Sending a cold email follow-up is crucial to maximizing your conversion rates.

However, it’s also tricky.

You’ll need to decide how many follow-ups to send, when to send them, how to write your cold email follow-ups, and more.

But don’t worry.

In this article, I’ll first highlight why you need to send a follow-up to your first cold email and provide five excellent templates to get your cold emailing efforts off the ground. I’ll also offer five actionable pointers to help you send successful cold emails for follow-up.

And as a bonus, I’ll also mention 2022’s best cold email follow-up tool.

Cold Email Follow Ups: Table of Contents

(Click on a link to jump to the specific section.)

• Why Send Follow-Ups to Cold Emails?
• How to Write a Cold Email Follow-Up (Step-by-Step)
• How Many Follow-Ups Should You Send?
• How Long Should You Wait Before Following Up?
• 5 Effective Cold Follow-Up Email Templates
• 5 Useful Pointers on Improving Your Follow-Up Emails
• The Best Cold Email Follow-Up Tool in 2021

Let’s dive into it.

Why Send Follow-Ups to Cold Emails?

Writing effective cold emails is not an easy skill to master.

Even seasoned sales professionals have some difficulty nailing it down! And great templates are important, but you need to know how to adapt those cold email templates to get the results you want.

After all, there’s no guarantee that personalized cold emails will have the desired effect. And as a salesperson, the idea of sending someone a follow-up email when they haven’t replied to your initial sales emails can be daunting.

And yet, the cold email follow-up is a crucial part of everyone’s cold outreach process and is an extremely effective means of increasing your conversion rate.

But why?

On average, the first point of contact with a lead rarely results in any sales. In fact, it only accounts for 2% of sales.

Having said that, I’ll add that there are several possible reasons your first email didn’t receive a reply. In all likelihood, the contact is busy and forgot to reply, or they have a full inbox, and prospecting emails are at the bottom of the pile.

Whatever the reason, sending a follow-up email can be the difference between getting the response you want and losing the lead.

Keep in mind that cold email follow-ups aren’t just for a cold sales email campaign.

There are other times when you might need to follow up, like after cold emailing for a job or meeting at a networking event. While the nature of the emails may differ, the purpose of the follow-up outcome stays the same — to improve your reply rate.

In this article, I’ll mainly focus on the sales follow up, but you can apply these guidelines to any follow-up email.

Wondering how to write your first cold email?
Read my ultimate guide on cold emails for some templates and pointers.

Now, let’s explore how you can write an excellent follow-up for cold emailing.

How to Write a Cold Email Follow-Up (Step-by-Step Guide)

Here are four steps to write an effective cold follow-up email:

Step 1: Use a Solid Email Subject Line to Grab the Prospect’s Attention

Many salespeople just reply to (or forward) the first email they sent.

As a result, the subject line remains the same.

Only “Re:” will be added at the beginning.

However, if the prospect has not replied, it’s a good idea to modify the subject line, even if you do reply to the same email.

In fact, it’s a good idea to reply to your first email so that the recipient can go through it for context if necessary.

As the subject line is usually the first thing your prospective client sees, it will be a deciding factor in whether the cold prospect opens your email or not.

The key to a good subject line is personalization and relevance — it needs to communicate to the potential customer why they should open your email.

In fact, one study found that personalized subject lines can increase response rates by 30.5%.

Now, about the length of your subject lines…

A study found that longer email subject lines between 36-50 characters achieved a 24.6% higher response rate than shorter subject lines.

If you’re wondering what a great subject line looks like, here are a few you can use in your follow-up emails:

• Still thinking it over? This might help…
• Ready to continue our discussion, [recipient’s first name]?
• [Mutual connection] recommended we get in touch
• I had an idea since we last spoke.

Step 2: Provide Context for Why You’re Reaching Out

Avoid starting your email by saying that you are following up.

This is a huge mistake.

The likelihood that the recipient remembers your first email is practically nil.

In the main body of your email, you need to address the reason you are emailing them and what you need from them. This increases the likelihood of receiving a reply.

