The Best Cold Email Follow Up Sequence
Most cold emails aren’t followed up on: that’s a fact. For proof, look at how many you receive - how many emails you send right into your spam or trash folder, at a quick glance of their dull, generic subject lines. Maybe the sender was lucky enough for you to actually read their email, but how many times have you actually performed an action after reading or responded to a cold email? Yeah, not many.
So, you have some gated content that people opt-in to, a form on your website, or some lead generation ads on LinkedIn or Facebook. You need to follow up with an email sequence because you know it’s not all about that initial opt-in or confirmation email. However, no matter how hard you try, you just don’t feel like your cold email follow-up sequences are working. You might think that you are:
Just sending bad emails
Not nailing the timing of your emails (too long after, or too early)
Being too persistent and sending too many emails
Not having the confidence to follow up at all
It’s okay, I understand. I’m a marketing expert and I still spend a lot of time every day A/B testing different routes for my clients and myself. There isn’t a one size fits all miracle solution when it comes to cold emailing, so I know it can get tricky and frustrating when you’re not getting the results you were hoping for.
That’s why I’ve curated this guide to cold email follow-up sequences for you. We’ll start by looking into cold emailing as a practice and what it can help you achieve, then we’ll start to assess what exactly makes the best cold email follow-up sequence. I can guarantee you’ll come out of this article knowing some tried and tested techniques, tips, and tricks to make your cold emails stand out and get those responses you’re craving.
Why are cold email follow ups so important?
Though it’s sometimes easy to forget, there is a real person behind every email in your lead list. There’s someone sitting behind that computer screen - someone with hopes, fears, needs, and wants someone with a past, present, and future. The first step in understanding why cold email follow up sequences are so important is by going over your leads and assessing what these people actually want. It’s difficult to know how to onboard someone on a journey whose final destination is to buy your service or product without knowing where this person stands.
The five stages of awareness
I like to think of it just like how advising practitioner and writer Eugene M. Schwartz broke down customer awareness into five distinct stages:
Most aware – your prospect knows your product already, they just need more information about the package and how you sell it
Product aware – your prospect is aware of what you sell, but still doesn’t quite know whether or not it’s right for them
Solution aware – your prospect knows which results they’re after, though they are not yet aware of the fact that your service or product has the solution they need.
Problem aware – your prospect knows they have a problem, but they don’t know what the solution to their problem may be
Completely unaware – your prospect is neither aware that they might have a problem nor aware of any existing solution, whether it’s yours or another business’s
What you’re trying to do is take your prospects on a journey from being problem aware to solution aware, then product aware, and eventually most aware. Knowing this prevents you from missing out on a whole range of potential leads that are not yet most aware, or even product aware, and end up targeting so much less volume than they could be doing.
The key is catching leads at an earlier stage in the buying process, by nurturing and educating prospects until they think your solution is what will fix their problem (which they might not even have known they had). How? Well… Surprise… With cold emailing! More precisely, with follow-up sequences.
Your prospects are people admitting a problem
This brings us back to our starting point. You’re getting high quality leads from LinkedIn, Facebook, or even Instagram. Maybe you’re getting prospects to download gated content or sign up for a newsletter. What this all means is that people have literally signed up to something and said “hey, I have the problem you are describing! I want to know more”. It’s a gold mine - you have the information of people that are admitting to having the problem you have a solution to, and who want to learn more. You’re going to need to follow up, take care of the relationship, offer educational resources around the problem, the solution, your service/product, then manage to convert them into a scheduled call, demo, or free trial. Wow, that all sounds like a mouthful. Right, let’s find out how to actually do this.
The key to the best cold email follow up: personalization through automation
Okay, so, your prospect has performed the action which has made them a prospect. This could be:
Signing up for a webinar
Opting in to a newsletter
Requesting a download for some gated content
Clicking on an ad on social media (LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram…)
Reading a blog post
You’ve sent your prospects a generic first email as soon as they perform the action, through your CRM or another automation tool. This could be:
A signup confirmation email for a webinar, with a date and time, maybe a calendar invite to download
A welcome email for a newsletter
A personalized email after a generic initial one
Today, we’ll be focusing on an email you’d send after your prospect downloads your gated content, like a free e-book or guide. I do this a lot, so I thought it only fitting to use it as an example here. These gated content initial generic emails look something like this:
“Thanks for downloading!
You can find your gated content here.
This is what you’re missing out on if you don’t read it.
The link to download the content
And a quick Call to Action like visit our sales page here or sign up to this here.”
Right, so you’ve sent out your first generic email to this particular prospect, which includes the gated content they’re after. Usually, at this point, they’ll be looking straight into their inbox waiting for their download to arrive. They’ll download it, read it or save it for later. Okay, what’s next?
A 2 hour later follow up works like magic
By A/B testing a ton of different ideas for this, I’ve managed to come up with a powerful solution that will make your conversion rates go through the roof, I promise. Once you’ve sent out your first generic email, try following up 2 hours later with an automated email that has a truly personalized feel to it.
