How To Write Follow Up Emails

Want to know a secret?

To have the best response rate, you’ll need to make your follow-up emails as personalized as possible.‍

Personalized vs Automated

Sending personalized emails is the best way to have a high response rate.

The problem is that it takes FOREVER to create personalized emails.

When sending follow up emails, ask yourself what can be automated and what cannot be?

In other words, finding a healthy ratio of automation to personalization is necessary to have great results with your follow up emails.

Using a template and personalizing a few sections is the best option to automate without sounding automated.

For example, if you frequently go to networking events and follow up with prospects I recommend you have one template for each networking event.

Now that you have a template that will work for the prospects from that event, personalize the email before you send it out.

In this day and age, we can find out more about a person on the internet than ever before.

So do it!

Then add some juicy and specific words in your email to capture the attention of your reader.

The shorter, the better

As a general rule, less than 50 words is best for emails, which is harder to achieve than you might think.

Jeremy Donovan studied 4 million emails and found that the highest reply rate is 25 words.

It is ok to go a little above 50 words. But the goal is to get your point across with as few words as possible.

Back up anything you claim with the statistic

Using data to express how helpful your services can be is a great method. But you need to make sure that you have a quality source that proves you are right.

If you are talking about your own data, then a screenshot will likely be sufficient.

This is an email I have been using that has recently made my pipeline explode.

This works great because the prospect can see how big of an impact I have made for other people, giving me social proof.

(I call it the extreme weight loss email because of the before and after pics 🤣)

Track your results and figure out what works the best

Just like all areas of sales, it is best to track your analytics and what results you produce.

Every industry will have different ways of generating results, so it is best to track what works for you so you can continuously improve upon your efforts.

Some of the best email tracking software are Outreach.io, SalesLoft, Lemlist, and Hubspot.

Subject lines

Since subject lines and the first sentence of any email is the first thing the reader will see, it is one of the most critical parts of an email.

In general, good subject lines are:

• Personalized
• Include An Offer
• Use Odd Words
• Spark Curiosity
• 2-3 words
• Urgent

But for follow up emails, it is best to reply to a previous email of yours.

Some other emails you should be sending are touching base emails, but I won’t cover that here.

Is your team meeting your expectations?

If you have a sales development team and are interested in learning how we can help you dramatically increase their results, talk to me here.

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