On that note, it may be helpful to segment your target prospect list based on those who opened your first email and those who didn’t. For example, you could identify a pain point for the prospects who didn’t respond and then address that pain point in your follow-up.

Fortunately, you can use email outreach tools to track who has opened your original email and the actions they took, such as clicking a link.

With this information, you can adjust your outreach campaign to provide your potential customer with additional context on why you’re following up.

And for prospects who didn’t open your first email, you can include the same elements in your follow-up. But only include the essential information the cold prospect needs — avoid anything unnecessary as this is simply a follow-up email; your initial email already has the information.

Step 3: Tell the Prospect What’s in It for Them

When you’re emailing someone you’ve never met before, you need to grab the prospect’s attention by telling them what’s in it for them.

Essentially, you need to convince the cold prospect that what you’re offering is worth their time. However, since this is a follow-up, you need to do so without fluff to ensure you get the point across.

For example, you could include the benefit for the potential customer, such as a free premium trial of your software, in the opening lines of your follow-up. If you’re in content marketing, maybe you could offer to feature them in a blog post to improve link building.

The goal is to convince the prospective client that it’s worth hearing about what you’re offering.

Step 4: Include a Powerful Call to Action (CTA)

Adding a solid call to action is crucial in successful cold emails and follow-up emails.

If the potential customer didn’t respond to your first email, you need to give them a reason to respond to your sales follow-up, and including a powerful CTA could be just what you need.

Avoid using vague statements like “Could we have a chat?”

Instead, create a personalized and unique CTA for your follow-up that clearly spells out what you want them to do.

Here are some CTAs you could use:

• Provide a link to your scheduling tool, like Calendly.
• Can we get on a 30-minute call this week?

Being straightforward about what you want the potential client to do is the key to crafting a good CTA. You could consider including humor in your follow-up emails, but double-check if this is appropriate for your target audience before doing it.

Now that we know how to write cold emails, let’s find out how many follow-ups you should send.

How Many Follow-Ups Should You Send?

Unfortunately, there’s no simple answer to that question.

Some sales professionals suggest sending a maximum of three follow-ups, while others may find that sending as many as eight works best.

The first sales follow-up email is naturally the most effective, offering the highest reply rate. However, statistics have shown that 80% of sales take five follow-up emails to close.

Based on that, it would make sense to say that sending several follow-ups would increase your overall response rate, right?

Not necessarily.

Consider that each follow-up provides diminishing returns, so the 7th follow-up is less effective than the 3rd follow-up, for example. However, some studies show that 55% of replies stem from the 4th to the 8th follow-up.

That said, bear in mind that there’s a very fine line between adding value and annoying the cold prospect.

Aside from having your emails deleted, if you start annoying the cold prospect, you run the risk of them marking yours as spam emails — and then you’ll never hear back from them.

Next, let’s go over how long to wait before sending your follow-up email.

How Long Should You Wait Before Following Up?

If you follow up too soon, you risk losing the prospect’s attention and annoying them.

But if you follow up too late, they might move on.

As a general guideline, two or three days is a reasonable amount of time to wait before sending your first follow-up email.

While there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to the follow-up schedule, here’s an example of how you could space your follow-ups:

• 1st follow-up: 2 days after the initial cold email.
• 2nd follow-up: 4 days after.
• 3rd follow-up: 7 days after.
• 4th follow-up 14 days after.
• 5th follow-up: 30 days after.

Experiment with your own prospecting email schedule to find what works best for you and your audience.

Now that we’ve got the steps and timing out of the way, let’s talk about scalability.

Creating a cold email follow-up from scratch each time you need one can be time-consuming, especially if you have a massive email list.

Instead, you can use templates to get started right away.

5 Effective Cold Follow-Up Email Templates

Here are a few cold email templates you can use for follow-ups:

1. Using a Trigger Event to Follow Up

As a salesperson, you should always look for triggers you can work into your follow-up emails. Some examples include winning an award, hiring a high-profile employee, or scoring some media coverage.

