Part 1

Here are some subject line examples — split into groups based on the type of sales follow up email
you're writing — that will make your prospects intrigued enough to open your message. These examples
have actually been used some of HubSpot's top sales professionals to help them achieve high email
open rates.

Sales Email Subject Lines after No Response

Still any interest in our service?

Any updates for us?

It takes two to tango

Let's cut to the chase

Sales Email Subject Lines after a Trigger Event

Discussing your future goals today

Ideas for your launch

Question about new product feature

Thoughts about [title of blog post]

Sales Email Subject Lines for General Follow Up

How can we improve your [business goal]?

10 free tactics to increase [objective]

Let's have a 10 min call on this?

[name], quick question

[name] recommended we chat

Follow Up Emails For Sales

1. After a meeting
2. After a trigger event
3. After you tweak an email
4. After leaving a voicemail
5. After a trade show, conference, or networking event
6. After your first discussion
7. After you send a follow up email
8. After sending several follow up emails
Part 2

Cold sales follow-up

Cold email outreach is a big part of modern sales, and we’ve covered it fairly extensively on the Close
blog.
Before we can get to the follow up email, it’s important that our initial email is strong, so we wanted to
start by sharing a tried and tested cold sales email template with you.

Subject Line: "Trying to connect"

Hey [first name],
My name is [my name] and I'm with [my company name]. We work with organizations like [company
name] to [insert one sentence pitch].
[One sentence unique benefit].
Could you direct me to the right person to talk to about this at [company name] so we can explore if this
would be something valuable to incorporate into your events?
Cheers,
[Signature]
(For more cold email templates, click here)
Even the best cold emails rarely hit a 40% response rate, so how do we reach the other 60+%?
We follow up.

Subject Line: "Trying to connect"

Hey there,
My name is Pooja and I'm with Solar eCRM. We work with organizations like ABC to manage your busy
solar business more efficiently [One sentence unique benefit].
Could you direct me to the right person to talk to about this at ABC so we can explore if this would be
something valuable to incorporate into your events?
Cheers,
[Signature]
(For more cold email templates, click here)
Even the best cold emails rarely hit a 40% response rate, so how do we reach the other 60+%?
We follow up.
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The Close follow-up formula

1. Send out first cold email.

2. 1 day later, at a different time of the day: Send out Follow-up 1.
This email should be a modified version of your original email. It should communicate the same
message, just in a different format. For example, if your initial email was several paragraphs long, make
this follow-up email just two sentences long. If your initial cold email was just two sentences long, make
this email several paragraphs long. Don’t write something completely different. Don’t add attachments.
3. 2 days after your second email: Send out Follow-up 2.
Don’t even explain anything. Just succinctly restate your call to action. You can ask your prospect to
introduce you to the right person in their organization, to schedule a call, or to respond to your email—
whatever your desired call to action for your initial cold email was. For example, you could say, “Hey,
when would be a good time for you to discuss this on a quick 10-minute call? How about Tuesday or
Wednesday 10 a.m. Pacific?”
 4. 4 to 5 days after your third email: Send out Follow-up 3.
The break-up email. It’s an email in which you say goodbye to the prospect, betting on their loss
aversion, a psychological principle describing people’s tendency to strongly prefer avoiding losses to
acquiring gains.
To make things easier, you can turn these emails into a new follow up email sequence in Close. With
email sequences, you can increase engagement with leads and save time writing new emails.

Warm sales follow-up

2. The warm lead follow up formula

With cold email outreach, there’s a timeline. If you follow our formula, it’s 1, 2, 3, 4, done. You spend a
week on a prospect and move on.

With warm leads, it’s a different story. There is no timeline. You continue following up until you get a yes
or a hard no.

Our very own Steli Efti says it best:

“I have a simple philosophy: I follow up as many times as necessary until I get a response. I don’t care
what the response is as long as I get one. If someone tells me they need another 14 days to get back to
me, I will put that in my calendar and ping them again in 14 day

If they tell me they are busy and they don’t have time right now, I will respond and ask them when they
feel like a good time would be for me ping them. The key here is to actually keep following up. If
someone tells me they are not interested—I leave them alone.

