospects will start doing business with you, and your referral sources will send you even more referrals.

Now is the time! Start following up with your customers and prospects today with Thanksgiving cards!

Related posts:

1. Increase Referrals and Attract More Clients by Sending Holiday Cards
2. Sending Holiday Cards to Your Customers is a Waste of Time!
3. Do You Still Need to Send Your Holiday Cards?

Last week I had the opportunity to speak at the Cool Twitter Conferences at the House of Blues in Hollywood.  My topic for my discussion was Using twitter to Attract More Clients, Increase Your Referrals, and Maintain Top of Mind Awareness With Your Customers.  It’s a big topic about using twitter one of the hottest social media sites as a follow up tool.

I started the discussion with a question…  Are you giving business to your competitors?  The answer for many businesses is YES!  Have you heard this before?  “The fortune is in the follow up” or the really overused yet clearly correct “People do business with people they Know, LIKE, and TRUST!”  These are great statements and both are true yet many businesses do not have any follow up strategy and don’t really understand how to create the “know, like, and trust” feeling with their clients and prospects.

So what is a follow up strategy?  It’s about creating a system for follow up which will be used with every new client, prospect, or referral source.  The system could look something like this:

New Customer Follow Up System:

• Day 1  – new customer welcome email
• Day 1  – new customer welcome card
• Day 1 – new customer welcome tweet on twitter
• Week 2 – follow up phone call checking to insure client is happy with purchase
• Week 4 – follow up card “It’s been 30 days since your purchase and we want to make sure you are happy”
• Week 4 – follow up tweet on twitter similar to the week 4 card
• Week 8 – follow up phone call just “checking in”
• Week 12 – follow up card Discussion additional products or services you might offer

I can keep going but you have the idea right?  The best way to increase your referrals with your customers and clients is to have a follow up strategy in place.  Of course having it in place is only the first step!  You must be committed to your strategy, you want to make sure once you start following up you keep it going!  You might want to read a previous post, Creating Great Follow UP With Your Clients in 7 Simple Steps where I went into more detail about this process.

Do you have a follow up strategy?  Please take a moment and tell us what you are doing by leaving a comment.

Related posts:

1. Follow Up Strategies: Two Days Before Christmas
2. Are You A Multitasking Follow Up Extremist?
3. Creating a Great Customer Experience

Two very simple follow up ideas for Speakers and Presenters.  Yes even Speakers and Presenters need to follow up!  This week I had the wonderful opportunity to speak at the Encinitas Rotary group about using Social Media to follow up and engage customers.  I have to admit the setting for this discussion was perfect, the room was right on the water with a wall of glass facing the ocean.  The room felt like the ocean was coming right in with each incoming wave!

After the discussion I had spent some time outside listening, viewing, and enjoying the beautiful day.  When I was about to leave I decided to make this short video on follow up to share with you how I will follow up with the members of this group.  Here is the video:

Two simple steps:

• Send an email to each person thanking them for the opportunity to speak at their meeting
• Mail each person a thank you card

As a Speaker and Presenter why would I want to take these two follow up steps?  I can think of many great reasons but I will focus on the basics.  It’s about building upon the relationship I have started.  This group just listened to me talk for an hour.  To this group I would be considered an expert or go to person in social media, follow up, and referral strategies.  The opportunity from speaking is to continue the relationship!  If I do this effectively I will naturally receive clients, referrals, and additional speaking engagements.

Are you a speaker, presenter, or trainer?  Please let me know the methods you are using to follow up with your audience by leaving a comment.

Related posts:

1. Creating a Follow Up Strategy
2. Follow Up Strategies: Two Days Before Christmas
3. Attracting New Customers and Increasing Your Referrals this Year!