Any Internet marketer worth his salt will tell you that following up with your customers and potential clients via email is an absolute necessity in order to succeed online. If you're just starting out on the web as a home based business owner you should make it a priority to develop an effective list building strategy, and while creating this directory of names and email addresses be sure to follow up with them on a regular basis to promote your products and to increase your sales.

For the uninitiated follow up email marketing is the process of sending persuasive email messages to your list of subscribers to help convince them to become paying customers or, in the case of current clients, to purchase from your business again. This tactic can be used in many ways to help build your business and to help increase your profits and here are 5 very valuable tactics you can use via email follow-up to accomplish these goals:

1. After you close the sale and you have a new customer why not create a follow-up series of messages attempting to convince them to become affiliates for your products. Creating an affiliate program and having an army of sales people promoting your merchandise on the web will create a very lucrative income stream for your home business. Of course you must make it worth their while by offering an attractive remuneration package of 60% or more commission for each sale they make in order to get them to subscribe.

2. After they've signed on the dotted line you can email your clients and offer them access to an e-course you've created for a specific dollar amount each month. This is a tremendous way to create a recurring income on the web because if you subscribe 50 people to take your course and you charge each person $27.00 per month you would establish a habitual secondary income of $1350.00 each and every month for the duration of your classes.

3. Follow-up email is a great method to employ for up selling your clients via a backend product from your website. Your initial sale could be for one of your lower end goods or cheaper products just to close the deal so you can then promote one of your high end or pricier pieces of merchandise in order to up sell your new client. Making the first sale is only half the battle because more money is usually made from follow-up promotions after the initial deal.

4. Establishing a reputation online for providing excellent customer service can be worth its weight in future sales for your home based business and there's no better way to accomplish this than through follow up email messages. After your customers have purchased their products you could initiate a series of autoresponder messages teaching your new clients how their new purchase operates.

You could do this by answering a frequently asked question every day in one of your email follow-ups and you could also include a toll free number for customer support if they have any other issues or problems with your merchandise.

5. You could create a series of messages asking for your customer's opinion on the sales process they just went through at your website. You could then send another question the following day asking if they have any suggestions of how they would improve this aspect of your business or if there's any other area of your enterprise including your home page they would change.

Collecting information from your customers as well as your potential clients can help you improve your customer service and help your clients feel a part of the process which can help you establish a closer relationship with them. Of course this will all go a long way toward helping close some of your future sales thereby adding more money to your coffers.

These 5 strategies for using follow up email messages to help increase your sales are only scratching the surface because if you think about it for a minute I'm very sure you will come up at least 5 or maybe even 10 more tactics for using follow up email marketing to help take your home based business to the next level online.