Subject line: Congratulations on [X], some ideas about achieving [goal] 

Hi [prospect’s first name], 

Congratulations on your company’s recent round of fundraising! It was exciting to learn more about your story and goals. 

Have you given more thought to my proposal on improving your lead generation? I’d be happy to do a quick recap over a phone call and answer any questions you may have. 

Would you be able to squeeze in a conversation on Wednesday at 16:00? Alternatively, feel free to choose a time that works for you from my calendar: {scheduling link}.

Best, 

[Your name] 

[Your designation (for example, Sales Rep)] 

[Your company’s name] 

[Your contact info] 

[Social media icons (like a link to your LinkedIn or Twitter profile)]

2. Following Up After a Meeting

If you’ve been cold calling and just wrapped a successful meeting with a target prospect, you could send a follow-up to recap the conversation. It’s an excellent way of keeping the relationship moving forward.

Subject line: I’d love to hear your feedback on the meeting

Hello [prospect’s first name], 

It was wonderful meeting you today. Learning about [target company] and your goals for the future was inspiring. 

We’ve worked with several clients who have faced similar challenges, so I understand how difficult it can be to [what the challenge is preventing]. 

Below I’ve attached a case study highlighting how we’ve helped previous clients overcome the same challenge. I thought you might find some value in seeing how another company in the [same industry] overcame it. 

[link to case study]

Also, I thought I’d recap the important points from our meeting earlier: 

• Your key priorities are (2-3 goals) 
• The criteria for success include (2-3 benchmarks) 
• How [your product/service] can help in achieving the points mentioned above

Please reach out if you have any questions or feedback. I’m looking forward to catching up again on [agreed-upon day/time of the next meeting]. 

Regards, 

[Your name, designation, company name, contact info, and social media icons]

3. After You’ve Already Sent a Follow-up

Sending one follow-up doesn’t guarantee a response.

You may very well need more than one follow-up, especially if it’s a cold lead.

Often, persistence pays off when it comes to following up on sales emails. This is also an excellent opportunity to restate the value proposition.

Subject line: Re: [original subject email subject line] 

Hi [prospect’s first name], 

I thought I’d get in touch again to see which of the [details of the first email] have helped improve your sales teams’ productivity. If you haven’t implemented any of the techniques yet, or if you’re having difficulty implementing this, I’m happy to help you get started. 

Are you available for a 30-minute phone call? I’d love to go into more detail. Let me know what time works best for you. (If you can’t make time for a call, let me know, and I’ll send more details by email.)

I look forward to hearing from you! 

Best regards, 

[Your name, designation, company name, contact info, and social media icons]

4. Following Up After Tweaking an Email

Sometimes you could be in a situation where you may need to make a few changes to your first email. This might be because you’re sending the email to find the right person to engage.

Whatever the reason, making a few small changes can be enough to get you the response you want.

Subject line: Can you help me with this? 

Hi [prospect’s first name], 

I’m writing to follow up on my previous email. I haven’t heard back from anyone on the team yet. If it makes sense for us to talk, please let me know what day and time work best for you. 

However, if this doesn’t fall within your area of responsibility, could you put me in touch with the right person? 

Thanks for your help.

Have a great day, 

[Your name, designation, company name, contact info, and social media icons]

5. Following Up After Sending Several Follow-ups

If you’ve already sent several follow-up emails and still haven’t heard back, you’ll probably be wasting your time if you send any more.

However, you should still tie things up in a way that leaves the cold lead with a positive image of your business.

If you’re in this situation, consider sending a breakup email. Who knows, maybe down the line, they’ll be ready to do business, or they can refer you to someone else.

Subject line: Still any interest in our service?

Hey [prospect’s first name], 

I’ve reached out to you a few times with some suggestions for improving [business aspect], but haven’t heard back yet, which tells me one of three things: 

1. You’re interested in our offer but haven’t had the time to respond — in which case I’d love to set up a call at your convenience — perhaps next week?
2. You’re interested in our offer, but now isn’t the right time. I’ll reach out again in three months. 
3. You’re not interested in our offer, in which case I’ll stop bothering you. 

