5 Email Templates and Tips to Strengthen Your Follow-up Game
Finding leads but not customers? This post is going to cover the following points on what you can do to turn this around:
- Why should you send follow-up emails?
- Mistakes to avoid while sending follow-up emails
- Without value
- Too long
- No call-to-action
- Follow-up email scenario templates and tips
- Scenario: 1 Following up with a prospect who signed up for a product/ newsletter
- Scenario: 2 Following up to convert a prospect from freemium to premium
- Scenario: 3 Following up with a prospect who didn't respond to the previous email
- Scenario: 4 Following up with referrals
- Scenario: 5 Last follow-up email (breakup email)
Why should you send follow-up emails?
98% of the marketers never send follow-up emails after their initial email conversation. Follow-up mailers are sequential emails in response to your prospects action, say arranging a meeting, closing a sale, or for getting more information for converting a lead to customer. A study conducted by Iko systems states that following up with your audience creates 1.5 times of increased response rate over the initial email.
Mistakes to avoid while sending follow-up emails
Follow-up emails don't make a difference if
- it doesn't add any value
- it is not to the point
- it has no call to action (CTA)
Now let's analyze each metric briefly and see how it impacts your open rate.
Serves no value
Would you respond to an email that directs you to a product signup without first being of any value? No! And this applies to your audience as well. Ensure your initial conversation isn't pushy and talks plain value. In the follow-up email, suggest additional relevant information to provoke and intrigue your audience.
Too long
More often than not, customers get dumped with too much information which sounds pushy or makes it clear that you are here to sell. After sending a welcome email, it's best to look at what the user needs, understand this and work towards it. For example, a new user might need a helpful webinar/tutorial to get started rather than repeated calls on other services, when they haven't implemented the ones they have already! Don't repeat what you do and what your core values are in the follow-up email. If you want to reiterate, link to the previous email you sent. Short, concise, and to the point emails will increase your overall response rate.
Lacking call-to-action
The points discussed above will be ineffective if there is no call-to-action. The action you want them to perform decides the ROI of the follow-up emails. Say, suggesting they attend a webinar, sign up for a newsletter, or upgrade their service, it all boils down to the proper call-to-action present in the email. Directing them to your desired action serves the purpose of your follow-up email.
Follow-up email scenario templates and tips
We will see some of the frequent scenarios where a marketer needs to send a contextually relevant follow-up email along with some quick tips to help them send more personalised follow-up emails:
Scenario: 1 Following up with a prospect who signed up for a product/newsletter
Tips:
- Adding stats (charts, graphs, or basically any visually pleasing variant of that easily conveys numbers)to your email content is one of the smart ways to capture your audience's attention.
- When a prospect signs-up for the product, instead of explaining the pro-features, give them enough time and resources to explore the product.
Scernario 2: Following up to convert a prospect from freemium to premium
Tips:
- Always make sure your the CTA is visible and eye-catching. Here, the upgrade to premium button is prominent with a bold color that stands out.
- Adding a call to action button instead of a text hyperlink increases the click-through rate by 2 folds.
Scenario: 3 Following up with a lead who didn't respond to the previous email
Tips:
- For following up with user for the second time, don't copy-paste the same content that you initially sent.
- Be direct and convey what you want from your audience.
- Also, take enough time before sending the second email. Don't bombard your prospects with emails expecting immediate responses. Patience and persistence are the keys.
Scenario: 4 Following up with referrals
Tips:
- While drafting the referral mail, ensure that you mention the referral name (the person who referred the contact). It lends credibility to your email and helps the prospect consider your solution.
- Also, drop a few titbits of what you do briefly, to provide value.
- As mentioned earlier, the CTA should be visible in order for easy navigation.
Scenario: 5 Last follow-up email (breakup email)
Tips:
- When you want to end the follow-up email with a prospect, sending a break-up email can increase the chances of conversion due to loss aversion.
- Loss aversion influences the receiver and creates an urgency to act upon the email as this will be their final chance.
- Also, give them the option to express their standpoint.
Pro tip: You can also go about using a personalised break-up subject line which can increase the possibilities of opening the email. They are:
- Goodbye from XYZ
- Should I stay or should I go now?
- Thank you from XYZ
- It is time to part
- We are going to miss you.
