If you have good F.A.Q.'s, you will reduce amount of inbound phone calls and you will be showing your customers you are concerned about their questions. If you don't have F.A.Q.'s, you really need to get them up on your site as quickly as possible.

3. Post your response time to inquiries in your customer service section and stick to it.

Most Internet consumers feel that their inquiries will go unanswered or they will have to wait days to hear back from Internet businesses. Post on your site that you will return e-mails within 24 hours. That means having someone check status of questions on weekends too! If you get in habit of responding to inquiries within 24 hours, you will be exceeding your customers expectations 99% of time.

4. Confirm receipt of all orders received.

How many times have you ordered something from an Internet company and after your transaction was completed, you DID NOT receive confirmation of your order? If you are like me, it has happened way too many times! Make sure your customers receive confirmation their order is being processed. Send them confirmation through an automated system or manually.

5. Follow up on important customer issues with a PHONE CALL!

That's right! If a customer places an overnight order and you find out you are out of stock of item, do you e-mail customer and wait for their response? No you don't! You call customer and offer a solution to their problem. Most people don't mind getting phone calls from companies when company is addressing their concerns. In fact, in most cases you will build a tremendous amount of goodwill and they will provide you with more referrals than you can imagine.

6. Provide a tracking number and link to tracking system of company you use to ship your orders. Many companies have automated tracking systems tied into UPS and FEDEX. If you are a small company without automated tracking, you can provide URL for tracking shipment (example) http://www.fedex.com/us/ and tracking number. This gives customer piece of mind and reduces likelihood that you will receive an inquiry from your customer regarding status of their order.

Follow these six steps and you will prove to your customers that they are number one!

o The Techniques

So what techniques can you employ in your follow-up messages to turn your prospect into a customer?

- Technique 1: Build Trust and Credibility The more you contact your prospect with useful and relevant information, more they will assume you can be trusted. By offering valuable credible information, you prove to your prospect that you know what you are talking about.

- Technique 2: Create Emotional Reason to Buy With each message you send, you can work on need or desire that your product will satisfy. More money to pay for that holiday? More free time to spend with family? Less stress? People buy because they WANT something, secondly because they NEED it.

- Technique 3: Increase Offer Gradually increase perceived value of your offer until your prospect has to find reasons not to buy from you! You can do this by offering free bonuses, discounts, or free shipping. But here's golden rule - all of them must be time-limited to push your prospect to make that final decision.

- Technique 4: Logical Justification People buy for emotional reasons, but they need that decision backed by solid logical reasons. Your follow-up plan should include logical reasons why your prospect should buy - reasons based on facts and figures, not on emotional desire alone.

- Technique 5: Avoid After-Sale Blues How many times have you bought something and then immediately regretted it? You can avoid this situation (and refunds) after sale by reassuring your new customer their decision to purchase was a good one. You simply need to remind them that your product will save time, increase sales, boost site traffic, help them lose weight or whatever. They have already bought it - they just need reminding what it will do for them.

In summary, to dramatically increase your ratio of visitors to sales, you ABSOLUTELY MUST follow up with your prospects and site visitors. It works, it's proven, and it's easy if you use right tools.