You could use an outbound cold email tool like Woodpecker, which I love and use on the daily. There are other ones out there like Mailshake, Lemlist, GMass, Yesware, Gmelius, and more. With these tools, you’ll be able to link up leads to outbound emails. These are different from your CRM system because they actually go from your email. Sending out an email directly from your email and not from your CRM is part of those small details that will make this second cold email follow up feel so much more genuine and authentic.
Make it look real and authentic
The email already looks like it’s a real email. Another thing you can do is write it in a way that really does feel conversational and spontaneous. Don’t overthink it - when it looks overthought, everything is structured 100% neatly and perfectly, it will end up looking pre-planned and automated, the opposite of personalized. So that’s definitely something you want to avoid because you’ll see that your reply rates will end up going down. Again, I know this because I’ve A/B tested pretty much every option out there. I’m confident that organic, authentic, and personalized follow-up emails are what will get you that sale in the end.
A/B testing the different elements of your email: subject lines
By the way, with the kind of tool like Woodpecker, you yourself can start A/B testing subject lines to work out what works best for you. I know that subject lines can be a tricky thing to get perfect, but this isn’t a matter of getting things perfect - your second follow up email should feel like an effortless conversation, just like you popping in to say hi. Don’t worry about it being overly polished and perfect. You’re a human talking to another human, and this email should reflect that.
I usually suggest not to give away too much information in the subject line, but do awaken some kind of curiosity, without misleading people which will lead to them inevitably being irritated that you click-baited them within their own inbox. Really, don’t do that, like ever. Find the right balance between catching prospects’ attention without misleading them completely. This, for me, works by writing subject lines that are like: “Call?” It’s short, it’s sweet, and it kind of tricks people into thinking it’s something important because it’s got to do with a call. I’m not however misleading them into thinking they’ve won a prize or something, see what I mean?
In Woodpecker.co, you can actually really easily A/B test what are called snippets. Feel free to go ahead and A/B test:
The subject line, to see how many of them are being opened (different subject lines will create different open rates)
The first line of your email
The body of your email
The Call to Action
My aim is really for it to look genuine and human, like I really did just manually write that email to that specific person. I want a reply on this, even if it’s “no sorry I’m not interested”, and the only way I can really get a reply is by convincing my prospects that I’m a real person they can talk to. I mean, what’s the point of answering an automated CRM email? Your lead won’t even be sure it’s even getting to a real person, so they’ll probably feel like it will be a waste of time. You won’t even have the opportunity to convince them your offering is the right fit for their problem. That’s why I make things as personalized as I can.
It’s called a follow-up email for a reason
I believe in following up 2 to 3 times after you’ve sent that second personalized email, still with personalized sequences through Woodpecker or any other tool. The idea is to give prospects the opportunity to talk to you - suggest that discovery call a few times, prompt them to chat with you about their project, etc. Don’t try and convince them to take a big step, it’s just about offering a quick chat, or a baby step towards getting them to the right awareness stage.
The best cold email follow up sequence is fully personalized
Bear in mind that most people just have an automated CRM email post-lead generation, and one single follow-up email after that. If that’s what you’ve been doing so far, hopefully, you know by now that what you’re doing wrong is just not personalizing your emails enough. It’s an easy fix, really. Nothing too complicated - it’s all just about personalization, even within automation. If you’re able to make things sound unique instead of generic, you’ll quickly witness your conversion rates go sky-high. It really only boils down to a few main points:
Written in your Gmail for it to feel human and not CRM generated (thanks to tools like Woodpecker that connect to your Gmail)
A personalized, simple, genuine email
A clear and natural call to action
An authentic but catchy subject line
Bonus tip: follow up with LinkedIn too
As a LinkedIn marketing expert, I couldn’t possibly go all the way through this article without even mentioning LinkedIn. My bonus tip here is to automate the follow up sequence on LinkedIn, with a tool like Dux-Soup for example. Dux-Soup will send your leads a LinkedIn message in conjunction with your email, so the sequence flow will look something like this:
Send the first automated CRM email as soon as the prospect opts-in
Send the personalized email 2 hours after that
Send an automated LinkedIn message with Dux-Soup after 1 day or 2
What’s great about all this is that it’s all automated, which means you’re not wasting time daily doing everything manually. Consistency doesn’t have to cost you time thanks to all of these brilliant automation tools.
Your LinkedIn message can just be something really simple, short, and sweet, something straight to the point that doesn’t disengage your prospects. You’re trying to build excitement and entice people to talk to you and build value around your offering.
Back to the importance of follow-up cold emails
In my experience, the follow up is where the majority of the conversions happen. Don’t expect a conversion to happen in the first email, because it most likely won’t. You absolutely need to have a follow up - that’s why it’s best to use automation tools that allow you to just input these tasks once and not have to think about it much again in your daily workflow. It’s all just going to come out automatically, you won’t have to perform any actions to trigger anything. However, I do strongly advise doing some A/B testing if you have time.
