So you've built your site and started to promote it. You're getting some sales, but you want to generate more.

There is one simple sales technique that almost every Internet marketing expert agrees will DRAMATICALLY boost your sales every single day - follow up with your prospects.

The bottom line is this - if you want to vastly increase the number of your visitors who turn into valued customers, you need to contact them over and over. Through a series of messages, you need to convey the emotional and logical reasons why they MUST buy your product.

If you assume that your visitors are going to buy from you on their first and only visit to your site, you are mistaken. It just doesn't happen that quickly. Approximately 80% of sales are made AFTER the initial contact. Do you see how many sales you could be losing if you don't initiate further contact?

Consider your site's visitors perspective. Do you grab your credit card every time you pass through a store and see something you like? It doesn't mean you're going to buy it right then and there. When you decide to buy it, do you go back to that same store? Maybe, maybe not! Would you be more inclined to return to a particular store if the sales associate gave you a courtesy call?

How do you follow up for maximum effect and what tools and techniques should you use?

The Tools

Begin by realizing that you can't do all this by yourself! Suppose you get 500 visitors a day to your site and one in fifty of them requests information. That's ten e-mails you're going to have to send manually for the next few days or weeks. And tomorrow you get another ten, and the next day another ten... can you imagine how complicated managing this process could be?

What is the best management tool available? Sequential or follow-up autoresponders.

Autoresponders are the e-mail equivalent of "fax-on-demand" systems. Someone sends your autoresponder an e-mail or subscribes to it on your web site and the autoresponder sends the messages and manages the follow-up process from that point. It does the managing for you!

A good autoresponder system will send out the right message on the right day, address your prospect by name, keep track of the follow-up sequence while automatically building you a database of interested contacts.

Most web site hosting packages come with autoresponders. Usually, however, these send out a single message and therefore can't be used for continually following up with prospects. Instead, you can pay monthly fees to an autoresponder service or install software on your site and run them directly from there.