Email Productivity Tips: How to Easily Follow-up with Business Contacts

Sometimes winning your “dream account” or client isn’t about having the best pitch or more resources. At times, you’ll find that your company won out above everyone else due to your team’s persistence, and what happens after the pitch.

To understand this better, let’s think about your potential customers and clients.

When they receive an important email from you, they probably have a full days work ahead and possibly a hectic travel or meeting schedule. By default, this can make you easily forgettable. However, you shouldn’t assume that your new business pitch went badly if you don’t receive a reply. Instead, assume that they need to be reminded of your existence and your message.

Why I Follow-up with Contacts Often

While running my company, I like to collect feedback and find out how we can better help our customers. To do this, I rely on a specific system to garner a response:

I email approximately ten prospective customers and ten existing customers everyday and then follow up with every single person that I attempt to contact.

I too am busy; my inbox and to-do list are also overloaded.

But it is still my job to remind my customers that I exist. The dilemma is this: there is no way that I could remember to email every customer and contact. It’s cumbersome to keep an organized list of reminders outside of my inbox.

A Simple Email Follow-up System

My solution is simple. I created a simple system that reminds me to follow-up with potential customers three times over a six-week period—all from within my email.

I use a free productivity tool called FollowUpThen, a simple email reminder service.