How to Write Sales Follow Up Emails in Your Cold Email Campaigns – Effective Tips for Sales Follow up Emails

A comprehensive guide to write persuasive follow-up emails that get results

How to Write Sales Follow Up Emails that work? A common mistake most people do while sending sales emails or any type of outreach email is that they overlook the follow-up emails. All the efforts get put into sending introductory emails, while the follow-up emails are more important than any initial emails in marketing and sales. 

That’s a big oversight, where studies found that most of the sales result from typically follow-up emails. 

The major reasons why email marketing campaigns fail include – 

• Sending low-value emails. 
• Very poor mail timings (for example, sending follow-ups without waiting long enough or waiting too long to communicate with follow-ups) 
• Not getting any follow-up headaches. 

If you’re guilty of any of these points, you won’t get your desired results from your email marketing campaigns. In this article, I’m not going to cover the timing but you’ll learn about the structures of the follow-up emails that will help you send better follow-ups in your email marketing campaign. 

How to Write Sales Follow Up Emails in Your Cold Email Campaigns 

Before sending your sales email follow-ups, make sure you’ve personalized your emails as per your business and brand voice. To create personalized and compelling sales follow up emails, you’ll need to consider the following factors – 

• Keep your message short and sweet. 
• Make responding to a one-shot task for your recipients. 
• Be authentic and honest 
• Acknowledge their permission and interest 
• Demonstrate belief that your product or service can solve their challenges 
• Follow up from a sales call 
• Provide value 
• Gracefully walk away 
• Automate email follow-up sequence
• Using templates for follow-up emails  
• Final words 

Keep your messages short and sweet

In general, sales emails should be always short, but when it comes to follow-ups, they should be even shorter. However, it doesn’t mean you have to suppress all your sense of humor. You’ll just need to keep things concise with a friendly, polite, and most importantly human conversational voice. 

You may ask for permission to connect later or suggest compliments to add value. Your first follow-up email shouldn’t take much time to scan. 

Make responding to a one-shot task for your recipients 

In your follow-ups, you should ask for the one-shot task that’s extremely easy for your recipients to respond to. 

You’ll need to choose the forms that make them very comfortable to reply to you. For instance, you can create several options with numbers and tell your customers to reply back with just a number so that you can understand what your customers want. 

Be authentic and honest 

In your sales follow-ups, you’ll need to be brutally authentic and honest. Authenticity and honesty are always respected by people, especially in the sales process. Show your authenticity and honesty in your sales follow-ups in the most possible simple manner.  

Acknowledge their permission and interest 

Your recipients know that you’re tracking your email list and you also know that they know about your email tracking process. Therefore, you don’t need to pretend that you’re not tracking your emails. 

Always try to acknowledge the permission they’ve given to you to send them emails. And if you see that your prospects are opening your emails and showing interest, you should also acknowledge their interests too. 

Demonstrate belief that your product or service can solve their challenges

You should show 100% confidence that your product or service can obviously solve your recipients’ issues. You may need to discuss simultaneously to reinforce the benefits of how your product or service is fit for them. 

Your belief should be absolute and you’ll need to become enthusiastic about your solutions. You may add a call to action in the last of your sales follow-up emails to know if they’re interested in your solution and want to communicate further for more information. 

Follow-up from a sales call 

If you made a sales call, it’s a must to follow-up the sales call. You don’t need to be completely formal. You can just show gratitude and provide some extra information or explain your offer in detail.

Don’t forget to appreciate the meeting. Your sales call follow-ups should obviously bear a sales message but far from sales. You should also mention the next step you want your recipients to follow with a polite call to action. 

Provide value 

When it comes to sales, it’s really a great idea to share statistics, social proof, and any other helpful information in your sales follow-ups. Adding content that can build your recipients’ trust is always a good practice to implement in sales emails. 

From your first communication through emails, you’ll need to come up as a trusted solution provider rather than just a sales professional always pushing to sell something. You can provide a quick tip guide and ask for permission to provide more valuable in-detail solutions. 

Related reading: How to write excellent emailer or newsletter

Gracefully walk away 

Sometimes you may touch the end of the road with your lead, and it’s not a good habit to keep wasting your energy and time on them. Rather than just giving up without any notifications, it’s worth sending a final follow-up email to track if it works to wake them up. 

You can ask for permission to close the file or you can request to hit you back when the time is right. But make sure you assure your recipients that you’re always open to help them in the coming future.  

Automate email follow-up sequence 

If you’re sending follow-up emails to thousands of prospects every week, it’s practically not possible to send sales follow-ups manually to everyone. 

This is why an autoresponder comes into practice. A variety of email automation tools are available in the market nowadays. Autoresponder tools help to create an effective and scalable sales follow-up sequence. 

With email automation tools, you can personalize your email messages in bulk with effective mail merge features, schedule your emails that are triggered or paused based on the behavior of a recipient such as whether he or she opens an email, replies, or clicks on the links. 

You can also preset the gap timing between your follow-up emails in advance such as 3 days between the welcome and 2nd follow-up emails, 2 days between the 2nd and 3rd emails, etc., and the times and days you wish to send. For example, you can schedule to send follow-up emails between 4 pm and 6 pm on weekends. 

