The #1 Way to Get A Reply Back: Follow Ups

I rely on a system of followups to get a yes or no from potential customers. I send about 5 cold emails to prospective customers and 5 warm emails to existing customers (the ones on my free plan) everyday. I like to find out how we can help businesses with our products.

People Fail. Systems Don’t.

People are busy. Their Inbox is overloaded. It is my job to remind them that I still exist and can help their business. That is why I created a simple system that reminds me to followup with potential customers 3 times over a 6 week period.

My Easy To Use FollowUp System

My system can easily be replicated if you want to use it. I use a free service called FollowUpThen.

Screen Shot of The FollowUpThen Setup

All You Need to Do is Add FollowUpThen to the BCC field

1. 1st Contact Email, BCC “2days@followupthen.com”
(FollowUpThen sends me a reminder in 2 days)

2. 1st Follow Up Email, BCC “nextweek@followupthen.com”
(FollowUpThen sends me a reminder in 1 week)

3. 2nd Follow Up Email, BCC “next month@followupthen.com”
(FollowUpThen sends me a reminder in 1 month)

I use GMail, which uses conversation mode, so each followupthen reminder is sent in the same thread. Making it super easy to find the email you need to follow up with!

Customers very rarely email me back on the first email. Almost always I get a reply to the 1st follow up.

Reminder Emails Are In The Same Sent Thread for Easy Access

Reminder Emails Are In The Same Sent Thread for Easy Access

Download my easy to use Follow Up Email Templates for free here. I have 3 follow up email templates that you can use for job interviews, small internet sales, and big sales. All 3 follow up email templates are the ones I follow on a daily basis.

31 Comments

    • Hey Ryan – SalesForce is a really powerful tool that makes followups easy as well. My system is more for people that don’t have a CRM tool like SalesForce.

    • Rishi, I got pointed to your article by one of your friends. I wanted to just drop a note pointing out a couple differences with my service, FollowUp.cc, and the others.

      Aside from having created entire this concept back in 2007, the main difference from Boom is that is that we work everywhere (as someone noted below). I believe it’s also easier to just put a reminder in the Bcc field since the addresses get added to your address book and are a keystroke away.

      The main different with FUThen is mostly depth. We have an iCal feed that lets you view and even ping your reminders from your calendar. We have a system of tagging emails via email addresses, the ability to have all your email addresses under one account in addition to a full calendar view of your reminders. And as people really get into our service, we have Response Detection (we detect if people have responded and thus cancel the reminder), and for the Salesforce users out there, we have a Salesforce integration. You just give us access to your SF account and when you set FollowUps, we’ll create the lead if they don’t exist, and log the email under the Activity records in one fell swoop.

      Give our service a whirl sometime, I think you’ll like it. Thanks,

      Chris

      • Hi Chris,

        I really appreciate companies that improve my productivity. I also really like it when they reach out to people directly (like you just did). You are obviously very passionate about your company 🙂

        My favorite features that you mentioned were:
        1. Multiple Email accounts all in one account
        2. Calendar View of reminders
        3. Response Detection

        I’m going to give your company a shot. Thanks for letting me know about your service! If I like it I’m going to switch this blog post from FUThen to FollowUp.cc

        • Sounds good, email us if you have any questions on the details or tips/tricks.

          One last thing (recently released), the updating and canceling of reminders via emails is another surprisingly big differentiator (meaning, person responds, you reply back and put cancel@ in the Bcc to kill the existing reminder…this is for people who don’t have Response Detection from the higher up plan).

  1. Rishi, this is awesome. I didn’t know that service existed – thanks for letting me know! I’m going to try it out.

    One of my most successful follow-up techniques is to simply “reply all” to the last email I sent, but delete myself from the email. That way, my last email (that they didn’t reply to) is copied beneath the follow up email. And I just send a concise email that basically just says I’m writing to follow up on my previous email below. And that usually gets a pretty good response.

    • Hi Pete,

      Do you use a simple one liner in the follow up email? Like “Just wanted to follow up with you to see how things are going on your end. Let me know if I can help you out with anything.”

      • Yeah, I’ll basically do something like that.

        And sometimes I’ll suggest a specific time to speak. Depends on the scenario. I think it’s helpful because it puts the conversation in context since the person can see the previous email

        And short emails like that are pretty easy to respond to

  2. What a great service! I never heard of that, but it’s really brilliant. I usually send myself calendar reminders in gmail but when you have a ton of projects, those can start to feel like white noise in your inbox. The fact that this will show up in the same thread is huge! Thanks for sharing.

    How do you find all this cool stuff Rishi?

    • Hey Jenni! Yeah I use to do the same thing, but then I discovered FollowUpThen. People always think I’m sure organized but I’m not. I totally depend on their reminders 🙂

      How do I find this stuff? No idea. I guess I’m on the internet way to much LOL

    • I have seen boomerang but FollowUpThen.com is way better. They allow an unlimited amount of followups for free and you don’t have to install a plug in.

