One hundred and twenty-one. That is the number of emails an average business professional receives in the course of a single day. It is a whopping statistic, to say the least. It is no wonder that your sales letter can easily get lost or overlooked among that impressive pile of correspondence. So what do you do if your email to the prospect does not receive any response and you do not even know if the potential customer has seen it? It is easy – you follow up, and when that fails to work, you follow up some more.

An overwhelming majority of your prospects will have a strict system in place for prioritizing incoming emails. At first, they will respond to emails from upper management, colleagues, business partners, and clients. And only then will they move on to cold emails like yours. They will not open and read every one of those sales emails as it is extremely time-consuming and – for the most part – offers them no real value. Hence the conclusion: your email has to stand out vividly, and you need to be ready to send quite a few of those before you get an answer. 

What are follow-ups, and why do they matter? Follow-up emails are a polite and subtle way to remind the recipient that they missed your previous email or failed to reply to it. As such, these letters should neither be too pushy nor too obvious about what you are trying to achieve as a seller. It is essential that every follow-up email provides extra value for your prospect and offers them some new and exciting benefits that the previous one did not mention.

Now to the question of when. It is a general unspoken rule to wait 2-4 days before sending out your first follow-up email to the prospect. Depending on the number of letters in your follow-up sequence, the waiting time can be gradually extended. Most experts in cold marketing agree that the ideal number is 7-8 emails, which is how many touchpoints it usually takes to close a deal.

If you are eager to learn more about how to draft a perfect sales follow-up, which points to include, and what phrasing to abandon in your emails to prospects, visit the official Reply.io website. There is an ultimate guide on writing follow-up sales emails – https://reply.io/follow-up-guide/. Hopefully, it will make it easier for you to accomplish great things in the highly competitive world of sales.