Do you have a response letter prepared for prospective customer inquiries? When you get an inquiry via email or your Web contact form, how long does it take you to respond?
It’s up to you as to whether you’re responding to a hot lead or a cold one. Your response time makes all the difference. Same day, even same hour response is best, but unless you have a prepared response letter, that’s not likely to happen. Instead, you’ll find that customer inquiries arrive at the most inconvenient times and you’ll be torn between dropping everything to answer or making your prospect wait … which is seldom a good thing. Ask me how I know about that. (hanging head in shame)
Elements of a Winning Response Letter
- Appreciation: Thank your prospect for his inquiry.
- “Sell” the Information Requested: You do this by showing the benefit to the prospect for purchasing your product or service. Remember that it’s not about you … it’s about meeting your prospect’s needs.
- Depending on your product or service, you may also need to list the features offered.
- If pricing has been requested, “sell” the value of what you offer. Do you have the best price or best quality in town? Offer a guarantee? Is your product exclusively available through you locally? Say so. Yes, give the price, but show why the purchase should be made through you.
- Provide full contact information: Make it easy for your prospect to become your customer.
- One final tip: Make sure to add a subject to your response email … something along the lines of “Info you requested from [name of site]“
You may need more than one version … unless you only offer one product or service. Need help crafting a great response letter? Contact me through my Web form and I promise to respond promptly!
Ideally, your response letter should be step one of a multi-part follow-up series. For more information, visit and subscribe to Zero To Sixty Marketing’s Inside Line to learn what you need to know about effective email list marketing.
Hey Shari,
Thanks for the great content and information. I am always browsing the internet looking for good content to get ideas for my easy home based business blogs and articles. You have some real good content here so just keep on doing what you are doing as good stuff like this is always hard to find.
That’s a great post Shari. One thing we always forget is the fact that we always think it is about us. We want more clients, we want more profit and all such things. But we tend to forget what the prospect wants.
Since I´m allways online it´s easy to respond to customers. If it´s a more demanding inquiry I give the offer within 12 hours but sometimes only within minutes. I use previous mails and offers as a start and mix them to produce a letter that is right for them.
Thanks for that posts. Actually for me writing a respond letter or any kind of letter must be made carefully.
You have given a very good idea to have a response letter or reply letter ready for the inquiry emails we get for different local restaurant in our inbox..I really didn’t know it can be done automatically.. I hope this will really help in keeping the customers updated for their inquiries within a few minutes…thanks for sharing such a wonderful idea…:)
Thanks, everyone, for your comments. I’m glad you found the ideas useful!