Are You Making These Mistakes With Your Follow-up Emails?

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bad follow-up emails

Don’t you just hate it when a salesperson decides to spam your inbox with useless, boring, and repetitive emails because they just want to “follow-up” with you or “bubble their message to the top of your inbox”?

I’m in sales, so I get that salespeople are told they need to be persistent and relentlessly follow-up with leads if they want to close the deal–and they do–but that doesn’t give you a right to send 7 redundant follow-up emails either.

It’s true that if you don’t send 8 emails, you’re probably missing out on 33-60% of responses (or more) from qualified leads. After helping more than 480 B2B companies optimize their sales emails and running our own experiments with more than 360,000 emails, we’ve concluded that about 1/3 of your total positive responses in a campaign will come from touches #5-8.

But those numbers are only true if you make the time to craft thoughtful and targeted emails for EVERY step of your email campaign. Otherwise, you won’t get any results, and you might even develop a spam complaint problem that tanks own email deliverability, sabotaging yourself from even reaching the prospect’s inbox.

Avoid these seven mistakes if you want to get responses to your follow-up emails instead of being marked as spam:

1. Don’t assume they saw your last email.

Sometimes you might get lucky and have a prospect engaged, reading your every email. But a lot of times, a prospective customer might have never read anything you sent them until the 4th, 5th, or even 6th email. And even if they did read what you sent them before, you can’t assume that they remember what you said, or that they cared for anything your email said. After all, if they had been compelled by those previous emails you sent they probably would have responded by now.

2. Perseverance isn’t always respected or appreciated.

There are a lot of automated email tools out there that make it really easy to send “bump emails,” you know–those “RE: ” threads that contain a chain of all the emails you sent in your attempt to reach the prospect. But contrary to popular belief and claims, sending bump sales emails aren’t always the best way to get a positive response.

In fact, sometimes reminding prospects about all the previous emails you sent them can sabotage your current efforts.

Consider these 3 scenarios:

  1. The prospect didn’t open your message, and never read the body. This means they probably weren’t interested in your subject line. Your subject line might suck, but if it is at all related to the benefit/pain point you were focusing on, chances are they aren’t interested in that.
  2. The prospect opened your message, but didn’t respond because they weren’t interested. In that case, you probably don’t want to be reminding them about that concept that they already decided wasn’t worthwhile discussing with you.
  3. The prospect opened your message, but didn’t respond because they were busy. If they were really interested in what you had to say, but didn’t make an effort to respond, you still haven’t won yet. You might be getting closer to their needs and pain points, but chances are that timing is wrong or what you’re talking about doesn’t resonate strongly enough with them, since they didn’t respond.

There are plenty of tools to help you know if someone opened your message or not, but you still don’t know why they didn’t respond.  That said, if someone did actually read your message AND found it interesting, they’ll probably remember it. And if they don’t, it’s not actually that interesting.

That’s why in most cases it’s better to not remind people that you’ve already sent them 6 emails with a giant thread of unsolicited “RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE”‘s that never had a response. In most cases, those “RE”s are a red flag that you’re probably an annoying salesperson who’s spamming them, and they’re much more likely to hit delete or even mark you as spam.

There are some cases where either mentioning another email thread or using a “RE” bump email might make sense, though. For example, if one of your emails is “building upon a previous one,” meaning that you’re adding new information that is referencing a previous email you sent, then it makes sense to reference that email or even include a copy of that email thread below your new message for context.

3. Don’t be redundant.

Many follow-up emails don’t work because they’re damn boring and repetitive. Just like your first sales email must be compelling, every follow-up needs an interesting new angle that gives the prospect a reason to keep reading and respond.

I realize that crafting great sales emails is hard. And crafting 8 of them is even harder. But rather than seeing this as a giant chore, see those 8 messages as different opportunities to test a different message that might excite your prospect into responding.

Even if you’re sending targeted messages to a specific and well-defined “buyer persona,” it doesn’t mean that everyone in that audience thinks and feels exactly the same. Not all Chief Marketing Officers are going to have the same taste, and everyone will have slightly different problems and goals at the time they get your message. That’s why you need to try different things in your email campaign, and these 8 emails are your opportunity to do so.

