In marketing, the real money is made on the back end. This applies to both offline marketing, as well as Internet marketing; and especially applies to email marketing.

It’s so important that I’ll say it again. In marketing, the real money is made on the back end! But what exactly does that mean? Well, whenever you sell something, it doesn’t really matter what, you won’t often make a whole lot of money selling that first thing. You may even take a loss on the first item you sell.

But then you have the contact information of the customer, and you can market to them for years to come. You can market to them virtually forever. Over the life of that customer, (or on the back end) you can sell many things to them.

This is the strategy people are talking about when they say the phrase “loss leader”. A loss leader is the act of selling the first product at a small loss, but then making up the loss by selling more stuff to that customer in the future. It’s also the strategy for many late night infomercials. The point of all this is that the Internet makes following up with your past customers and your potential customers very very easy, and very inexpensive. Once you get a hold of a customers email address, you can send them email messages forever, or at least until they unsubscribe from your list. (Try to get their actual home address and you can send them direct marketing sales letters via regular postal mail - but that’s a conversation for another article and another time!).

There are two forms of email follow up to focus on. Follow-up for potential customers, and follow-up for past customers. Each way needs to be addressed slightly differently for the best results.

Back in the day, I used to be scared to email potential customers too often for fear of annoying them. Then I learned that it’s really hard to annoy someone this way for several reasons. One, people expect to hear commercial things from businesses. Two, a lot of your email will get ignored, so you *have* to send lots of email to get a persons attention.

My rule of thumb for a new, potential customer who has just signed up for my newsletter or downloaded my free ebook (and hence given me their email address and permission to contact them - permission is all important) is every other day for the first three weeks. Then every three to four days for the next two weeks. Then once per week.

The once per week email is most likely a newsletter format, not an individual sales letter. I will also send them an individual sales letter randomly every week or so. By randomly, I mean once a week, but just on a random day in the week, as opposed to every Tuesday for instance.

Following up with past customers is slightly different. When someone buys something from me I immediately send them a sales letter for another product, either at the time that they bought my first product, or the very next day. I also send them a direct mail piece the day after they bought something from me welcoming them to my company, thanking them for their purchase, and pitching them on another product. Then I follow up that letter one week later.

These are just basic follow-up techniques. I could go into more detail but my time is up for this article! But test yourself to find the best groove of follow-ups for your specific market and remember that there’s no such thing as too often!

Jason has been writing articles online for over 13 years. When not writing about Internet Marketing, he runs a promotional wall calendars web site where he will show you how to find cheap at a glance refills to fit your exact needs.