5 Email Templates and Tips to Strengthen Your Follow-up Game

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. 

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.


    • 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 beverage

    • Inbound 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 the

    • The 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

      • Recent Topics

      • How do I import Connected Records for a Deal?

        Can you point me to an example of the CSV file that would add related records to an existing CRM Deal? I imported a Deal, then tried importing a connected record using a unique ID that references the Deal ID, but it doesn't attach it to the Deal rec

      • File Upload Field in Zoho Forms Not Updating Existing File in Zoho CRM

        Hi everyone, I’m trying to understand the behavior of a file upload field mapped from Zoho Forms to Zoho CRM. Scenario There is a File Upload field in a Zoho CRM module. A Zoho Form also has a File Upload field, which is mapped to that CRM field. When

      • Zoho Training

        Greetings! I am trainer. My focus area is Project Management and MS Project. I have used Zoho CRM to a good extent. Though, I was interested in using ZOHO projects, as there were no live projects, I could not take it up for studies. Recently a client

      • Detailed list of scoring rules in Zoho CRM

        Good morning Zoho community, warm greetings The reason for my message today is that I have a problem with my CRM, which I will explain below: Our organization has scoring rules designed to rate our potential customers or leads in the application based

      • How to create a summary document from Projects details

        Hi, Our team is creating many projects inside Zoho Project. When closing a project, they write a summary document containing data from the projects it-self (understand project budget, customers, etc...), and editable (ie the document is either a Writer

      • Request to Recover Deleted Task List – Project ID: RIV-MOD-10722

        Hi Zoho Team, I hope this message finds you well. My Zoho task list associated with Project ID: RIV-MOD-10722 appears to have been deleted. When I clicked on the task link from the email notification, I received the following message: "Task has been deleted

      • Host in US Data Centre

        I humble apply to be registered on US Data centre

      • convert the project to templet

        i have some deployment ME product for different customer , i need to create a fixed template for use it rather then keeping creating this template every time

      • Best practices for managing Project Charters, Business Case and RAID logs within Zoho?

        Hello everyone, I’m currently refining our PMO setup within Zoho Projects and I’m curious how others are handling high-level governance documentation. We’ve been using the standardized Project Charter, Business Case and RAID frameworks from projectmanagertemplate.com

      • Resource Management System built using Zoho CRM, Creator, Projects, and People:

        In a Resource Management System built using Zoho CRM, Creator, Projects, and People: CRM Deal Closed → Creator Allocation Engine → Zoho Projects Task Assignment What is the recommended architecture to handle dynamic reassignment when: an employee goes

      • Dynamic Remaining Quantity in Lookup During Allocation

        Hi everyone, From what I understand in Zoho Creator, lookup fields only display the stored value from the source record and do not dynamically update while a form is being filled. Because of this, showing a real-time updated remaining quantity inside

      • connect zoho creator with google drive

        Hello everyone, I need to connect to a folder drive. The idea, is that google drive loads a text document with some data, I must read that text document to be able to autofill a form that I have in zoho creator with that data. I also attach PDFs and place

      • Ability to Attach Record-Specific Files Automatically in Workflow Email Templates

        Currently in Zoho CRM, email templates allow attachments to be added, but these attachments are static and remain the same for every recipient. There is no straightforward option to automatically attach a file that is stored within the specific CRM record

      • Uploaded files are not included when using "Include user submitted data" in Email Notification

        In Send Email notification workflow in Zoho Creator, there is an option called "Include user submitted data" which allows the email to contain all the form submission details. However, when this option is enabled, files or images uploaded through File

      • kanban view for client portal

        Are kanban views an option for client portals? Access to Kanban views in the client portals would solve some mobile-compliant issues I have with the UI. Kanban functions very nicely on mobile and would be a super asset for my clients and vendors as they

      • Credit Card Pre-Authorization with later Capture/Settlement

        We really enjoy the convenience of being able to pay off a customer's invoice using our Auth.Net integration with Zoho Books. Unfortunately, we can only take advantage of this feature with a small percentage of our customers as it leaves a gaping hole

      • Zoho Cliq not working on airplanes

        Hi, My team and I have been having this constant issue of cliq not working when connected to an airplane's wifi. Is there a reason for this? We have tried on different Airlines and it doesn't work on any of them. We need assistance here since we are constantly

      • Zoho Sign 2025–2026: What's new and what's next

        Hello! Every year at Zoho Sign, we work hard to make document signing and agreement execution easy for all users. This year we sat down with our head of product, Mr. Subramanian Thayumanasamy, to discuss what we delivered in 2025 and our goals for 2026.

      • Work Orders / Bundle Requests

        Zoho Inventory needs a work order / bundle request system. This record would be analogous to a purchase order in the purchasing workflow or a sales order in the sales cycle. It would be non-journaling, but it would reserve the appropriate inventory of

      • Izettle or Sumup Integration for Zoho Books.

        The Stripe & Square clearing works great in Zoho Books. Any further integrations planned in the future for Izettle or Sumup? These card processors are very common for taking payments with a card reader.