      Do you use boomerang?

      • Hey Rishi,

        I do use boomerang. I like how it lets me schedule emails to be sent in the future and reminds me if emails aren’t replied to. FollowUpThen seems to solve a different problem – and I like that.

        I’m going to give it a try. Thanks for the tip!

      • Hey Rishi,

        This is Matt from Baydin, the makers of Boomerang for Gmail. I think it might be just the productivity tool you’re looking for if you give it another try. There are 3 main tools built directly into your Gmail interface as buttons:

        Send Later – schedule emails to send at any time. Sounds like you might want to use this feature to strategically time your emails, for say 8AM each morning or whenever you think your customers are going to check their email. You could also use this to delay a response—so you can reply to the email right away to get it out of your inbox, but have it send an hour or two later to break up a thread.

        Boomerang with Magic – remind yourself to check back on an important email at a specific time. This would help you to remember all appointments, meetings, and other emails with a time reference. We also built the feature with what we like to call ‘magic’, meaning that dates are detected and a return time is automatically suggested. When Boomerang detects a date, all you have to do to set the reminder is click the link that magically pops up above the message.

        Response Tracking – remind yourself to follow up on an email you send if you don’t hear back within a given amount of time (or even if you do)! This is perfect to set up follow up reminders on messages that you send.

        Boomerang is definitely the most robust service for anyone using the Gmail interface (Gmail and Google Apps users) and is the only system that will help you clean out your inbox, while making sure no messages fall through the crack. Our close integration means that you can set, edit, and even cancel all reminders without sending messages to external services—instead, your messages always stay with Gmail. It also means that you can use buttons instead of Bcc commands with special syntax.

        But if you don’t use the Gmail interface or if you actually like entering commands into the Bcc field, you should check out Bumper.cc. The service is similar to FollowUp.cc, FollowUpThen and the others…but Bumper.cc is open source and free and more secure.

        Cheers,
        Matt

        • Matt,

          Thank you for the detailed and insightful comment! Looks like a lot of my commenters are big fans of your products 🙂

          My biggest issue is the message limit. I use about 150 followups a month and FollowUpThen.com is free for an unlimited amount of follow ups. They only charge for premium features.

          I don’t think I’m your normal user (super small business) though so I wouldn’t change your pricing model because of me.

        • Hey Matt this is Brian, creator of Bumper.cc. Just wanted to say I found Boomerang before all the other guys and would have LOVED to use it if not for having client data passing through my inbox everyday, and thank you for the shout out, it’s an honor!

    • David – that is a really great question! Thank you for asking.

      Both work in my experience. Some work for new customers and some work for inactive customers. I do 3 things when it comes to sales emails:

      #1 Personalized Follow Up Emails

      After a customer joins I try to send 3 personalized emails over a 6 week period. We don’t have their first name unless we can find it using the Rapportive plugin. I try to personalize it based on the product they have uploaded.

      #2 Weekly Newsletters

      We send tips, case studies, new features, and fun stories on a weekly basis. This helps us convert inactive users as well as pump up existing customers.

      #3 Auto-responders

      We send a series of 30 emails over 6 months teaching customers how to use our products and be better at selling physical and digital products.

      This is not personalized and is timed based on when they joined

      Each of these 3 things is important to getting more paying customers. But I ranked them in the order of effectiveness for me personally.

  3. When I saw this article, I was sure it was going to tout FollowUp.cc, a service that I’ve been loving for several years now. FollowUpThen looks like a blatant rip-off of FollowUp.cc’s idea. It still looks like FollowUp.cc has more features and a more established customer base than FollowUpThen. Since FolllowUp.cc has worked flawlessly for me for 2yrs, I’m sticking with that for now.

  4. How does this deal with security? I would be afraid to cc a confidential email, with contacts and financial figures, to a web service. I Bcc the emails to myself, and let them as “unread” in the inbox.

  5. Hi JP.

    All of the above mentioned services are highly reputable, and to my understanding none of them access anything beyond your email headers.

    That being said, I personally have too much of “other people’s data” passing through my email every day to use 3rd party services with my email, which is why I built Bumper.cc. It operates similarly to many of the reminder services discussed above, but it’s self-hosted so you control all your data.

    It only requires PHP and MySQL, plus a domain name to receive the emails. It’s a weekend project, which means right now the functionality is very basic, but it’s open source, so contributions are encouraged and who knows what it may grow into.

    Check it out at http://www.bumper.cc – it may be what you’re looking for.

  6. Pingback: Die Wiedervorlage für E-Mails: FollowUpThen » ToolBlog

  7. Cool idea! 🙂 Thanks for providing the service. If I were still freelancing I could see this as very useful; especially since it stacks in the same thread in Gmail. ♥ Gmail ♥

    Cool post. Thanks!

  8. Pingback: Is there any piece of technology as useful as having a personal assistant? - Quora

  9. Pingback: Tool: FollowUpThen « Customer Development Labs

Comments are closed.