You’ve crafted the perfect cold email. You’ve personalized it, nailed the subject line, and written concise and engaging copy. You even sent it to the right person. Now, you wait. And wait. And wait. If you’ve done proper research, your target probably isn’t ignoring you because your email was terrible. Instead, they likely got busy, or your message might have been buried under a mountain of other emails. And so, you wait for the perfect amount of time before sending a follow-up email. So, how long should you wait? What should you say? How to follow up on a cold email: This way, it opens and reads your email and doesn’t annoy the recipient. This post will share exactly how to follow up on a cold email to increase response rates and convert cold leads into valuable opportunities.

Inframail’s email infrastructure solution can help you achieve your goals with cold emailing and following up on cold emails tips. With our tools, you can effectively engage email recipients, increase response rates, and boost conversion rates to turn cold leads into valuable opportunities.

Table of Content

• Why Should You Always Send Follow-up Emails?

• How to Follow Up on a Cold Email & Improve Your Conversion Rates

• 4 Mistakes to Avoid in Follow-up Emails

• Start Buying Domains Now and Setup Your Email Infrastructure Today

Why Should You Always Send Follow-up Emails?

Cold emails only work if you follow up. You should never expect to close a deal on the first email. Instead, think of your initial outreach as the start of a conversation that will eventually lead to a sale. Follow-up emails are vital to this process.

What is a Follow-Up Email?

A follow-up email is sent to a prospect you have previously contacted. Its purpose is to:

• Remind the customer of the previous email

• Request information or a response

• Remind them of an important date or time

A follow-up email does not initiate a conversation but generates a professional response. Most effective follow-up emails are brief, sweet, experienced, and (most crucially) at the point. A follow-up email is a series of emails sent after a crucial point in the sales funnel to seal the deal.

Why Are Follow-Up Emails So Important?

In sales, sending out a single email usually isn’t cut it. You need to build trust with your prospect to succeed, which happens over time through multiple touchpoints. In fact, according to Marketing Donut, 80% of non-routine sales occur after at least five follow-ups from the initial contact.

While email is an invaluable tool in sales, it also has a significant disadvantage: the messages you send have a short shelf life.

Boost Email Response Rates with Effective Follow-Ups

An estimated 19% of email campaigns are opened within the first hour of sending. After 24 hours, the chances of an email being opened drop below 1%. A follow-up email lets you reach your prospects, even if they missed your original message.

Follow-ups also typically result in higher response rates: Yesware’s data, for example, reveals that if you don’t receive a reply to your first email, you still have a 21% chance of receiving one to your second email.

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How to Follow Up on a Cold Email & Improve Your Conversion Rates

Writing a follow-up email can feel daunting, especially if you’re worried about being annoying or pushy. But don’t overthink it — it’s just an email!

In most cases, you’re simply checking to see if the recipient received your first message and offering more information to help them decide. So, let’s get to it!

1. Start With the CTA in Mind

Always think of your goal first. What exactly do you need to know? What do you want the recipient to do? This will determine your CTA – and the remaining content that leads up to it. Don’t have a clear goal? Maybe it’s not a great idea to send the email after all.

2. Pay Attention to Your Subject Line

Make it stand out. However short or long it is, it should be specific. Ensure the most essential info is at the beginning in case it gets cut off in the inbox. Use the preheader to complement it and add the information I can’t (or don’t want to) fit in the subject line.

3. But Be Personal, Anyway

Make the email seem like it’s from an actual human – people don’t want to talk to brands; they want to talk to people. And just because the follow-up email is automated doesn’t mean it has to sound robotic. After all, there’s always a person behind writing the copy and setting up the automation rules. So make yourself seen.

This means using natural language like you were having a conversation with the person you’re sending your email to.

Why Faux Plain-Text Emails Are a Trend in Effective Follow-Ups

A big trend today is to send plain-text (or faux plain-text) emails that look and feel like emails from someone I know, often with a real person’s name attached to the sender's address. One great example is emails sent by Moo – or their “robot.”

This post-order follow-up email asking for feedback shows precisely what I mean. Everyone knows it’s an automated email, but still, it doesn’t read like one. And even better, someone on the other end of the line will read what you have to say.

Boost Engagement with Personalized Follow-Up Emails

Another way to make your email feel more personal is to make it personalized. But don’t just use the recipient’s name in the subject line. That’s been used too many times already. Make the content personalized and, therefore, more relevant to your recipient.

Use your information about them:

• Their company name

• What they’re doing

• How we know each other

Our data continually shows that this tactic can increase your click-through rates! And don’t forget to mention what your previous email was about. Make it a polite follow-up email in case they genuinely missed my last message, and do not simply ignore it.

