Writing effective cold emails is not an easy skill to master and cold email follow-up is even harder.
Cold email follow-up can be a powerful tool for increasing the response rate to your emails. By following up with someone who has not responded to an email, you may be able to re-engage them and get them to take action on your proposal or idea.
What do you say in messages, two, three, four and so on?
How many follow-ups should you do?
How do you get customers that haven’t responded to your emails, to finally respond?
Cold Email Follow Up… Why follow up?
There are several reasons why your first cold email might not have received a reply. Maybe the prospects were busy, maybe you didn’t say the pitch correctly. Maybe you emailed them at the wrong time or maybe you’re emailing people that would never buy from you in the first place.
While the fourth reason needs to be tackled in the lead generation process, the first three can be handled by you right now by following up effectively. First, you need to know how often to follow up with each contact.
The first thing you need to do is provide context for why you’re reaching out. You need to tell them why you know them, or how you got their info. All that sort of stuff needs to be addressed because remember: you’re, cold emailing people – these are people that you haven’t met before. They have no context for who you are what you offer anything like that.
So you need to provide that context in your Cold Email Follow Up.
What To Include In Your Cold Email Follow Up
Most amateurs will write something like “Hey, just bumping this up. Did you get a chance to look at my offer?”
… SILENCE!
There’s no context and they have no idea what your offer is.
They don’t know who you are or have forgotten about you.
Before they even acknowledge that you exist, they wonder who the F*&£ you are and why you are bothering them. Then before you know it, you have some frustrating response, telling you to go away and leave them alone.
You have to think like them and put yourself in their perspective.
How many emails do you receive like this and how do you react? If you cold email then chances are you are a little more lenient in your frustrated response but most of the prospects you are contacting get these kinds of emails many, many times a day.
How do you stand out from the rest?
You simply do what everyone else isn’t and the first step in that is not to be lazy when putting together your Cold Email Follow Ups?
You want to make sure you have the context of the pitch in every follow-up.
By following up with a reply to the previous email in the campaign, everything’s in one thread. It seems natural and you don’t have to worry about too much context.
You also want to include a call to action in your cold email follow-ups. It’s important that the buyer knows exactly what you want them to do after reading this email…
Are they responding to a yes or no question?
Are they booking a meeting with you?
Are they clicking a link?
Tips For Cold Email Follow Up
If you’ve sent a cold email and not gotten a response, don’t give up! Here are some tips for follow-up Cold Emails that will help you get the response you’re hoping for.
1) Keep it short and sweet
If your follow-ups are too long, nobody is going to read the past emails you’ve sent.
Be concise and to the point, outlining why you are contacting them and most importantly, what the benefits are to the prospect for persuing your call-to-action.
2) Is It Relevant?
Always make sure that your emails are relevant to the prospect. Whether that means writing your emails from scratch or what we do and utilising software to email in bulk whilst also making sure every person contacted has personalisation that is relevant to the contact themselves – this is why we get such great results for our clients.
Writing the email specifically for the niche allows you to
- Send them relevant ideas that you know their brand/business is struggling with because you’ve talked about it with other companies in their sector
- Talk confidently about those issues from a place of experience and authority
Back-Up Your Case In Your Cold Email Follow Up
Another great thing to do in your follow-ups is to include things to back up your position in the industry..
This could be case studies, testimonials, articles you have written or podcasts that you have been featured on.
Studies talk about a result that you’ve had in the past for a company similar to them, or a big win or big meeting that you’re excited about.
If you met with the CMO of another major company that they might know, it opens them up as it shows that others are talking to you in their industry/niche, meaning they are going to be more likely to respond.
Add Value In Your Cold Email Follow Up
Let’s say you are emailing tech companies that provide integrated solutions for the banking industry.
You could say:
“Hey there,
I sent through an introduction a few days back and thought this might be of use to you.
We were talking with Deutsche Bank recently which was struggling with cross-border activities and integrating solutions that were Cloud-native and compliant. We put together a case study that may benefit you given that most of the banking sector is struggling to implement this effectively.
Mind if I send it across for you to discuss this in your next board meeting?
Best,
Morgan @ FinTech Solutions LTD
See how this is centred around the prospect and not you, the sender?
All your follow-ups should be logical, focus on the prospect and flow from the previous email you sent.
Read It Out Loud
Your emails should flow as a normal conversation would.
Imagine if you just met someone and spoke in the exact way some of the emails you receive (or may have sent yourself).
What reaction do you think you would get?
Your emails should flow like they would in normal conversation so read them out loud and see how they sound when spoken.
Never send something you aren’t comfortable speaking out loud.
How many follow-ups should you send?
When sending a follow-up email, it is important to think about how you can best reach out to your recipient.
Sending too few follow-ups can leave the impression that you’re not interested in continuing the conversation, or that you are simply blanket emailing people.
Overbearing follow-up emails can be seen as rude and pestering.
There is no one right answer when it comes to how many follow-ups to send; it depends on the situation and the relationship between the sender and recipient.
Whilst general guidelines suggest sending at least 3 or 4 follow-ups after initially contacting someone, in our campaigns, we schedule follow-ups around 5 times in the space of 4-6 weeks depending on their seniority and then follow-ups in 6 months, then 12 months and then 2 years – linking our software to inboxes and tools to ensure that no follow-ups are done if there is any connection during that time either by email, LinkedIn or phone.
When doing follow-ups later down the line past 6 months, you need to ensure that your wording isn’t outdated and about matters that have been and gone. Software can help you with this but wording it in a way that is natural is far better.
The Break-Up Method
If you don’t want to be pursuing the long-term approach (6 months+ in follow-ups), the break-up method is best suited for the fourth or 5th email in your sequence.
Something like:
Hey Peter,
I’ll assume your integration solutions are all secured and future-proof for the new regulations and therefore not a priority in discussing this further.
Please feel free to reach out if I am wrong in my assessment or if anything changes.
Many thanks
Robert @ Fintech Solutions
This method allows them to respond due to the FOMO effect and you can continue the conversation.
Tackle All Angles In Your Cold Email Follow Up
If you still want to talk to the company but aren’t getting responses from the person you are contacting, you can also implement multi-point campaigns so that you contact multiple people within the company.
A good example of this came from Focus & Co and would be something like:
Hey Jane,
I sent through some info to Peter in your IT department but thought it best to bring you up to speed.
Our recent integration with Deutsche Bank fixed their cross-border activities for their Cloud-native compliancy structure. It seems like this would be needed within Barclays given the roadmap of banking over the next 3-years.
Would you also be wanting to jump on the call when we set up a meeting?
Best,
Robert @ Fintech Solutions
This approach gets more senior members involved and is likely to get them to discuss with the person who you initially contacted, then push them to respond.
It’s a smart way of tackling multi-points in the organisation and increasing the number of meetings you get for your business.
Conclusion For Cold Email Follow Up
There are 100% rights and for most industries, it’s a case of trial and error. However, there are set boundaries like the ones we have mentioned in this article that helps you solidify your outreach and get more responses and meetings booked.
If you want to set up a brainstorming session with one of our team at MarGen to see how we can help you book more meetings for your business and help you increase revenue and long-term custom, choose a timeslot below to discuss options available to you.
