I got an email a couple of days ago from Charlie Poznek who runs the Boomer Business Owner podcast. A little while back I did an episode for Charlie's show on Email Marketing for Entrepreneurs.

Charlie's email was to inform me that my episode has passed the 2,500 downloads milestone.

Now in truth, I have no idea if that's good or bad compared to other episodes. But it certainly felt good to get that email from Charlie congratulating me and giving me a special badge I could put on my website to indicate the achievement.

This is an example of “semi-automated” follow up that I think we could all do more of.

I'm certain that Charlie has a system that regularly reports his podcast stats that can tell him when his guests have passed a download milestone. 

And I'm certain that he has a bunch of pre-prepared email templates he uses to send out rather than creating the emails from scratch each time.

So it must only take him a few minutes each time to create a positive impact with his guests to build his relationship with them. And, of course, that enourages them to share the details of podcast more like I've just done.

The key that makes it efficient is the little bit of preparation Charlie did to figure out a system for identifying people to follow up with (based on podcast downloads) and a system to make that follow up easy (the email templates).

Could you do something similar in your business?

I've found that when we have to create our follow up from scratch each time it's too much hard work and we rarely do it. 

But if we have an easy way of identifying who to follow up with each week and a starting point of templates or examples we can use for the content of the follow up, then even the least organised of us can manage to do it.

The system for identifying who to follow up with could be as simple as a list of key contacts you want to keep in touch with monthly. Or it could be as sophisticated as using something like Contactually to identify which of your top contacts you haven't been in touch with for a while.

Or like Charlie's system it could be based on some kind of trigger. For example, you could decide to send a personal email to people who open all your regular email marketing broadcasts. Or you could follow up personally with people who download your free report to check how they found it.

And by putting a bit of thought in advance into templates you can reuse, you make doing the follow up much easier too. That could be a “library” of useful articles you could email to contacts over time. Or some pre-printed “thank you” cards you can use to send to people in the post.

Anything as long as it makes follow up easy.

Because follow up is what gets results. But only if you do it :)