Email marketing is one of the best channels to generate a highest ROI. Sending follow-up emails is the first step in lead nurturing that makes an overall difference in your email marketing strategy. Personalized and relevant follow-up emails take you a step ahead in providing credibility and, evokes the user's interest in responding. Creating a compelling follow-up email is hard, but all it takes is the first step - keep fine-tuning it for better reach, every time. Do check out our previous post on 3 simple strategies to create an effective email marketing campaign. Drop us your thoughts in the comments on how you follow-up with your clients, and what worked best for you.
Access your files securely from anywhere
Centralize Knowledge. Transform Learning.
All-in-one knowledge management and training platform for your employees and customers.
New to Zoho Recruit?
Zoho Developer Community
New to Zoho LandingPage?
Zoho LandingPage Resources
New to Zoho Survey?
New to Zoho CRM Plus?
Deliver unforgettable customer experiences
New to Zoho CRM Plus?
Deliver unforgettable customer experiences
New to Zoho Marketing Plus?
Everything you need to run your marketing
New to Zoho Marketing Plus?
Everything you need to run your marketing
New to Bigin?
Topic Participants
Shaveethira G
Sticky Posts
10 simple e-commerce marketing tips to boost sales
Congratulations! You've finally set up that e-commerce store you've been thinking about for a long time. Hopefully it wasn't too difficult. Even if it was, the effort will be totally worth it when you start seeing some orders come through. Now that the store is live, let's take a look at some marketing tips you can apply for sales growth. 1. Avoid cart abandonment If you've ever shopped online, you might have added a product to the cart but then decided not to purchase it. This is known as cart abandonment.Marketing in a post COVID-19 world!
Consumers across countries are increasingly spending more time on a wide variety of digital activities, right from online grocery shopping, to video conferencing, to tele-medicine. There is a good chance that you performed one or more of the following activities during this lockdown, thanks to COVID 19: Cooked a meal Made a TikTok Video Signed up for a remote learning session Consulted a doctor online (or ordered medicines online) Shopped for groceries online A study by Hunter, a food and beverageInbound Marketing 101: The Foundational Blocks of Inbound Marketing Strategy
According to a behaviour survey, 68% of the buyers use sources such as blogs to evaluate the product even before considering it. Before buying a product, we do a lot of research to learn more about the product through communities, blogs, social media,How Zylker doubled their webinar registrations!
Webinars are good educational resources to gather qualified leads for your product. But what if your visitors are dropping off from your webinar landing page without signing up? What more could you do to convert visitors into registrants? This is theThe ideology behind why features tell, but benefits sell
Do you think there's any truth to this? Do features only tell, and benefits sell? Well, let's see why we should focus on benefits rather than features as the great marketing wizards, David Ogilvy and Steve Jobs proved to be the best examples leveraging
New to Zoho TeamInbox?
Zoho TeamInbox Resources
Zoho CRM Plus Resources
Zoho Books Resources
Zoho Subscriptions Resources
Zoho Projects Resources
Zoho Sprints Resources
Qntrl Resources
Zoho Creator Resources
Zoho CRM Resources
Design. Discuss. Deliver.
Zoho Show Resources
Get Started. Write Away!
Writer is a powerful online word processor, designed for collaborative work.
Zoho CRM コンテンツ
-
オンラインヘルプ
-
Webセミナー
-
機能活用動画
-
よくある質問
-
Ebook
-
-
Zoho Campaigns
- Zoho サービスのWebセミナー
その他のサービス コンテンツ
Nederlandse Hulpbronnen
ご検討中の方
Recent Topics
Zoho Commerce Microstore to bypass customer portal on spesific items
Hi everyone, I’m currently testing the Microstore feature in Zoho Commerce and trying to understand how it behaves with access restrictions. My goal is the following: Even though the customer portal is enabled (and the main store requires users to signCustom Fields - Conditional Visibility
At one time, it was possible to set visibility rules for custom fields. It seems like that functionality has either been eliminated or placed somewhere not obvious to me. Has that feature been removed, or is it somewhere that is not obvious to me? TheBusiness Day Logic Update: More Accurate Scheduling for Your Workflows
Hello everyone, We’re improving how business-day calculations work in workflows, especially when triggers happen on weekends. This update ensures that offsets like +0, +1, and +2 business days behave exactly as intended, giving you clearer and more predictableMultiselect lookup in subform
It would be SO SO useful if subforms could support a multiselect look up field! Is this in the works??App passwords stop working
Some of my app passwords appear to stop working after awhile. Seems to happen every 6 months or so. Just had to change one again for the second time in a year. Is this a bug or a feature? Or perhaps changes are being made on the back end on occasion thatHow to publish different instances of the same application.