      • Train Zoho Answer Bot Based on Customer

        Hi all, Is it currently possible to mark Help Centre articles to a specific customer, and restrict the answer bot to only use relevant information if it is either marked as "General", or tagged for the specific customer in question? We currently have

      • Trying to access records in a custom module in Zoho Desk and not having luck

        I've built a custom module in Zoho Desk and am using a custom function to query the records in the module and I'm not having any luck. The only way I have found to retreive a record is by getting it by its recordID (the long zoho assigned one). The function

      • Composite items inside of composite items; bill of materials needed

        Hi Zoho and Everyone, I am evaluating whether Zoho Inventory will work for my small business. I grow and harvest herbs and spices but also get from wholesalers. I use all these items to make herbal teas, but also sell them as individual items on my Shopify store and Etsy. I discovered the composite item bundling and am wondering if I could get some assistance since there is no bill of materials: Our herbal company's best selling tea is a sleepytime tea. Sleepytime Tea can be purchased in three weights

      • ZOHO Books Smart Accounting Software for Travel Agency

        Dear Travel partner, Contact for Travel Agency Accounting Setup & Training Vansh Travel (ZOHO Books Authorised partner) Email: info@vanshtravel.com Mo: +91 98984 95155 Please find PDF   

      • 452 Mailbox delivery restricted by policy error

        We have been testing Zoho desk for about a week now and have been forwarding emails in via an Exchange Online Mail flow rule without issue until yesterday. Suddenly yesterday morning we started getting the vast majority of the emails stuck in Pending

      • Send Email reply on behalf of Agent

        Hi, When using the send email reply via the API I can set the reply on behalf of the customer by using impersonatedUserId in the header of the API call. Is there a way to do this for Agents too? I need to be able to send an email reply on behalf of an

      • Sharing Tickets to a team within a department

        Hi there, We have a need for one department to be able to share tickets to a specific team within a department, I'm wondering if this is possible? All the shared tickets are going into the 'Shared Tickets' view for the whole department but is there a

      • Removing To or CC Addresses from Desk Ticket

        I was hoping i could find a way to remove unnecessary email addresses from tickets submitted via email. For example, a customer may email the support address AND others who are in the helpdesk notification group, in either the TO or CC address. This results

      • Do not use isnull()

        Does not always return booleans. Can also return null. Never use this function. Just use var==null instead.

      • Organization wide Account and Contacts Visibility/Sharing Capabilities?

        Has anyone figured out a way to make visibility or sharing of Accounts and Contacts to be available across the entire organization without having to have every individual user edit their Sharing permissions? For our sales folks they need to be able to

      • Is there a way to configure dark mode for Campaigns emails that go out to customers?

        I've found a lot of information on how to configure dark mode for my (The user) personal Zoho workspace and email, but is there any way to edit dark mode settings on emails that we send out to customers via campaigns?  We sent out a test email the other

      • When Does WorkDrive integrate with Books?

        When Does WorkDrive integrate with Books?

      • FSM integration with Books

        Hi, I have spent a few months working with FSM and have come across a critical gap in the functionality, which I find almost shocking....either that, or I am an idiot. The lack of bi-directional sync between Books and FSM on Sales Orders/ Work Orders

      • How to close an estimate ?

        Hello, I have created estimates, and converted them to invoices to get 50% payment. Now I have 2 cases where the estimate stills shows status partially invoiced, however: 1. for one of them, project stopped half way, so the remaining part will never be

      • Power up your Kiosk Studio with Real-Time Data Capture, Client Scripts & More!

        Hello Everyone, We’re thrilled to announce a powerful set of enhancements to Kiosk Studio in Zoho CRM. These new updates give you more flexibility, faster record handling, and real-time data capture, making your Kiosk flows smarter and more efficient

      • How do you print out the invoices comments

        I have some invoices where i need to print out the comments that show when reminders and etc were sent how do we print those out in Zoho Books.

      • Unable to load a specific image

        Hi I am trying to upload an svg file, which reports that there is "a problem with the file", but does not say what sort of problem. I can't find anything which says which files are supported, so it may be it does not support svg. (which would be a real shame) The file itself will open in either Firefox or Chrome without problem. For the moment I am using a png file, which does not zoom well of course. David

      • Why does the Address field show the wrong map location even with a correct Pincode?

        I am noticing an issue with the Address field map in Zoho Creator. When I enter a city name that exists in multiple locations within the same state, the map sometimes points to the wrong area even if I have entered the correct Pincode. Currently, it seems

      • Books <-> CRM synchronisation with custom Fields

        Hello, We are synchronising Books Customers with CRM Accounts. In CRM Accounts I set up last year a "segments" multiselect field shown below In Books, I set up a custom multi-select field with the same value as in the CRM And set up the synchronisation inside Books. Want to synchronise the Books Segments with the CRM Segments, but the later doesn't exist, and another non-existing is there ?! First, I don't understand where the field Segmentation is coming from. Second, I set CRM Segmentation to sync

      • CRM x WorkDrive: We're rolling out the WorkDrive-powered file storage experience for existing users

        Release plan: Gradual rollout to customers without file storage add-ons, in this order: 1. Standalone CRM 2. CRM Plus and Zoho One DCs: All | Editions: All Available now for: - Standalone CRM accounts in Free and Standard editions without file storage

      • Next Page