The more you differ your messages (while still keeping them relevant to your audience), the more total opens and responses you’ll get from your campaign.

4. Don’t write a novel.

Avoid the temptation to ramble in any email you send, especially follow-up emails. The most polite thing you can do in an email is cut out all the unnecessary pleasantries and filler that will bore your prospect to death. The shorter your emails are, the better.

As a general rule, keep your follow-up emails to 3-5 short sentences or less. Just make sure you’re getting your point across clearly in those sentences so that the prospect isn’t confused.

5. Don’t forget about the Call to Action.

Whenever you write an email, you should have a particular goal in mind. Maybe you want to schedule a phone call with the prospect, or you want them to watch the video you’ve linked to. But whatever the desired action is, you need to explicitly ask the recipient to perform it in your Call to Action (CTA).

Follow-up emails are no different: you need to have a clear ask and provide a good reason for the prospect to do what you’re asking.

6. Don’t just follow-up once.

How many emails are you sending before you give up on a prospect or an account? It’s good if you’re following up at all, but just sending 3 follow-up emails after your first isn’t enough. Persistence pays off: remember that about one-third of your responses might come from emails #5-8, so if you quit before then you’re losing all those potential customers.

And sometimes, when you’re testing new things, email #6 might actually get the most messages in the campaign. If this happens, you should probably consider moving it much earlier in the campaign, but you’ll never know which email works best until you try, and each email in your sequence is another chance to get even more responses.

7. Don’t forget to say Goodbye.

You shouldn’t be sending infinite follow-up emails. At some point there’s diminishing marginal returns, meaning that if you keep following up you will probably not get much benefit for your time spent. Likewise, sending people TOO MANY emails will actually increase your chances of getting marked as spam, since you might be driving them insane. Based on our own research and experiments, we recommend ending your campaign at 8 emails, but feel free to test that for yourself to see what works best for your buyers.

When you do finally end things, you need to make sure you let the buyer know it’s “goodbye.” As corny as this sounds, letting them know that this is your last outreach attempt can often have an interesting rescue effect. Whether it’s a sense of fear of loss or some other human psychological reaction, good breakup emails will always capture a few people who were silently reading your emails without responding.

But instead of sending that corny “little green aliens” or “alligator” breakup email, try writing a thoughtful message that actually adds value to the recipient. There are lots of ways you can do this, but the more you can end on a positive and helpful note, the more likely they are to either have a change of heart and respond to you, or reach out later when the timing is better.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gotten emails from people I prospected years ago, who finally leave their companies and go to a new role or start companies of their own, telling me things like:

“Heather, I got your email [x time ago], and I really wanted to work together then, but it just wasn’t going to work because [reason x]. But I’d love your help now…”

Follow these 7 pieces of advice for follow-up emails (lame pun intended!), and I promise you’ll get more positive responses to your sales emails.

If you liked this article, leave a comment or ask a question. And if you want to hear even more cold email tips, subscribe to our newsletter.

Why Some of My Best Cold Emails Are Dead

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If you’re searching for a “silver bullet” to magically solve all your problems, you’re probably going to fail.

Even if you’ve found an effective tactic that can give you a strong advantage, that advantage won’t last long once a million other people have learned of that tactic. This is why even the best tactics and sales or “growth hacks” are always only temporary.

This is true for just about everything in life, but especially sales prospecting emails.

I get emails, comments, tweets and Linkedin messages every week from people asking the same thing: “Can you post some of your actual cold email templates online?”

Although I regularly critique cold emails to educate people on what mistakes they should avoid, I intentionally try to avoid posting simplistic examples of “what you should do/write” because people tend to misuse and abuse these examples.

About a year ago I was helping Aaron Ross and Jason Lemkin edit and wrap up the sequel to Aaron’s best-seller, “Predictable Revenue.” One of the things Aaron asked me to add was a section on cold email copy, in which I supplied one of my client’s real email templates that actually got them at least 16 customers.