4. You Don’t Have to Keep It Short – But Keep It Interesting

Sometimes, like sales follow-up emails, you should send a longer email. The plain-text version even encourages longer copies. But whether this is a good idea will depend on several factors: 

• The type of email you’re sending

• Who your audience is

• What stage of awareness they’re at

• Do they need a story first to get them

• Where do you want the email to take them

• Are they ready to click that button

Craft Concise and Goal-Oriented Follow-Up Emails

All I need is a few crisp sentences to encourage them. Adjust the content of the email to the recipient’s needs, and whatever the length, don’t forget about your goal. Make it clear all the way.

Format your email, and forget long paragraphs (even if they’re super interesting, you risk losing a lot of attention) and super long sentences. Don’t be afraid to try something different – there isn’t a one-size-fits-all. Test different kinds of copy to see what works for your customers.

When Should I Send Follow-Up Emails?

I recommend following a simple principle – send a follow-up email whenever an information need justifies sending one. You should always consider your target audience's preferences and use common sense.

Those information needs vary from company to company and depend on whether you operate in a B2B or B2C environment. Here are a few common examples:

B2C Follow-Up Emails

• Welcome email: an email sent whenever a new person joins my email marketing list. You can use this email to show the new subscribers what they can expect from my email marketing program.

• Thank you email: there are many reasons to send a thank you email. Maybe someone has bought my product or participated in an event I organized? Follow up to get valuable feedback that will help improve my customer experience.

• Outreach follow-up: these are tough nuts to crack.

Timing Your Follow-Up Emails for Maximum Impact

Here’s what Ada Durzyńska, GetResponse blog’s editor, says: As the blog’s editor, I receive hundreds of outreach emails every day and, what’s more surprising, two times as many follow-up emails. Why is that? People often want to follow up too quickly, sometimes following up twice on an email sent 10 minutes earlier. It’s only natural for a person to want to know if their email has been read and to want answers ASAP.

But, give the person I contact more time to read my email and familiarize themselves with my offer. If I want to follow up quickly, wait a few hours. If it’s not an urgent matter, I should follow up as soon as possible, the next day. Remember to attach the previous outreach message in my follow-up in a suitable way (forward, reply, or as an attachment).

Write Engaging and Confident Follow-Up Emails

As for the email copy, make it light-hearted, and be patient. Try to include a question in my follow-up email. It’s harder for the reader to skip. So, for example, switch the usual “Just making sure you saw this” for something just a bit more engaging, like “What do you think of my offer?” or even something as straightforward as “Is the silence a ‘no’?“.

Also, while making the email as unobtrusive for the reader as possible, don’t be overmodest. A good “I’m following up on this email because it’s worth not giving up!” will take me further than “I know you’re probably too busy to read such emails, and I really don’t want to bother you…“. And, to be nice to others, skip the “Are you alive?!” and “I’m CC’ing all your management on this email.”

Make the subject line stand out because the more creative I am, the better my chances of getting a positive or negative reply. To be clear, “A quick follow-up” is the subject line of (probably) 99% of follow-up emails.

B2B Follow-Up Emails

The customer journey in the B2B environment might be longer and more complex. Here are a few practical tips from the expert, Beata Patfield, Senior Business Development Executive at GetResponse:

• Event follow-up: Be personable! Call them by name, ask about something personal we’d spoken about previously, and show I was listening. Did their kid ace those SATs?

• Go through my past interactions: Were there any questions I was supposed to get back to them on? Make sure to do it now.

• Be brief: Don’t write a three-paragraph email to ask them if they like my product.

• Leave the ball in their court: Make sure to finish strong with a specific and actionable CTA – ‘Let me know what you think!’ or ‘When can we jump on a call to discuss your feedback?’ is always better than ‘let’s touch base’ or ‘looking forward to hearing from you.’

• Don’t forget the CC: If they had a colleague involved in the conversation, include them. Otherwise, at best, I’ll be deemed as forgetful, at worst – disrespectful.

• Sales follow-up email: Speed matters. I will contact your prospects as soon as I hear from them. Do I want my competition to beat me to it?

• Don’t give up: Getting through to my prospect may take 5-7 tries.

• Check my metrics: Do my emails get opened? Like online marketing, it matters what time I send emails and what I put in my subject line. If I’m getting opens but not replies, revamp my content.

• If one isn’t sufficient, use multiple channels: If they don't reply to my emails, give them a call. Look for them on LinkedIn or Skype if they don't pick up. I have many options. All I have to do is look.

• Be flexible and adapt: Once I’ve established two-way communication, I have a plan, but be open to change. My process is to answer the inquiry, demo the product, and then reach a decision – but my prospect can switch things up on me, and I just have to roll with it. It’s not about me, it’s about them.

5. Follow-Up Email Templates

Looking for some follow-up email templates to kick your email marketing strategy up a notch? Here’s a look at five of the best ones out there:

Short Follow-Up Email Template

This template from Sean Bestor over at Sumo is short and sweet. I can use this template to casually contact a prospect after he or she fails to reply.