Optimize your sales follow-up emails and overall cold email campaign strategy through AB testing several subject lines, the body of the letters, and the full email sequence. You can even further trigger your campaigns when someone takes an action such as downloads an eBook, or registers for a webinar, by integrating Zapier and other software tools including your CRM. 

If social media networks are a part of your email follow-up series, you should also consider including those platforms in your follow-up campaigns as well with the engagement features of your autoresponder tool. 

To scale any business or brand, automation of the sales emails is as essential as following up. The more you automate, the better your business scales. 

Using templates for follow-up emails 

Follow-up email templates are great for reusing in the follow-up series. They may encourage you to create sales follow-up copies that can engage your recipients and convince them to take action. Templates may also help you get results faster. 

But templates aren’t final points. 

Only copy and paste never works. Marketers shouldn’t expect to see results using only copy and paste techniques in their emails. Buyers are smart nowadays. They can identify whether they’re being sent a template or a personalized, genuine email – and they’re unlikely to respond. 

So, how could you use templates? And what kind of editing do they require to produce results? 

Templates work well in repeatable cases with the same information and same goals. But you’ll need to edit as per your own business goal and information. Always try to personalize your email copies with your creative inspiration. But you don’t need to personalize your emails one-to-one, you should personalize by category so that you can optimize results by batch. 

When using templates, keep in mind what worked for other brands won’t necessarily work for your business. You’ll have to customize your sales emails according to your own business factors like niche, product, price, location, and many more. 

You don’t need to exactly follow any given length. You’ll need to choose a perfect email length as per your brand voice. You’ll have to follow dozens of copywriting factors to persuade your prospects to maximize the results. 

Of course, you’ll need to keep your emails as short as possible, but it doesn’t mean you should ignore your objectives. Your emails should contain adequate information, neither more nor less. 

Check email follow up templates here

5 samples of killer sales follow up emails

1. Subject: Following up on our conversation

Hi [Prospect],

I hope this email finds you well. I wanted to follow up with you after our conversation last week. As we discussed, [insert key points of your conversation].

I’m reaching out to see if you have any additional questions or concerns, or if you’d like to move forward with [your product or service]. If you’re still interested, I’d be happy to set up a call to discuss the next steps.

Please let me know if you have any questions or if there’s anything else I can do to help.

Best regards, [Your Name]

2. Subject: Final reminder about our special offer

Dear [Prospect],

This is just a friendly reminder that our special offer ends tomorrow. [Insert details about your offer]. I wanted to make sure you didn’t miss out on this opportunity, as I think it could be a great fit for your needs.

If you have any questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to reach out. Otherwise, I hope to hear from you soon!

Best regards, [Your Name]

3. Subject: Exclusive content for [Prospect’s Company]

Hi [Prospect],

I wanted to reach out and let you know about some exclusive content we’ve recently published that I think would be of interest to you and your team. [Insert details about the content and why it’s relevant to your prospect].

If you’d like to take a closer look, I’d be happy to send you a link or set up a call to discuss it further.

Thanks for your time, [Your Name]

4. Subject: Thank you for considering [Your Product/Service]

Hi [Prospect],

I wanted to take a moment to thank you for considering [your product/service]. I know you have a lot of options out there, and I appreciate the time you’ve taken to learn more about what we have to offer.

If you have any questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to reach out. Otherwise, I’ll follow up with you next week to see if you’ve made a decision.

Best regards, [Your Name]

5. Subject: Congratulations on your recent success!

Hi [Prospect],

I saw the news about [insert recent success or milestone for the prospect’s company], and I wanted to reach out and offer my congratulations. It’s always great to see businesses like yours thriving.

I also wanted to take the opportunity to see if you had any upcoming projects or initiatives that we might be able to help with. If so, I’d be happy to set up a call to discuss how we can assist you.

Thanks again, and congratulations! [Your Name]

Summary

here are some bullet points summarizing how to write killer sales follow-up emails:

• Personalize the email based on your previous conversations with the prospect.
• Keep the email short and to the point, focusing on the benefits of your product or service.
• Provide value, such as offering additional resources or insights related to your product or service.
• Include a clear call to action, such as scheduling a call or meeting, or providing a link to your product or service.
• Use a catchy subject line that grabs the prospect’s attention and entices them to open the email.
• Avoid being too pushy or aggressive, as this can turn the prospect off.
• Follow up multiple times, but space out your emails to avoid being too persistent or annoying.
• End with a friendly closing and a way for the prospect to contact you with any questions or concerns.

Related reading: Email marketing guide

Final words 

Following up is one of the most important things in your business you should bother. Don’t expect results too early and don’t give up before offering your recipients all the changes required to get to yes. 

Now it’s your turn, create your own sales follow-up email templates and test them. Track your results and continue to optimize your email campaigns. 

If you want to learn email marketing skills, you can consider joining our digital marketing course to learn all the digital marketing facets including email marketing in the most hands-on practical manner. Contact us for more information.