I can’t believe I even have to blog about this, but it does seem that many people wonder – how much time and energy should they put into answering questions from non-customers (subscribers or complete strangers?)
The answer is you DAMNED WELL BETTER! Â
In fact, you should be going out of your way to get your market to ASK you more questions – even though on the face of it, that may seem rather suicidal when you barely have enough time to run your business as it is.Â
But remember, questions are the way your market get to know you, trust you and help share your passion and mission with the world.Â
Not only should you send them an email response, you may consider other ways to make SURE they know how good you really are for them…making it so they MUST come back to you and buy from you in the future.Â
I’ve even jumped on Skype or on the phone with them, produced a quick tutorial video for them or, on occasion, made a tweak to their site or software for them.Â
Your subscribers and visitors are the FOUNDATION of your business – especially in today’s day and age of social networking.
I’ve had people on my list that still communicate regularly after 10-years!
I had someone send me an unsubscribe a couple of weeks back apologizing that they were leaving my list because they have moved on to another job and have sold their online business (for a nice profit I may add!).Â
They felt as though they were somehow letting me down by leaving my list…go figure!
Here are some business reasons why you want to respond to 100% of your subscriber, non-customer questions:
- Reciprocity – once you have given them your valuable time and knowledge, they will feel compelled to reciprocate (this can mean buying something or simply being a champion for you)
- Trust and Credibility – I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had a customer buy minutes after receiving a response to their question, they were (sometimes without knowing it) testing to see if our business was trustworthy and credible
- Re-use content. Here’s a little secret I have rarely told anyone outside of my InfoMarketer’sZone members – most of our new products are put together by simply answering user questions…we compile those questions and answers in different ways, but after a month or two of responding to subscribers, we have the foundation for a new proudct that we can sell to tens of thousands of others…pretty cool!
- Word-of-Mouth. The entire basis of marketing is changing from invisible push to highly visible pull…rather than blasting an ad from a virtually invisible company, your customers now buy based on visibility and word-of-mouth. Who do you suppose will be the champions that will give you the word-of-mouth boost you need to have to lead in this new internet marketing world?Â
- You learn with each question your market asks. The old addage that until you can teach someone else to do what you know, your information is useless really is true. By making sure you help your subscribers and emailers, you are refining your products, messaging and positioning at the same time. The result is MUCH higher profits in your pocket.Â
Aside from the business reasons to answer your non-customer emails, I am a huge believer in being passionate and being fulfilled by the products and services you market.
By helping every person that comes your way, you feed that passion and motivation to do even more – the return shows on your monthly order reports.Â
Finally,all of this is not to say you can’t promote paid products and services – we certainly do that as well.
In the process of answering questions or providing help to our subscribers, we use the following test…
If a paid tool or service is likely to help a prospect realize at least 3X more revenue than the cost of that product or service is to them, then it makes sense to share that with them…even urging them to adopt the recommended resource.Â
So yes, make sure you spend time answering 100% of your market’s questions…you will get payback many times larger than the time/effort you put in down the road.
