New customers. We all want them. There probably isn’t a business out there that isn’t focused on marketing to bring in new customers.

And there’s nothing wrong with that; it’s how most of us built our businesses. Yet, in our efforts to generate new customers, we create something valuable which is often then neglected.

That “something valuable” is the prospects who responded to your postcard but whom you didn’t close on the first or second contact.

Here are some statistics you might have seen which tell you the value of persistence when it comes to continual follow-up with leads:

• 2% of all closes happen on your first contact
• 3% happen after two contacts
• 5% happen after three contacts
• 10% happen after four contacts
• 80% happen after anywhere from five to 12 contacts.

In other (rhyming) words, try-try-try = ROI.

If you sent out 1,000 postcards at a cost of $400 and got 20 responses…that would be an acceptable ROI.

Your $400 investment divided by 20 responses equals a cost-per-lead of $20.

If you close four of those leads for $1,000 each, you’ve made $4,000 on your $400 investment—a not-too-shabby ten-fold return.

You could probably do that over and over and get similar results each time, and that’d be fine.

But what about those other 16 leads you paid $20 each for but didn’t close on the first one or two tries? If you don’t continue to follow up with them, you are leaving money on the table (and on the chair, the floor, and in the garbage disposal).

Because those leads responded to your postcard, they are a potentially easier close than a completely cold prospect. You have their phone number or their email or their address, so continue to contact them and enlighten them about your product or service and how it makes their life easier, their home more beautiful, their body more fit, their business more successful, etc.

One of the best ways to create leads you can follow up with is to send them a postcard. You can design and mail one right now by logging on to www.prospectsplus.com/pei. Use your own mailing list or create a targeted list using our built-in tools.

If you’re too busy following up with leads but want even more leads to follow up with, give a call to Opportunity Knocks at 1 (866) 319-7109 and tell us about your customers. We’ll design a postcard campaign tailored to your industry that keep those leads coming in.