I am using Creator for my internal management my store. I am opening a new location, and I want to have a somewhat separate instance of the same app for my new store to use, since the data will all be different, and there is no need to interact betweenZoho Analytics - Compensation Information?
I am attempting to put together payroll reports in Zoho Analytics. However, I do not see any way to get compensation information from Zoho People to sync. Am I missing something? The use case seems like it should be obvious; it's difficult to do payrollZOHO Cadence
Can you edit when a cadence is set to enroll? For instance, I currently have it set up to enroll three days after a new record is created that fits the custom view criteria; however, I would like to change it to enroll immediately. I do not see whereCompensation | Salary Packages - Hourly Wage Needed
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics says 55.7% of all workers in the US are paid by the hour. I don't know how that compares to the rest of the world, but I would think that this alone would justify the need for having an hourly-based salary package option.Canvas and calendar
Is it possible to have a canvas view that shows say a contacts details with the meetings calendar on the same page?Error when subscribing to any iCal feed in Group Calendar
When I try to add any iCal URL via Settings → Calendar → Calendars → Group Calendars → Manage → Subscribed by Group, Zoho pops up an ‘Internal Server Error’ and nothing is added in the ‘Subscribed by Group’ list. But - the feed then appears under my personalFSM- are we getting there
We have now tried the FSM a couple of times. We have been defeated on the offline access. As you can imagine the enginner needs to know the customers details, the job and the equipment. This needs to be cache. Is it yet? Plus Our engineers do multipleZoho CRM Copilot Connector
Hello, Are there plans to release a connector for Zoho CRM and Copilot? I'm in the early research stages of potentially switching our CRM solution to Microsoft Dynamics because of its out of the box integration with Copilot. The advantage being that weMail bounces due to bad reputation
Good evening. I'm seeing these errors from both hotmail/outlook and yahoo, as well as hard bounce from Virgin Media and talktalk for some time now. Bounce category: Connection issues Reason: uncategorized-bounce Message: 4.7.650 The mail server [136.143.188.237]The in between line spacing management
In the Microsoft Word, when we write something there is a tool from where we can manage the line spacing. Here in writer app in mobile it is by default 1.5. I request Zoho Team to give the option from where I can control Line Spacing, Remove space betweenSort by Project Name?
How the heck do you sort by project name in the task list views??? Seems like this should be a no-brainer?Bulk upload images and specifications to products
Hi, Many users have asked this over the years and I am also asking the same. Is there any way in which we can bulk upload product (variant) images and product specifications. The current way to upload/select image for every variant is too cumbersome.Side bar menu
It would be great if you could stop the auto collapse of expanded menus when selecting a different module. It would save a lot of mouse clicks for a lot of users that frequently switch between sales & purchases as we do, it's easier to collapse them manually when not required !Re: Application Architecture in Zoho Creator — A Platform-Specific Deep Dive
A recent community post on application architecture made some excellent points about planning architecture early in Zoho Creator projects. The core message is right — Creator applications have a habit of growing organically into maintenance nightmares,What's New in Zoho Inventory | January - March 2026
Hello users, The first quarter of 2026 has been dynamic! We’ve shipped a powerful set of updates in Zoho Inventory to enhance item control, improve warehouse efficiency, expand integration and reporting capabilities. From a unified item creation experienceDeliver timely updates across your organization
Keeping your organization informed goes beyond sending emails or sharing links. It requires ensuring that the right information reaches users at the right time, without being missed. Whether it's communicating policy changes, maintenance schedules, webinar/trainingZoho Commerce -
Zoho Commerce currently only allows merchants to define the United Kingdom as a single shipping zone, which creates a significant issue for businesses operating between the EU and the UK. Under the Northern Ireland Protocol, Northern Ireland follows EUConnecting Portals from different Zoho apps
Hi, I note that Zoho has functionality for customer portals for several of the Zoho apps, like CRM, Projects, Desk etc. Is there any way to connect these portals? It would be great if we could give our customers access to a portal in which they couldInvalid value passed for line_item_category
duplicating a previous used invoice and trying to save it (new invoice number / po number used) I keep encountering this error when trying to save the invoice Invalid value passed for line_item_categoryMake Task ID and Issue ID columns filterable like all other columns
