When & How to send a Follow-up email?

When you finish writing a follow-up email, the next step is sending it to your prospect or your targeted audience. But, the story does not end here. If you want people to read your follow-up email, or more efficiently, respond to it, then you should know how to send it wisely. So, how to send a follow-up email that helps achieve your initial purpose at its optimum? It depends on many factors such as the right timing, right recipients or the ways you manage your emails before and after sending. Thus, this article is going to take you through these aspects in a clearer view in the hope of helping you and your team with the follow-up email sending process.

Table of Contents

• When to send a follow-up email
• Understand your audience before sending Follow-up
• Know how to manage your sending Follow-up emails
• Avoid these mistakes when sending a Follow-up email
• Conclusion

When to send a Follow-up email

Timing is very important when it comes to sending a follow-up email because it can decide whether or not your strategy is successful. If you send an email without time planning, there is a high chance that it could be ignored or even deleted.

In the world of email marketing, there is some general advice on the best time to send emails that many people in the community agree with:

• Send it in the daytime: Obviously, people will have much more time to check their emails during the daytime than nighttime. So, sending your email campaigns while people are awake seems to be more effective.

• Avoid Monday Blue or Weekends: Many people go to work on Monday feeling a bit sad or bummed out because the weekend had ended. The first thing they do at work is to check emails, delete spam or unimportant newsletters, and possibly your email will be deleted without hesitation. So, you should remember that. Also, if you send emails on Friday or the weekend, the open rates could be pretty low and might not be effective.

• Send it on Mid-week and mid-day: The suggested time for an email marketing campaign is on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday at around 2 pm, sometimes 9 -11 am time frame is also recommended.

However, these practices are just a suggestion, they may not be suitable for your own case. The best answer to the question of when to send a follow-up email is that it totally depends on your audience. You can use an effective method such as A/B testing to test on your own data. After that, you will have a detailed analysis of the audiences’ open email hours in order to set your own time frame. In addition, there are more and more people now using mobile devices to work rather than a PC, so the frequent time of checking email could change considerably. You should also pay attention to that.

And, your demographics’ time zone is an element which should be considered. If your targeted recipients are global audiences, then there is definitely a time schedule needed for each area.

Understand your audience before sending Follow-up Email

As mentioned above, you must know who you are about to send a follow-up email to. To deeply understand your audience, you should do your research, analyze their behaviors based on your collected data or utilize the advance of technology by using sales management tools to get more precise statistics for analysis.

Remember that you should use different tones to the different types of recipient and care about the timing, as well. For example, if your targeted audiences are young and tech-savvy people who use their smartphone every day, at any time, you can even send a follow-up email during the nighttime since it just takes them a simple click on the email notification to check. Or, if your potential customer is a leader of an enterprise, you better send them an email during mid-week in their working hours. And the language used in this case should be more formal than the former.

But, after all, testing on your data is still a preferable recommendation to let you understand your audience and therefore send the follow-up email more efficiently.

Know how to manage your sending Follow-up emails

You obviously don’t write one follow-up email to just one recipient but to many other targeted audiences. Thus, the ability to manage your contact data as well as categorize it into different groups of potential leads is also important. Perhaps in this century, you will be less worried if you have a long list of potential customers since there are many available tools that can help you organize your prospects’ emails and manage it easily.

CRM is one of the most effective solutions that should be mentioned. You can keep track of the emails sent, know whether or not the recipients have replied to it, or know your frequency of sending emails to a certain customer so that you can have a proper adjustment. Also, the information that you garner from CRM tools can be very helpful for you to analyze audience behaviors and a great source of data that you can base on to plan suitable email marketing strategies.

Another way to ease the follow-up process is by using email marketing tools. Tools like GetResponse or MailChimp are very effective solutions. They can provide many features to help manage your email campaigns, offer a spam-free solution and send high-quality emails, newsletters to your audiences. Or, you can check out our SMTP solution for Magento 2.

With technology, you will save more time to send hundreds of emails at the same time but still reach the right targeted audiences. Remember that, sending the right follow-up emails to the right people is very important to get higher open rates.

Avoid these mistakes when sending a Follow-up email

• Forget to check what you wrote one more time before sending it. This is important because you don’t want to regret after sending the email to your prospects. Check the spelling, length of the email, the subject line, the CTA line, your using tone (does that sound like a robot?), etc. Your email should look professional when the recipients read it, which can help you earn credibility from them and win a chance of receiving responses.

• Forget to check the deliverability. You will never know that your email might directly be sent to prospects’ spam boxes if you don’t check. And by saying that, it means the recipients might never see your email to read because it already happens to become a SPAM. So, make sure that you had tested sending the email first before actually send it to your prospects to avoid this ridiculous issue.

• Fail to leverage social proof. If you have great feedback or reviews from your customers, show it to your prospects. You can also use social proof from experts, celebrities, certifications, etc., which can help prove to the recipients that they can trust you, and it is worth to learn more about your products or your company.

Conclusion

Everything you do with the follow-ups should be considered and planned carefully, even when you send a follow-up email to your demographics. If you think just one “send” click could make the audience read the email, then your campaign might be close to failure. Understanding your recipients first, having a great written email and a clear plan of timing, and using technology to support the activity are what you should do before finally send the email to your prospects. If you succeed in this step, there will be more potential next follow-up emails, and you will get really good deals after.