What is Email Follow Up and Why You Should Do It
Onur Genes
PublishedatEmail Follow Up is a term widely used in email marketing but what does it mean?
Email communications are due to their nature, asynchronous. Most of the time when you send an email you are not expecting receiving party to take an action immediately. But it is not always the case. Sometimes urgent matters are also can be told via email.
As the name suggests, email follow up means following up on the reply or the action depending on your last email. When the receiving party doesn't reply to your latest email you may want to follow up with them to get the latest news or bump the last email for them to make it a priority for the receiving person.
Why Are Email Follow Ups Are Important?
Most email campaigns are made for getting a reply from the receiving person. Especially cold emails almost totally depend on getting a reply. Of course, you might want them to click the link you have sent but it still means you want to see action in return for that email.
Not everybody has time for your cold email and most of the time, speaking from experience, they forgot your email. Helping the receiver to remember your email is very important for your cold email campaigns.
But of course, if they don't want to answer, there is nothing you can do. The only thing you can do with the follow ups is remind them you are still waiting!
Best Strategy for Email Follow Ups
When you send an email, it is not possible the get a reply immediately and to do that you should firstly know how to send a follow up cold email.
Secondly, at least most of the time you have to wait a while to check back with the recipient or your cold email campaign's prospect.
People are busy and they have other things to do other than replying to your email.
But when is the best time to follow up?
In our experience, the best time to send a follow up email is waiting for 2 days after your last email. If you didn't get a reply in the first 2 days, probably your lead forgot about your email.
How Many Follow Ups You Should Send?
This question depends on what do you want to achieve and the industry of the person you want to reach.
Some people are not checking their emails and not work with emails most of the time. If that's the case, you should wait a bit longer and 3 follow ups are enough. If you still didn't get a reply, you should accept they are not interested in your services or products.
If you know they are using emails a lot and didn't hear back after the first follow up email, you can go up to 5 follow ups. But beware, this approach can be exhausting for the recipient and they might mark your emails as spam.
Best Examples of Email Follow Ups
When you are sending the second email, your email should act like a gentle reminder. Don't forget, they are probably forgetting about your email. In that case the following sentence or equivalent will work great:
"I wanted to make sure you got my email and it didn't get buried. Did you have time to take a look at {product/service/email}?"
But if you want to send 3rd or 4th follow up, you can use the following template:
"Not sure if I'm knocking at the right door, I just wanted to follow up on my previous email.
Many businesses from the {Industry} space have already started using our service to get more replies and reach out to new clients. This led to landing more clients and growing beyond their expectations in a matter of weeks"