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LET THE ORDERS FLOW
Are You Ready to Handle the Flow of Orders That May Soon Flood Your Business?
By Gary Christensen
You take orders IN and send orders OUT, for the things you need. But do your orders flow?
Maybe you don't have many orders coming in yet, but if you do things right, you will. You should get ready for incoming orders, to make the work of filling orders flow--and if you do these things, you business will grow.
If you don't yet enjoy a full mailbox daily, well...it might soon overwhelm you, if you aren't ready for it. Let's say you go to your mailbox and find 30 or 40 envelopes stuffed in it. It's a nice problem, but after about five or six days of that, you could have 150 or more orders to fill. Even at just five minutes per envelope, you're talking about 10 or more hours of filling orders. Here's how to handle it.
1. Sorting Your Mail--You should have a plan for sorting the mail you receive. If you've been at mail-order even for a short time, you know you'll receive some Direct Mailings, some Inquiries, and some Orders.
DIRECT MAILINGS are pieces of mail which are offers sent to sell you something, or catalogs or magazines (often called junk mailings). However, nothing I receive is junk. I usually learn something from every piece of mail that I receive.
INQUIRIES are pieces of mail which contain nothing exert a clipped out copy of your ad, or a note scribbled on a piece of paper, or a postcard. You should have a form letter, or a standard "filler" for inquiries, or at least a pile of your flyers to fold and insert into envelopes to send back to those who inquire. Those envelopes, when opened and read by those who have inquired, should end up being the stuff that makes up future orders.
ORDERS are those pieces of mail that arrive with cash, check or money orders inside. If you're a dealer for someone else's products, of ALL your orders, dropship orders should be filled as soon as possible to your dropshipper, as they'll need a few days, to a week, to fill your orders direct to your customers.
2. Make Piles--Direct mailings go into a pile, Inquiries into another, and envelopes with cash, checks or money orders in them go into a third pile.
Mailings from others you can read later. Put that pile off to one side. Answer inquiries the same day or within 48 hours. They are hot prospects and you don't want them to wait any longer than they have to. They'll be looking for your material to arrive, and the longer you make them wait, the less interest they'll have.
Orders which you can fill yourself should be filled within a few days to a week. Again, people are looking for your material to arrive. Don't keep them waiting any longer than is absolutely necessary.
3. Blank Envelopes--These should be handy, or ones imprinted with your company name and logo, or some that you can stamp with your name and address. These will be needed to fill inquiries which come to you on postcards. I stopped asking for the usual stamped, return envelope with each inquiry a few years back, so I now provide the envelope and the stamp (and my number of inquiries has risen sharply).
4. Letting It Flow--Your mail should be sorted, and handled as quickly and as efficiently as possible. The sooner you fill inquiries and send each the info they want, the sooner more orders will arrive. The quicker you can fill orders, the sooner they will arrive at your customers address and the quicker more orders will arrive back in your mailbox. Be sure to send along a few other flyers, with each order that you fill.
Gary Christensen has written more than 100 articles just like this one. Buy 88 of his best reports in his "88 Shortcuts to Greater Mailorder Profits" for only $14.95. To receive Gary's latest free report, email him: garch7@peak.org
You mail also write him at:
Gary Christensen 2601 NE Jack London St. #138 Corvallis, OR 97330
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