Here’s the “winning email template” I wrote:

the winning email template that died

Please note that this template was designed for a very specific use case: It was written for a B2B company with sales acceleration software who was targeting VP Sales and Directors of Inside Sales.

My company, Salesfolk, designs email templates as part of campaigns that our clients send to their prospective customers in order to start conversations. All of the templates we create for clients are 100% original and unique. We don’t reuse templates or generic formulas for anyone, but rather rely on a variety of carefully tested and proven copywriting principles that aim to evoke our clients’ prospects’ emotions and build rapport so that they will engage in a thoughtful conversation.

Part of why our emails are so effective and beat the industry standard by 3-10x, consistently getting response rates around 16-35%, is because none of them are ever generic.

Ironically, this means that when people try to rip them off and reuse them, it will backfire and fail, unless they are used by a close competitor targeting the same buyer personas.

Why Cheap Copycats Will Always Fail At Sales and Marketing in The Long-Run

Aaron later republished the section I wrote for the book on Hubspot to drive additional traction to his pre-launch. I didn’t mind this because I had already given it to him to use as he liked, and it did generate qualified leads for me. However, since then I have seen that same exact email template copy and pasted dozens if not hundreds of times.

It became rampantly overused, like Aaron’s “who’s the right person” email.

Not only did almost every direct and indirect competitor of my client start using that email, companies who weren’t even in that space started using it too.

I know this because not only did I personally receive that same email from ZoomInfo and a dozen of their competitors in the lead space, but so did my clients and everyone else.

At first, I didn’t mind this, and found the whole thing kind of amusing and flattering.

But eventually, I started to get a bit annoyed.

I wasn’t annoyed because people were ripping off our templates without paying us, but because people were being so lazy and foolish to try to just “copy-paste” an email template that clearly wasn’t relevant to their business model or their audience.

Not only will these people not be effective with cold email, and will not get many responses to their cold emails, their spam is irritating the market of prospective customers and teaching them to hate sales prospecting emails.

And all this really pisses me off.

I don’t want to see my own email templates going up on our Hall of Shame, but if people keep spamming and abusing them, they will.

Please Don’t Be A Sheep: Stop Copy-Pasting Generic Emails And Spamming Them. Instead, Be A Goat And Adopt An “Original Approach”

I have a big orange goat on the back of my business card. It looks like this:

orange goat on my business card

Sure, it’s memorable and makes a good conversation starter, but it’s more than that to me.

There are two things I fiercely believe in and live by. They are that:

  1. Cold email is a powerful tool that can change your life and business, if used correctly and thoughtfully to start intelligent conversations with the right people who you can add value to.
  2. You cannot get far in life by being a “sheep” and blindly following people and copying other people’s work and tactics. Instead, I believe people should always be “goats,” and strive to think critically for themselves and come up with creative and original ideas. (Sheep follow blindly, and goats lead independently.)

So how does this apply to cold email, sales and marketing?

The only real “winning sales strategy” is by continually seeking out effective tactics and strategies that others have not yet realized.

The way to find them is to have a mindset where you are constantly testing new strategies to find out what works and what doesn’t, and then iterating upon them once you’ve found the winners.

Anything less, such as blindly copying basic tips and tactics from some mainstream source, such as a blog post or book, won’t ever be nearly as effective.

There’s a lot of great content out there, and you absolutely should read it and think about it, but the key is to think critically and skeptically about any information you absorb, and test it out for yourself to see if it works for you or not.

If you want to “learn how to fish for yourself,” and learn how to create unique emails that actually work, check out the Salesfolk Cold Email Mastery Course. I created it based on the lessons I learned from 2,000 email split tests that helped our clients make millions of dollars last year.

The Cost of Personalizing Your Sales Emails

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How much should you personalize your sales emails?

Sending mass generic emails with zero personalization won’t get you many responses, but writing every email one at a time isn’t very scalable or cost-effective either.

So how much personalization is enough?

The truth is, there’s no magic one-size-fits-all answer.

