In brick and mortar world, there are numerous examples of service excellent. One of most famous, is customer who claimed he had bought a tire from Nordstrom and insisted on returning it. Nordstrom doesn't sell tires but they accepted return anyway! This is a true story, although a little extreme for most companies.

Let's take a look at Internet businesses vs. traditional brick and mortar businesses. How do they stack up in terms of customer service and putting needs of customer first? Ask yourself these two questions:

How many Internet businesses do you highly recommend to your friends because you received excellent customer service?

How many traditional brick and mortar businesses do your recommend to your friends because you received excellent customer service?

If you are like most of us, list of Internet businesses you recommend is a lot shorter than list of traditional retailers you recommend. Why does this tend to be true? The main reason is, you receive personalization when you shop at a traditional business, which you don't receive from most Internet businesses.

At a traditional business, employees people greet you, they qualify your needs and they promptly close sale. Is this possible to do with an Internet business? Listed below are a few ways to personalize shopping experience at your web site, so you can practice "Making customer number one"!

1. Make sure your phone number, address and office hours are posted in a highly visible spot on your home page.

Many Internet companies do not want to handle inbound phone messages. If you are one of those companies, change your philosophy NOW or get out of business. The phone number is there for your customers. Do not create barriers for your customers to do business with you! Make sure doing business with you is as simple and easy as possible. List your address, even if you don't ship products from your physical address. Customers are more comfortable knowing that you have one!

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 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 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 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 sales associate gave you a courtesy call?

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

o 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 next few days or weeks. And tomorrow you get another ten, and next day another ten... can you imagine how complicated managing this process could be?

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

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

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