When you can, please let me know which of these is the right assessment, and I’ll be guided accordingly.

Cheers, 

[Your name, designation, company name, contact info, and social media icons]

Now, let’s go over some pointers to make your cold email follow-ups stand out.

5 Useful Pointers on Improving Your Follow-Up Emails

Here are five tips to help write an excellent cold email follow-up that’ll help you generate qualified leads for your sales pipeline:

1. Keep Them Short

Effective cold emails should always be short.

And when sending follow-up emails, always try to keep them shorter than the initial email.

There are several reasons for this:

1. Most people don’t read emails in the same way they read books — they scan the images and copy, often in an “F” pattern.
2. After opening an email, many recipients spend less than a minute reading it, so you only have a few seconds to make a good impression.

2. Send Personalized Cold Emails

You should always send personalized emails for the best chance of improving your open rate. You should always include the recipient’s name, but you can take it further by adding their company name and job title.

Sending a generic email is not productive, as it is almost guaranteed to be ignored.

3. Include Social Proof

Social proof is a powerful cue that can be a major help in boosting your open rate.

Including relevant snippets from your existing customers can help convince a potential client to take the plunge. Feel free to include customer testimonials or any awards your company has received in your follow-ups.

However, keep it short to ensure it doesn’t take the focus away from why you’re following up.

4. Add Value

Don’t think of the follow-up email as a reminder for the potential client that they haven’t replied — that’s a surefire way to annoy them. Instead, ensure you provide value with each follow-up by adding information useful to the prospective client.

5. Keep it Logical

Ensure your follow-up continues the conversation from the previous message and that both emails are logically connected. This will make it easier for the recipient to connect both emails. You could also use the same CTA as in the opening email.

Now that we’ve had a look at a few useful tips for improving your cold email follow-ups, you’ll also need a tool to streamline our email follow-up process.

After all, you can’t manage all of this manually, right?

The Best Cold Email Follow-Up Tool in 2024

Writing and sending follow-ups can be an extremely time-consuming process, especially if you have a massive mailing list.

That’s why you should consider automating your email outreach campaign to streamline the sales process and convert cold leads to warm leads efficiently.

You still send personalized emails, but you can write your follow-ups in advance and have them scheduled to send automatically at custom intervals if you don’t receive a response.

Enter GMass.

GMass is an excellent email outreach and marketing tool that’s perfect for managing your cold outreach and follow-ups.

It’s used by employees in large organizations like Google, Uber, LinkedIn, and Twitter. GMass is also ideal for anyone looking to automate their email sequences, be they solopreneurs, startups, individual salespeople, or anyone else.

With GMass, you can:

• Automatically personalize your emails, including paragraphs, attachments, images, and links to your target audience.
• Send automated follow-up emails based on specific behavior, like if the recipient doesn’t open or doesn’t respond. You can set up to 8 stages of follow-up for your outreach campaign with various triggers, customize the text of each follow-up, and choose the time between follow-ups.
• Access detailed reports evaluating your email performance like open and reply rate, unsubscribes, click-throughs, and more.
• Schedule your emails to ensure they arrive at the best time for maximum engagement.
• Overcome Gmail’s sending limits to ensure your sales rep can contact every lead.

To get started with GMass, simply download the Chrome extension and sign up for a free trial using your Gmail account.

Cold Email Follow Up: Final Thoughts

A cold email campaign without follow-ups is never a good idea.

Without follow-ups, your email outreach efforts won’t be as effective as they could be, and you’ll be missing out on lots of sales.

However, following up to provide value without annoying the prospect can be tricky and time-consuming.

But don’t worry.

Use the tips and templates in this guide, and you’ll be able to master the cold email follow-up approach.

And with a tool like GMass, you can overhaul your email outreach campaign with features like personalization and follow-up automation, email scheduling, detailed reports, and more.

Why not try GMass today and maximize the effectiveness of your cold email follow up?