I’m sure you have heard that writing follow up emails is important to your business. You have probably read the statistics and the articles about it. But you still may be holding off.
Why? Because most likely you aren’t sure how to go about it. What are the rules? What should you write, how often should you follow up, what should you expect in return?
Sound familiar?
I have lots of clients that have been in the same boat. They know the importance; they just don’t know how to go about it. So, I am going to share some tips with you that will help with the process.
First, sales don’t happen in one touch. It often takes more than a dozen reach-outs before someone may realize they need what you are offering.
I’ve done this myself, and I’m sure you have too. We see the emails come in and we skip over them because we are busy, or we put them in a folder for “later” and eventually we are in the right place where we see the email, it hits a trigger for us, and we decide to look into the offer and maybe even buy.
If that person had stopped after the first email, they wouldn’t have gotten a sale and we wouldn’t have had our problem solved.
This happens for a lot of coaches I work with. Being of service is so important they often don’t think about the pipeline to get more clients until they are desperate to fill their practice again.
A sequence that will keep you in front of people ongoing, so they remember you when they are ready for your service or product is the key to building your business and getting out of the feast and famine cycle.
The key though, is that your follow up emails must be engaging and get people to open them. If they are generic or boring, or have an un-enticing subject line, you won’t even get people to open them, much less read through them.
Data from Yesware, an email software company, states that you have a 21% chance of receiving a reply to a follow up email if you don’t get a response to your initial email. And if you don’t get a reply to the second email there is still a 25% chance that you will eventually get a reply from the recipient, it just may take a little time.
If you word your email correctly and make it personal, your recipient won’t feel like it was sent to a million people, but rather that it was sent to them.
Be sure your follow up is genuine and timed so it isn’t going out immediately after your first reach out. You want to build a relationship over time and get the recipient to know, like and trust you more and more with each email.
Your emails should be valuable to the receiver but to the point. Don’t make them extremely long as people don’t have time to read all that. If you want to provide more information that they may be interested in, put a link to a sales page or information page in the email so they can choose to click it and read more if they are interested. They will appreciate you getting to the point and respecting their time.
Adding a call to action can be helpful too. Be clear what you would like them to do next after reading your email.
Some timing tips you may be interested in also are to:
- Send a thank you follow-up email 24 hours after a meeting.
- Send an email 1 to 2 weeks after a meeting to follow up on open items.
- Check in on a connection every 3 months to see how they are.
- Keep in touch with your list of prospects at least once a month with something of value.
- Check in with past clients every 3-6 months to see how they are.
Follow-up emails are the most important type of email you can send. They are also the most effective when it comes to getting you sales.
They don’t have to be time consuming either. With the right process in place they can be “set it and forget it” for the most part because they will be running on their own in the background while you focus on the important aspects of your business that you need to do yourself.
If you are interested in getting follow up email sequences in place and would like some help with the strategy, creation and setup of these, just reach out.
Let’s get your business built up and running efficiently so you have a continual pipeline of new clients and customers, even while you are taking time off to spend with loved ones, or just relax and give yourself a break. The right sequence and process will enable you to free up time you didn’t realize you had.