Follow Up Email Strategy: Everything You Need to Know
If there’s one thing that one thing that every seasoned salesperson will agree on, it’s this:
Following up is absolutely essential to a successful prospecting and sales strategy.
A sales strategy that relies on just 1 email, a single cold call, 1 LinkedIn message, is doomed to fail.
And it’s not just conjecture. The numbers back it up, over and over again:
- Follow-up emails often get a better response rate than the initial email. One study saw an 18% response rate to the first email, 13% to the 4th, and 27% to the 6th. Another study saw a 30% response rate to the first email and 14% to the 4th. Even the 10th email in the sequence got a 7% response rate.
- 80% of prospects say ‘no’ four times before they ultimately say ‘yes’
- An email drip series with 4-7 messages delivers 3x more responses than those with only 1-3 (27% and 9%, respectively).
- In fact, even following up just once can convert 22% more replies.
The data supports what the practitioners have known all along; the money is in the follow-up.
If we can agree that following up is worth doing, that begs the question:
How do you write an effective follow-up email? And how do make it a part of your broader sales strategy?
Having interviewed true sales practitioners and analyzed the campaigns of thousands of Mailshake customers sending millions of follow-ups, we’ve got a few resources to help you answer those questions.
Below is a (constantly updated) directory of our best resources on the strategy and tactics that underpin a successful follow up cadence.
Let’s get into it.
General strategy
How to Write a Follow-up Email After No Response
- How to approach your follow-ups and set a strategy, including how long to wait between follow-ups, how many to send, and how to send follow-ups that pique interest.
- The 5 rules for writing compelling follow-up emails
- Templates to draw inspiration from for your own follow-up emails
Cold Email Masterclass: Writing Email Followups
- Copywriting tips for follow-up emails
- Things to keep in mind when you are automating a follow-up sequence
- Examples of great follow-ups, and why they work
Sales Follow-Up Email Strategy
Interviews with 8 sales professionals on how to send effective follow up emails.
7 Strategies for Using Mailshake to Follow Up With Form Submissions
Examples of emails you can send to people who submit any type of form on your website.
Templates and Examples
16 Follow-Up Email Subject Lines to Steal for Your Next Campaign
Learn follow-up email subject line best practices, along with examples of subject lines to try and in what situations to use them.
14 Sales Follow-up Email Templates to Steal for Your Next Cold Email
8 different types of follow-up emails you can test, along with 2 examples of each.
Examples of Follow-Up Emails That Get Replies (And Ones That Don’t)
The types of follow-up emails that do (and do not) get replies, with real-life examples.
Networking and Event follow-ups
The Perfect Networking Follow-Up Email Strategy (With Templates)
How to execute the 24/7/30 system of following up with networking leads
How to Follow Up with Leads After a Trade Show (with Templates)
What to do before, during, and after a trade show to maximize your opportunity to turn leads into relationships
How to Write a Follow-up Email After a Meeting
Why following up after a meeting is so important, and templates you can use to inform your next follow-up
8 Subject Lines That Will Get That Networking Email Opened
If you’re struggling to get your networking emails opened, give these 8 subject line templates a try.
How to Leverage Email Outreach to Get the Most Out of Your Conference Experiences
You’ve paid for your conference ticket and travel. Now, ensure you get the greatest possible return on your investment with an email outreach strategy that’ll help you turn the new contacts you meet into long-term relationships.
Networking Email Templates to Turbocharge Your Personal Network
Every salesperson knows that real results come from the relationships they build. These five email templates will help you expand the size of your growing network.
Tools
Email subject line & body copy analyzer tool | Mailshake
This tool allows you to input your content, then provides real-time analysis to improve your content’s readability and deliverability.
By using this optimization tool, you’ll be able to ensure you’re following accepted best practices when reaching out to prospects through email, improve your email content, and increase the potential for future engagement and connection.
The Mailshake advantage
If you’re reaching out to hundreds of prospects every week, it’s impossible to manually stay on top of following up with all of them.
That’s why a sales engagement tool like Mailshake is essential to creating an effective, scalable follow-up email sequence.
With Mailshake, you can personalize your emails in bulk with powerful mail merge features, schedule follow-up emails that are paused or triggered based on whether a a recipient opens an email, clicks a link, or replies, and reply to leads straight from your Mailshake dashboard with Lead Catcher.
You can also set the amount of time between follow-ups (5 days between the first and second email, 7 days between the second and third, etc.), and the days and times you want them to send (for instance, between 8 am and 6 pm on weekdays).
Optimize your copy and overall outreach strategy by AB testing different subject lines, body copy, and full campaign sequences. And with native integrations to your CRM, and third party integrations to hundreds of software tools via Zapier, you can automate your outreach even further by triggering campaigns when someone downloads an eBook, books a meeting, or signs up for a demo.
If social media and phone are a part of your outreach cadence you can include those touchpoints in your outreach cadences as well with Mailshake Sales Engagement.
Bottom line: following up is absolutely essential to an effective outreach strategy, but there’s no reason why you can’t automate it.