It’s different for every business, and it depends on a number of factors, including who you’re targeting, how saturated your industry is with cold email, and how strong your product-market fit is.
hidden cost to email personalization

Why You Need A Baseline of Your Email Metrics Before You Ever Think About Personalizing

While it’s generally true that more personalization in your sales emails will increase your response rate from qualified leads, adding more complex custom inserts beyond “first name” and “company” has its opportunity cost. Appending data like “competitor,” “blog post,” and custom sentences or phrases doesn’t just happen for free. Whether you’re purchasing that data, scraping, or using cheap outsourced labor/interns to gather information, it costs you time and money.

There is no guarantee the data you append will significantly increase your response rate either.

In some cases, adding additional custom inserts has no direct impact on response, and on rare occasions it can even have a negative effect, especially when data is appended haphazardly or carelessly.

Nor are all custom inserts are created equal. It’s true that in most cases adding the name of your prospects’ competitor will usually increase your response rate more than other inserts, but not always.

That’s why you should always send a basic email campaign with minimal personalization before you go crazy with trying to add more merge fields to your email templates. Once you have an idea of your baseline numbers for open rates, response rates, and appointments set, you can A/B test adding more customization to the same email templates. Then you can see just how much lift various personalization may or may not bring you.

If for example you have a 10% response rate with basic personalization, but you aren’t satisfied with those numbers, you can try adding various custom inserts to see how many more responses you get. When trying to assess if your increased response rate is worth your personalization efforts or not, you should multiply the increase in positive responses by how much you value a response or sales appointment with a qualified lead. After backing out those numbers, you can calculate if the cost of appending that data is greater than or equal to the increased appointments. If it’s not, then it’s not really worth your time.

A simpler way to assess this is to see if the increase in response rates (if there is one) is minor or incremental. If it’s marginal, then you might want to do the math to decide whether personalization makes sense for your sales efforts, but if it’s large, then keep adding customization and start testing other custom inserts to see what else works.

Even if you don’t have luck with the first few kinds of custom inserts you try, that doesn’t mean that all extra personalization absolutely won’t work. Maybe you just haven’t found the right information to append yet.

When You Should Consider Personalizing Your Emails More

So when should you experiment with adding personalization versus just being content with your existing response rates?

It depends on your product, industry, and sales goals, but generally you want to add more personalization when:

  1. You’re trying to reach out to “difficult contacts,” that don’t easily respond to email, like C-suite executives in large enterprise companies, especially CIOs and CISOs.
  2. You’re in a crowded and competitive space where your audience is getting bombarded with emails.
  3. Your product is commoditized and not very exciting to prospects.
  4. Your company doesn’t have a lot of traction yet, and perhaps your audience needs to be educated more about your product.

Another good indicator to consider additional personalization is if your response rate is below 10%. However, that doesn’t mean personalization, or even cold emails for that matter, can solve all your sales problems.

Low response rates can also be signs that you:

  • may not have a strong product-market-fit
  • be reaching out to the wrong audience
  • have entirely the wrong message and are focusing on the wrong benefits and pain points

Basic Tips to Personalize Your Emails Without Adding More Custom Inserts

Before you start investing time and resources into adding extra personalization, you should try some basic cold email copywriting tips to see how much lift they can get you. Implementing the following tactics can often help you 2-3x your open and response rates:

  1. Use more casual language to make your emails sound more like a conversation than a letter to the Queen of England. (Unless you’re trying to cold email the Queen herself!) Cut out formal language like, “Dear Mrs Morgan, I’m inquiring about…,” because it sounds impersonal and distant.
  2. Cut out everything that screams “salesy.” Stop addressing yourself as a sales employee at company X. That’s a dead giveaway you’re sales prospecting, and it’s a waste of your email’s prime real eastate. Instead, you should assume familiarity and dive right in with an introductory sentence that commands attention and/or engages them with a thoughtful question.
  3. Use first and second person throughout your email. Avoid using third person because it feels distant and does not evoke as strong of a connection or emotional response with your prospects. Instead, use words like, “I,” “we,” and “you.” (And try to use “you” more than “I” so you don’t sound too self-focused!)
  4. Define your ideal customer persona before you even start writing. Try to use the keywords, language, and tone that appeals to the audience you’re writing for, and your email will instantly sound more personal, without even adding more custom inserts.

