Following up is critical in sales outreach. Only 2% of cold emails get a response on the first attempt. Effective follow up emails are the key to driving conversions from the other 98% over time through nurturing.
In this comprehensive guide, we’ll explore everything you need to create compelling sales follow up email templates, including:
Benefits of Sales Follow Up Emails
Best Practices for Following Up
Follow Up Cadence Strategies
Follow Up Email Templates By Stage
Examples of Effective Follow Up Emails
Tools to Help Schedule & Track Follow Ups
Let's dive in to learn how to boost sales productivity through better email follow up!
Taking the time to follow up via email provides many advantages, including:
Additional follow up emails have been proven to double sales response rates. More touchpoints equals more opportunities to connect.
Following up turns more cold prospects into leads to fuel your pipeline. Without follow up, you lose deals.
Following up with past prospects, even if they did not convert, can unlock referrals to new contacts.
Consistent nurturing builds familiarity and trust with prospects, laying groundwork for future deals.
Following up touches cold leads that expressed past interest but went quiet. This rehooks them.
In summary, the compounding benefits of disciplined follow up pays dividends to your sales funnel and relationships long-term. Now let’s review some best practices.
Executing follow up outreach effectively involves some key principles, including:
Follow your first email within 1-3 days. Quick follow up capitalizes on initial interest and has higher response rates.
Send follow ups via email, but also incorporate phone and LinkedIn to improve touchpoint variety.
Always include new details on prospects like research findings, triggers events etc. Generic outreach fails.
Give advice, share an article, provide a free trial etc. Make each message valuable beyond a sales pitch.
Connect follow up messaging to prospect challenges, industry news, company milestones etc. Timely relevance works.
According to data, 80% of sales happen within 5 follow up touches. Avoid long sequences that see diminishing returns.
Use sales engagement tools to monitor follow up performance and continuously improve template messaging that works.
Now that we’ve covered some key principles, let’s review common follow up sequence strategies.
Well planned and systematic follow up outreach drives results. Here are popular sequencing strategies used for sales:
This comprehensive sequence covers 1 month with a variety of touchpoints.
For shorter cycles, this streamlined email sequence works very well:
The accelerated pacing drives urgency while also touching base at the critical 7 day mark.
For longer sales cycles, this extended nurturing approach pays off:
Extended sequences develop familiarity and trust over time through valuable non-promotional updates. The eventual sales transition feels much more natural after nurturing.
As you can see, the right follow up sequence and cadence varies by offer, industry, deal size and other factors. Now let’s explore templates tailored to different follow up stages.
Email templates should be adapted as prospects progress through different interest levels in your outreach funnel.
Here are effective templates structured for each tier:
Use these follow up emails for non-responsive completely cold prospects:
Subject Lines
Email Body
Hi [First Name],
I’m checking back to see if you had a chance to review my previous email about [software].
As discussed, we help companies like [Company] optimize their sales funnel reporting with advanced analytics and models.
I understand you are busy, but please let me know if there is any interest in learning more. I’m also happy to provide a free demo, or examples of the dashboard for you to review as needed.
Either way, appreciate your time and let me know how I can help!
Best,[Your Name]
This focuses on the key benefit previously messaged while incorporating new details like the free demo offer to compel responses.
For prospects that previously replied or clicked a link, use warm follow up messaging:
Subject Lines
Email Body
Hi [First Name],
Great chatting with you last week about possibly leveraging [Tool] for automating your sales reports.
As we explored, over 75% of growth-stage B2B brands now use solutions like ours due to the 5-10x time savings plus more customizable analytics.
Wanted to check in to see if you had any other questions on capabilities, unique data integrations, or pricing options after reviewing the materials I sent over.
I also set up that free custom demo link if helpful for you to experience our platform live.
Let me know how else I can help!
[Your name]
Leverage past points of engagement while advancing the conversation. The demo link enables next step activity.
If prospects request proposals or express specific interests, highlight next steps:
Subject Lines
Email Body
Hi [First Name],
Thanks for the details on ramping up your sales operations analytics. Per your request, attached please find a custom pricing proposal from [Tool] based on your team size and usage needs.
We offer affordable monthly plans as well as volume discounts for annual contracts, allowing us to scale key services like integrations and analyst support as your needs grow - providing more value as you scale.
Please review the pricing and service details attached. I’m happy to answer any other questions or set up a quick call to walk through if helpful. Just let me know!
Excited at the prospect of working together on this project.
[Your Name]
Providing requested media and closing the loop on expressed interests advances deals towards closes.
As you can see, follow up email content and offers should directly align with prospect temperature. Now, lets review full examples.
It also helps to analyze complete follow up email templates across different scenarios.
Here are 5 excellent real world examples:
Connecting on social can power warm intros to key prospects. This template leverages a new LinkedIn connection for an invite:
Leveraging credible intros is very effective. Now let's look at a classic B2B sales sequence.
Strategic ABM requires repeated exposure to penetrate hard-to-reach executives. This 7-touch template is perfect:
Reviewing full follow up sequences provides great ideas on expanding objection handling, promotions, and positioning over time. Now let's explore a shorter B2C service sequence.
Rallying initial non-responses is key for service providers to capture inbound leads:
Creative subject lines backed by promotional offers convert resistant prospects. Humor also helps stops unsubscribes. Now let's explore an extended nurture sequence.
For long sales cycles, valuable non-promotional follow up keeps you top of mind. This template excels at sustained nurtures:
The above 30-day series leaves recipients highly engaged, qualified and sales primed after consistent nurturing. Finally, let's explore one last use case.
Driving webinar signups to registrants is critical:
Driving registration to attendance with effective follow up is critical for webinar success.
Hopefully these real world examples illustrate creative ways to incorporate compelling offers, exclusivity, and value across your follow up outreach campaigns.
Now let’s explore some tools to help manage effective follow up.
Executing sequences one-off via native email clients is very difficult. Thankfully, many great sales engagement platforms help streamline follow up tracking including:
Outreach is the leading follow up management solution for sales teams with capabilities to:
This enables sales reps to scale follow up sequences exponentially while maintaining effectiveness.
SalesLoft offers a leading sales engagement platform helping teams:
With these capabilities, following up at scale is streamlined for outbound sales teams.
For leaner teams, Streak CRM provides excellent follow up automation including:
The affordable CRM-based follow up orchestration makes Streak very popular.
As shown above, many outstanding tools exist to scale follow up effectiveness for sales teams while optimizing rep performance. Investing in these force multipliers pays dividends.
In conclusion, developing competent follow up outreach skills combines both strategy and technology for optimal results.
Efficient sequences, well crafted email templates, and purpose-built follow up software pave the path to higher sales conversions through disciplined nurturing of cold outreach over time.
Just Think AI makes creating effective sales follow up emails easy. Here are tips:
With this information Just Think AI can generate tailored sales follow up email templates to re-engage prospects.
When requesting follow up sales email templates from Just Think AI, provide:
Supplying this context allows Just Think AI to optimize compelling follow up sales emails tailored to your prior messaging and customer journey stage.