Hey [First Name],

I hope you had a fantastic weekend. I wanted to see what your team thought of my suggestions. Let me know if I can help at all.

All the best,

[Your Name]

We like that this email includes pleasantries, but they’re kept to a minimum to save time. The second sentence is straightforward, and the purpose of the email is clear. This email would be great if I were looking for a delicate way to reconnect with a prospect politely.

Post-Event Follow-Up Email Template

If I recently attended an event or conference and connected with a prospect, I want to drive home the key messages we discussed and move things forward. This template from HubSpot is very effective:

Dear [Prospect],

What an exciting show! I hope you made great connections and learned some things you can immediately use in your business.

I’m sure that [objective (e.g., effectively increasing sales)] is at the top of your list. As promised, here are [the content details (e.g., Six Ways to Increase Your Sales)]. If you’d like more in-depth information on implementing the [details of content], I’d be delighted to have a 30-minute conversation and dive into that.

I’m here to be your resource, so don’t hesitate to call me.

Best regards,

[Salesperson]

This post-event email is excellent. It opens with a polite and direct reminder of the meeting before launching into what the prospect stands to gain. The piece of content is a nice touch. The CTR can be tracked to determine the following action for the people; if they click but don’t reply, the email could ask for feedback about the resource.

There’s also a direct call to action (CTA). In other words, there’s the potential to move the prospect through the sales funnel and take things to the next level.

Call to Action Follow-Up Email Template

Sometimes, I’ll hit an impasse with my email marketing. At that stage, this template from Piotr Zaniewicz from Right Hello could come in handy:

Hi {{Name}},

I see you’re too busy to reply at the moment. Could you just hit me back with the number from the list below (1, 2, or 3) that best describes your response?

Please leave me alone! Too busy. Email me again in a month. I’ll reply in a week. Thanks!

This email is a great way to get a response from a prospect so I can quickly figure out where I stand. Many prospects will appreciate the direct nature of the email, especially since I’m considering their time.

Direct Follow-Up Email Template

It’s no fun to receive an endless chain of emails. Rather than inspiring my prospects to act, these emails could turn them away. This template from Dhruv Patel of SalesHandy helps me tactfully ask my prospect to take action:

Hi {{Name}},

I hate pushy salespeople. At the same time, I’d hate to think I gave up on trying to help you when all you needed was one piece of helpful information I forgot to give you. ’

All the best,

Salesperson

This email is a Hail Mary pass that helps me discover precisely what my prospect hopes for. So, it’s a great way to inspire action.

Informative Follow-Up Email Template

After an excellent initial call, I’ll want to deliver on my promise to share some extra resources. This template by Neville Medhora from Kopywriting Kourse helps me accomplish this goal:

Hey {{Name}},

It was great meeting you this afternoon.

1.) Here’s a handy Business One-pager you can print and send to anyone in the department.

2.) I’ve attached the full slide deck in a PowerPoint presentation.

3.) I’ve also attached the full custom SEO report on your website. Feel free to share this information with the team.

All the best,

Salesperson

As you can see, this email is packed with information, yet it isn’t too heavy. The formatting is simple, which makes it easy to read.

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4 Mistakes to Avoid in Follow-up Emails

1. Not Including a Call to Action

A follow-up email without a call to action is like a car without wheels. It might look like it could get you somewhere, but it won’t get you anywhere without the most critical component. Many forget to add a call to action when writing a follow-up email.

It is a prevalent mistake, but it can have lasting effects. For example, you might lose a lead because the reader might not know what to do, even if they are interested. Instead, the writer should be clear about what they want the reader to do:

• Reply

• Call

• Fill out a form

2. Not Following Up Quickly

Another common mistake is waiting more than ten days to send a follow-up email. Sending late reminders could mean the reader has forgotten what the previous email was about and what steps you asked them to take.

Instead, you should send a follow-up email after two to three days. This ensures that the recipients still remember the topic.

3. Hiding Key Elements in Long Text

Engaging in a conversation with the prospect is very beneficial, but forgetting your main objective can negatively impact your follow-up campaign. Thus, your follow-up emails should be short and specific, clarifying what you expect the recipient to do. Furthermore, the significant aspects of the email should be bold to ensure that the steps you want the recipient to take are clear and immediately grasp the readers’ attention.

As a result, the follow-up email will be less confusing and more understanding for both parties. Another way to ignore follow-up confusion is to use bullet points to make it easier for the recipient to navigate.

4. Not Personalizing Your Emails

Not personalizing the emails can cause the most damage. It is because it can make you sound like a robot, turning away prospects. Everyone knows that job titles and company names are not categorized as personalizing. It doesn’t make you stand out from the crowd. Incorporating differentiation factors in your follow-ups can show the recipient that you have done your homework.

Examples could be praise or complimenting the recipient on a recent accomplishment. Mention the common interest you two have between yourselves. Bring similarities in experience, this could be similar to:

• Companies

• Positions

• Employees

Related Reading

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