Do you want to generate more leads without increasing the number of cold emails you send? If yes, you should try reapproaching the leads you have already contacted once or twice. But wait, you already did that, didn’t you? So here’s the missing piece of the puzzle- you need to improve on how you follow up. Most marketers today have a myriad of tasks on their plates including extensive strategizing and ultimately, follow-up emails suffer when it comes to strategic thinking.
We spend a lot of time perfecting nested automation workflows, creating lead magnets, designing the most beautiful Salesforce newsletter templates, and auditing email metrics. But when it comes to writing follow-up emails, we are more likely to oversee the basics because we don’t consider it an integral part of lead generation. Well, this article is a deep dive into the art of strategic email follow-up tactics that will help you nurture leads, build stronger relationships, and ultimately convert more prospects into loyal customers.
Without wasting much time, let’s get started with five follow-up email strategies you can implement to maximize lead generation:
#1 Personalizing Your Follow-up Emails for Maximum Impact
The first thing you need to drop off your SOPs is creating one-size-fits-all follow-up emails. We are all guilty of it but this drains your prospects’ attention faster than any other mistake so you must invest time into prospecting and gather additional data that will help personalize your follow-up emails. Here’s how you can do it:
Refine Lead Data for Hyper-Personalization
Spend some time to analyze and grasp any behavioral patterns, preferences, and pain points to create targeted follow-up emails. Instead of basing your follow-up efforts on preconceived notions and assumed industry-specific issues, take time to see what your ICP posts on platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter. See what type of content they engage with and base your strategy around these insights to hyper-personalize your email outreach.
Dynamic Content Insertion for Customized Messaging
I recommend using interactive email elements like dynamic content blocks to automatically populate your emails with personalized content based on lead segments, behavior triggers, or other criteria. This will help you to deliver highly relevant messaging at scale, without manually creating individual emails for each lead.
Personalized Video Emails for Next-Level Engagement
Here’s the secret to high conversion with follow-up emails. Use the refined lead data to create personalized videos that address each lead by their name and speak to their specific requirements. You can use tools like Loom to do so. Thank me later!
#2 Shifting Focus From Persuasion to Value Addition in Email Copies
If your follow-up emails are written to grab attention and persuade leads to take action, you have room for below improvements:
Incorporate The Power of Storytelling in Email Copy
Start by using storytelling to engage your leads on their most pressing concerns. This could be real-life examples, case studies, or personal anecdotes that illustrate how your product or service has helped others overcome similar challenges. You don’t need to sound sales-heavy, just focus on delivering valuable insights with your product/service being a part of the story.
Highlighting Factors that Shape Decisions
Instead of merely listing your product or service features, focus on helping your leads on how to make decisions. The easiest way to do so is to provide them with the factors that should shape their decisions. This will help separate you from the rest as most marketers focus on discussing the solution while you will be sharing how to ensure that they get the bundled outcomes they expect.
Going Beyond Thought Leadership
You should move away from thought leadership content in your follow-up emails for one simple reason: Literally every person and organization out there wants to be one. If you manage to be helpful instead, you become of instant utility. Share resources and tools that would help your leads in their daily routine instead of bombarding them with heaps of self-praise and see your metrics skyrocket.
#3 Optimize Your Follow-up Email Timing and Frequency
Basing follow-up email timing and frequency on industry standards for good open rates is another area where you may be leaving money on the table. In this section, we’ll explore data-driven strategies for finding the sweet spot in your follow-up timing and frequency.
Analyze Lead Behavior to Determine Optimal Timing
Instead of benchmarks, use lead behavior data to inform your follow-up timing. This includes factors such as time of day, day of the week, and how long after the initial interaction. For instance, you may benefit from sending your emails at slightly odd times as your lead might prefer opening other emails during peak hours but would be okay checking follow-up emails later. Unless you analyze their behavior over different schedules, there’s no way you will understand what timing works for sending a “follow-up email” to your ICP.
A/B Test Your Follow-up Frequency and Timing
While it is true that you will need experimentation to determine the right follow-up frequency and timing, you must split these efforts and conduct A/B or A/X tests. This could be an additional workload that may not look much fruitful at face value but it certainly takes the guesswork out of the equation.
Implementing Adaptive Follow-up Based on Lead Engagement
Using adaptive follow-ups is the quickest way to increase conversions with follow-up emails once you have the above-mentioned data. What I mean here is increasing or decreasing the frequency and depth of content shared during follow-ups as well as allowing them to choose what content to consume via advanced template features like API or Chatbot integration.
#4 Leveraging Nested Automation Workflows With AI for Scalable Follow-up
As your lead volume grows, you might end up using similar follow-up automation despite the differences in segments. In this section, we’ll explore how to AI tools to supercharge nested email automations.
Use Gen AI Tools to Personalize Your Copy For Similar Segments
While each segment is unique, you can use generative AI tools to create spin-offs for similar segments. Based on user data and engagement metrics, you can then personalize your emails at scale with minimal effort. This could be as little as tonality and as comprehensive as the benefits/features of your product/service with respect to your leads’ affinities.
Personalizing at Scale with Dynamic Content
You can also combine the power of automation with AI-based dynamic content to deliver personalized emails at scale. This tactic is especially useful for account-based follow-up emails since you have greater visibility around your lead’s interests and content consumption patterns.
Implementing Lead Scoring for Targeted Follow-up
Lastly, you can integrate your email tool with OpenAI’s API via Zapier to get lead-scoring insights based on email metrics which can be interfaced with your CRM. This way, you will be able to throttle your email efforts and reach the most engaged leads without having to go through each conversation or rely solely on metrics shared by your ESP tool.
#5 Optimizing Your Email Follow-up Performance With AI
Towards the end, we will go through the application of AI tools to optimize your follow-up email performance:
Tracking Essential Email Metrics
As discussed earlier, you can use AI tools to automate analysis to a certain extent because email metrics only tell you so much. By combining your email copies with the metrics they generate, you can brainstorm, scout for patterns, and perform multi-faceted causative analysis which would otherwise never happen due to obvious reasons.
Conducting Tests to Optimize Your Follow-up Without Sending Them
Yes, once you accumulate a sizable amount of data, you will be able to perform tests on your follow-up emails without sending them since AI tools will emulate your audience to a large extent. This will, in a way, become your sandbox environment and help you improve your follow-ups at a faster rate.
Analyzing Conversion Funnels to Identify Bottlenecks
Last but not least, gen AI tools can help you identify any bottlenecks in your follow-up process. However, it will require you to ask follow-up questions to your AI tool but it definitely reduces the time taken to a great extent. If possible, you can deploy a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) to pitch two different AI models for doing the job on your behalf and providing you with the end results.
Wrap Up
Remember, what works today for email follow-up would change as your leads, market, and the industry evolve. I hope these five strategies will help you elevate your lead generation by supercharging your follow-up emails.