How To Master The Art Of Follow-Up

You take your time to write the perfect sales email. You proudly hit send, then sit back and wait for all the responses to roll in. You wait, then you wait some more. You begin to get nervous. You check all the settings are correct, that you haven’t made any spelling mistakes, and your CTA is clear, but everything’s right. Now you’re confused. Still no response. What did you do wrong?

Possibly nothing. No matter how good your first cold email is, it doesn’t guarantee you’ll get a response. People’s inboxes are overflowing, with office workers receiving on average over a hundred emails every single day. Even if they notice your email, they have a million items on their to-do list, and replying to your email is right at the bottom.

The answer? You need to follow up. I know people who won’t even bother looking at the first email, figuring if it’s important the person will send a follow-up. At Reply, we make it simple to automate your follow-up emails. However, what goes into a great follow-up email? How can you boost your chances of getting a reply? Here are 3 points to help you master the art of the follow-up email.

Start a conversation

In a cold email follow-up, it’s important to have the right goal in mind. If you’re expecting prospects to simply buy your product/service on the basis of one email, I have bad news for you. The goal of your follow-up email should be to get a conversation started, not to go in for the hard sell.

To show you what I mean, here’s a sales follow-up email example from our template library at Reply:

Hey {FirstName} - any chance you could share your thoughts on [original request]. Any feedback is highly appreciated.

Thanks,

Notice we’re not asking for a sale or any other big commitment. We just want their thoughts, their feedback. Keep your request small and simple to increase your chances of a response.

Make it easy for your prospect to take the next step by including your contact information is clearly visible so they can easily get in touch the way they want.

Personalize your follow-ups

Personalization is always important for any email, but if you’ve had no response to your first email it’s vital to include it in your follow-up. In our expert interview round-up on the best follow up email strategies, one suggestion was to pay particular attention to emails where there was some engagement (an open or a click, for example) and to personalize your response further. One great way to do this is to record a short video, specifically for them. While it would be difficult to do this for all your prospects, this is a great way to stand out to those already showing some signals of interest.

Set up a schedule

If you’re sending out follow-ups only when you remember, your results will suffer. While you may be able to get away without scheduling your emails if you’re only dealing with a couple of prospects, it’s essential when you’re trying to scale up your efforts.

At Reply, we’ve found a sequence of at least 3-4 emails will dramatically improve your response rate. Set up the schedule to go out automatically. If you’re using Reply, the sequence will stop if you receive a response to one of the earlier emails, so you don’t have to worry about sending irrelevant messages.

There’s a lot that goes into writing a great follow-up email. However, if you aim to start a conversation rather than make a sale, if you remember to personalize your emails and you send them on a set schedule, you’ll enjoy a much higher response rate.

This article does not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors or management of EconoTimes.