Check out our copywriting guide for additional tips to help you personalize your cold emails at scale. If you need extra help, just drop us a line.

Why Every Outbound Campaign Needs 8 Emails

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Just sending your prospecting list one or two cold emails is not enough.

If you’re sending any less than 8 emails in your outbound campaign, you’re likely missing out on the opportunity to set up dozens of appointments with qualified leads from your list.

Recently we helped Ambition, a cool YC startup that helps businesses gamify their sales to increase productivity, with their outbound email campaign to help them crush their Q4 numbers. Using our cold email copy and email automation software to load their prospecting list, Ambition was able to get 73 responses from new leads, with 23 of those responses coming from emails 6-8.

To learn more about the premise behind the engagement, you can read our recent blog post, but here’s an overview of what happened:

  • Ambition built a list of 578 prospects (291 VP/Directors of sales and 287 VP/Directors of Sales Operations)
  • We created 4 email campaigns (2 campaigns for each sales persona), each with 8 email touchpoints per campaign, totaling 32 unique cold emails.
  • There were some bounces in the first few initial touches (81 in all 4 campaigns), so we removed those contacts from the list.
  • End result: 73 responses from Ambition’s leads

Because I’m a HUGE game theory nerd, here’s a visualization of what the process behind our campaign looked like: game theory for outbound campaign

The reason for setting up the campaign like this instead of just writing 8 email touches for all 578 emails is that every email campaign should be specifically written for a clear persona. In this case, Ambition has 2 personas: VP/Director of Sales and VP/Director of Sales Operations. While these roles are similar, they are not identical and therefore should not receive identical copy.

The purpose of splitting up each persona into 2 groups is so you can A/B test different messaging to see what works better with your audience. In our campaigns we tested Ambition’s various value props and what psychologies resonated better (fear of loss, value add, competition, etc). These are the actual stats from our campaigns:

Ambition outbound campaign stats 1 Ambition outbound campaign stats 2

Why Successful Outbound Email Campaigns Require Persistence

The overall results of our campaign helped us discover more about which of Ambition’s value propositions resonated most strongly with their target audience, and what messaging they should use.

Notice that email touch #6 and #8 in the “VP Sales: 1B campaign” actually have more responses than the first email? Touch #6 has 5 responses and  Touch #8 has 3 responses, but Touch #1 only got 1 response. If Ambition had stopped emailing after only 4 touches, they would have missed out on 11 responses from their “VP Sales: 1B Campaign.”

Looking at the chart below, look at how many responses Ambition got across each of their 8 touchpoints:

Ambition outbound campaign stats 3

If Ambition had quit sending emails after touchpoint #3, they would have missed out on 40 responses from their leads. That’s over half of the total leads they got in their entire campaign.

Looking at the stats above and dozens of other cold email campaigns we’ve run, persistence definitely pays off for outbound email. However, you can’t email people indefinitely either without seeming creepy or like a spammer.

That’s why sending 8 emails is typically the magic number because it’s just persistent enough without being too irritating. (But you should always test to see what works best for you and your industry!)

Every email you send has a clear cost and benefit. While measuring the benefits of sending cold email is fairly straightforward in terms of generating warm conversations with qualified leads, the costs are a little more opaque. One simple indicator of the cost of your cold email would be the number of unsubscribe emails that you get, or the equivalent, when someone tells you to “never contact them again.”Generally you’re in a good direction as long as you’re getting more positive responses than unsubscribes, but other factors such as the value of a lead also come into play.

Although SPAM laws vary around the world, cold email etiquette dictates you’re typically in good shape as long as you’re smart with your targeting, adding value in your emails, and not obnoxious.

Check out our Cold Email Mastery Course for more tips on crafting scalable cold email campaigns.

Be a goat, not a sheep!

We always strive to create captivating copy that is unique, actionable and adds value to prospects’ lives.

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