But here is the kicker—if they don’t respond at all, I will keep pinging them until they do. And trust me,
they always do. :)”

The two things to keep in mind when following up on warm leads are frequency and relevance. You
want to be persistent without being annoying, and you want your emails to be simple yet relevant.

For frequency, here’s what we recommend:

Day 1: First follow-up (+2)
Day 3: Follow-up (+4)
Day 7: Follow-up (+7)
Day 14: Follow-up (+14)
Day 28: Follow-up (+30)
Day 58: Follow-up (+30)
… (from there on once a month).

Example Template #1:

“Hey [first name], how is it going? Can we schedule a time to talk this week?”

Example Template #2:

“Hey [first name], we got some new press coverage [link]. I’d love to pick up on our conversation.
When’s a good time to chat?”
Example Template #3:
“Hey [first name], can we hop on a quick call Wednesday 4 p.m. or Thursday 11 a.m.?
Cheers,
Steli
PS: thought you might find this article interesting [link]”

Another great example of a follow up email is John Barrow’s “Did I lose you?” email. You follow up
several times with a prospect, and each time you hit reply all to answer. You always keep it in the same
email thread. After doing this about six or seven times, you hit reply all, but you change the subject line
to “Did I lose you?” and hit send. This will often get prospects who’ve gone dark to respond to you.

It doesn’t have to be complicated. If they aren’t giving you a “no”, there’s a reason. Your job is just to
keep putting your business in front of them and reminding them how relevant your offer is to them.

That’s the core of sales follow up. Be willing to persist. If you aren’t convinced, grab your free copy of
Steli’s book: The Follow-up Formula: How to Get Everything You Want by Doing What Nobody Else Does

Free trial follow-up

3. How to follow up with free trial signups

The SaaS business model is a bit different than most other business models. Rather than pursuing a one-
time sale, your goal is to get users signed up for an ongoing subscription to your software.

Many SaaS businesses offer a free trial to get interested users on their platform and actively using their
product. This entails many of the same challenges as selling the product outright, but even when you get
the sign-up; you still have to turn those free trial users into premium customers.

Doing this well requires you to hit a number of key objectives:

1. Get the user into the app
2. Get the user to have an “aha moment”
3. Get the user to sign up for the paid plan (or refrain from cancelling)
Hitting all three of these objectives is not easy to do within a brief free trial window, but it’s essential if
you want to maximize your free trial conversion rate.

A great example of this in action comes from Groove, a simple help desk software platform. (They’ve
also been documenting the journey of building their startup on their blog, sharing lessons learned along
the way. Highly recommended reading!) Groove’s follow-up sequence starts with a welcome email
focused on making a connection with the user rather than diving right into the product.
This initial email has also ended up being a significant source of feedback for Groove, which they’ve used
to improve the product, the website, marketing campaigns, and the onboarding experience itself.

From that point forward, Groove sends emails based on user behavior. For example, users who have
taken the step to create a mailbox on the platform get this email:

While users who haven’t reached that stage would get this email:
Groove’s follow up sequence is composed of six core emails sent out over 14 days. With the above
customization, they end up sending 22 different messages. Adding this type of customization improved
Groove’s trial-to-customer conversion rate by 10%.

Once the sequence is over, Groove sends out a “win them back” email. Some users opt in for a trial and
then it just doesn’t end up being a good time for them to try out a new platform. The goal of this email is
to get those users back at a better time where they can actually try out the software.

Groove has tested sending out this email 7, 21, and 90 days after the free trial expires, and the 90 day
version has converted best with a 2% customer conversion rate.

A more aggressive example comes from SamCart, a platform for quickly creating high-converting
checkout pages. SamCart offers a 21-day trial and sends users a new email EVERY SINGLE DAY of the trial
period.
Here’s Day #1: https://blog.close.com/hs-fs/hubfs/samcartday1.jpg?
width=1500&name=samcartday1.jpg

Notice that SamCart is doing some very important things here:

They tell the user exactly what to expect

They provide added value in the form of a course
Each action they are teaching the user incorporates their software
This is the perfect formula for accomplishing all those objectives we just talked about.

