It appears a lot of freelancers still haven't got the memo on the skills needed to send cold emails that get great responses, don't piss off your recipients and earn you more business.
That's alright, because today we're going to give you another tip to add to your cold emailing skill set, the follow up email.
Your initial email contact should be well crafted and get a decent response, but there's no guarantee that every single person you email will respond. So, do you just let it go and move on?
Of course not.
The follow up email
This is a great email marketing tactic that can help turn your 40% response rate to a 75% response rate, and it takes less than 1 minute in order to do it.
If you don’t get a reply within 48 hours, one additional follow-up message (a quick one-liner) usually does the trick. When reaching out cold to Food Truck owners when launching FoodTruckr.com, for example, it was my follow-up emails that actually received the highest response. - Pat Flynn
As a general rule of thumb, you need to be keeping track of every cold email you're sending out. I personally use a label in my email setup in order to tag every cold email I send, then I can periodically go through the list and see which ones haven't got a response.
From there, I have a small email template that checks in with the recipient to make sure they received my previous email, and find out if there's anything I can do for them.
You should be doing the same thing, because from personal experience, as well as Pat's, the follow up emails got great response rates.
Repetition works
I've wrote about repetition in your freelance business before, but when it comes to cold emailing, the repetition of potential clients seeing your name in their inbox causes curiosity. First thing you need to know is, not everyone will even open your first email. Then, a small percentage of the ones who do open your email will actually respond the first time.
So, by showing up in their inbox again, you're generating memories in their mind of the last time they seen you in their inbox. Now, what you're offering them must be good, so they feel like they have to open it.
Just like advertising companies spend millions of dollars to have ad placement on websites through Google Adsense, on billboards, in T.V. commercials and so on, your business needs to be in peoples faces, reminding them that you exist and they need you.
They don't spend all that money expecting to get an instant response the first time you see their billboard, and they know that effective frequency gets them the sale in the long run. That's what you're doing with your cold email campaigns. It's not a quick fix to your freelance sales woes, but it's a marathon of work that pays off in the long run.
What your follow up email should look like
Based off your initial cold email contact, you should bring back in a quick note about the reason you wrote the potential client in the first place. For this, I have an email template that has the basic 'I just wanted to follow up with you' message, but leaves a spot for me to specify something in their business, like I did in the first email.
This shows that it's not just a generic message spammed to everyone, and it also lets the person on the other end of the email know that you are thinking about them, personally. The personal touch will always benefit you when cold emailing.
Another way for your follow up email to stand out is to take a second and look over the potential clients recent tweets and see if there's something you can talk about. For instance, did someone in their family recently have a baby, or a wedding? Congratulate them before you even mention your services again.
The goal is to keep your name fresh in their minds, and if you can land a sale along the way, great. One thing I've realized after doing cold emailing for the past couple years is that you never know when someone will pop up in your inbox that you completely forgot about, but they remembered you because you made them remember you.