Hello Zoho Projects Team, We hope you are doing well. We would like to submit a feature request regarding the Task ID and Issue ID columns in Zoho Projects list views. Current Limitation: As of now, in both the Tasks and Issues modules, almost every visibleFull Email Threading for Custom Modules
My clients run their core business operations inside Custom Modules. They need to see their full email history directly within those records. Right now the integration is limited compared to the Deals module. Users have to jump back to the Contact recordEdit Active Workflows
Workflows are great and extremely powerful, however the inability to edit active workflows makes iterating on their functionality extremely difficult. It would be great to have the ability to edit workflows even while active. When this is done, It wouldAutomation Series: Assign Subsequent Task Owner on Completion
When a project progresses, tasks get piled up over time. As new tasks are created, tracking ownership and assigning them can become time consuming. In Zoho Projects, this can be addressed by automating task assignment using Custom Function, so that ownershipMultiple Pricing for single item
We are doing billing based on batch number. We required multiple Price for an Single Item based on Batch. While billing the POS should fetch the price based on batch. Whether this could be done ?Split Bills/Expsense between multiple projects and/or clients
I need to be able to split vendor invoices/ expenses between multiple clients. Entering the bill multiple times is not only time consuming, it defeats the purpose of having a unquie identifity bill number and will allow for possible duplicated entry. Below is an example from Quickbooks Desktop. Splitting costs over various projects is a common job costing function that I am very sad and surprised is not an option in Zoho Books. Unless I am missing it somewhere? Thanks for your help!Disable - order online at zoho store
I'm running cafe with Zoho POS. Doing good, however this enablement (Disable online order only on zakyastore.in) would enhance the business. Support asked to close -> "We can close the store from more options in the Mobile store > Overview > Store detailsWorst product ever designed - Zoho Books.
It is designed and conceptualised by people without any financial background. Basically bunch of software engineers who knows how to code. They dont have any idea how finance people will use this product, what are their requirements, how transactionsConfiguring Email Notifications with Tautulli for Plex
Hi I'm new to Zoho. I am from Canada and I have a I use a web based application called Tautulli for Plex that monitors my Plex media server. It also sends a newsletter to my followers. To set this up they require a "From" email address., a smtp serverCliq iOS can't see shared screen
Hello, I had this morning a video call with a colleague. She is using Cliq Desktop MacOS and wanted to share her screen with me. I'm on iPad. I noticed, while she shared her screen, I could only see her video, but not the shared screen... Does Cliq iOS is able to display shared screen, or is it somewhere else to be found ? RegardsLast activity time is acting like last modified time
When i edit the description or any field in the potential, account, contact and lead, the Last Activity Time is being updated like the Modified Time. This is messing all workflows and reports and we are unable to track real last time of activities likeTotal Saving in POS Screen
Displaying the Total Saving in POS Screen, while adding the items before before recording the payment. Customer wish to know this total savings before making the payment (i.e., before recording the payment). Currently we can able to view this total savingHow to skip weekends and public holidays in a scheduled workflow using Deluge in Zoho Creator?
Hi, I have a scheduled workflow in Zoho Creator that runs daily at a fixed time. I want it to execute only on working days skipping weekends and public holidays. Could anyone please help me with how to achieve this?Can I hide empty Contact fields from view?
Some contacts have a lot of empty fields, others are mostly filled. Is there a way I can hide/show empty fields without changing the actual Layout? I would like to de-clutter my view, and also be able to add information later as I am able. I would beBuilding extensions #1: Creating, testing, and editing extensions for Zoho Sprints using Sigma Cloud Editor
Hello all! We're delighted to announce the beginning of a new series called Building extensions for Zoho Sprints. Our primary goal for this series is to educate developers on the process of creating extensions for Zoho Sprints and guide them through theHow to use Picklist values language in email templates
Hello, I'm using multi-language in Zoho CRM and I've prepared separate email templates for each language. My question: how do I make sure the picklist field values in each template are rendered in the language that matches the template itself? This isNext Page