Clear expectations (along with an intuitive UI) will get the user straight into your app. Providing added
value will get users feeling really good about your brand AND stir excitement, leading to more app time.

And most importantly, you need to be taking users on a journey that plugs your app straight into their
challenges.

SamCart does this by walking users through a simple new feature each day. https://blog.close.com/hs-
fs/hubfs/samcartday2.jpg?width=1500&name=samcartday2.jpg
They take the user through a journey, from initial checkout page, to upsell..
https://blog.close.com/hs-fs/hubfs/samcartday12.jpg?width=1250&name=samcartday12.jpg
All the way to split testing checkout pages and other parts of the funnel:
https://blog.close.com/hs-fs/hubfs/samcartfinal.jpg?width=1250&name=samcartfinal.jpg

Since SamCart’s free trial automatically converts to a premium account if the user doesn’t cancel, their
goal isn’t to convert the user but simply to help them make SamCart a part of their marketing and sales
system.

And even if the user doesn't follow along actively, they are being exposed each day to a new benefit of
using the product.

Lead magnet opt-in follow-up

4. How to follow up with lead magnet opt-ins
A lead magnet is simply something of value given away in exchange for a website visitor's email address.
They go by many different names: content upgrade, opt-in bribe, etc. and often come in the form of free
checklists, ebooks, reports or whitepapers.

Lead magnets tend to be educational in nature, and accordingly, the follow up should nearly always be
educational in nature.

For businesses with big tickets items to sell and a consistent content marketing strategy, there is really
no need to use email marketing for direct sales as part of their normal follow up. These businesses will
often use the email list primarily as an audience building asset, allowing them to send 30-40% of their
list to new content any time they want.
Popular marketers like Pat Flynn, Brian Dean, and Sujan Patel use this strategy to keep their business on
readers’ minds and to drive consistent traffic back to their websites. They will then run dedicated
product launches to their email lists 2-4 times a year.

So essentially, their follow up model looks like this depiction of Pat Flynn’s autoresponder sequence:

Product sale follow-up

5. How to retain customers with a strong post-sale follow-up

It costs 5x more to attract a new customer versus keeping an existing one. The sale is just the beginning
of the story, especially if you are running a SaaS business or offering some other type of recurring
product or service.

What you do after the sale is just as important as what you do before the sale—and will only gain in
importance in the coming years.

Every business model demands a slightly different approach, but we’re going to focus on three highly
effective strategies for the purpose of this discussion:

Onboarding

Education

Incentives

The Onboarding approach is all about getting users to experience an “aha moment” with your product.
This terminology was coined during Facebook’s meteoric rise. They determined that their users’ “aha
moment” would come when they added 7 friends in 10 days, and they focused all their energy into
making that happen.

The Education approach is all about educating your audience, establishing your brand as an authority
and driving regular re-engagement with your website.

Giveaway entry follow-up

Let’s break this down into a makeshift template you can use.
Describe a problem you faced
Describe the pain you experienced from that problem
Share the solution and how the prize played a big role in that solution
Talk about the benefits of the prize
Talk about how it feels to have the problem solved
CTA

There are a few key takeaways here that will help you launch your own campaign:
Don’t simply add giveaway entrants to your subscriber list without following up
Provide some value to every single individual who signed up
Reinforce the value of the prizes when you send them out
Invite new subscribers to engage with your content
You really can’t go wrong with giveaways. There’s not much more to say on the matter.
Contributor outreach follow-up
Promotional outreach follow-up

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Hi [first name],

My name is [my name] and I head up business development efforts with [my company]. We recently
launched a new platform that [one sentence pitch].

I am taking an educated stab in the dark here, however based on your online profile, you appear to be
an appropriate person to connect with ... or might at least point me in the right direction.

I’d like to speak with someone from [company] who is responsible for [handling something that's
relevant to my product].

If that’s you, are you open to a fifteen minute call on _________ [time and date] to discuss ways the
[company name] platform can specifically help your business? If not you, can you please put me in touch
with the right person?

I appreciate the help!

Best,

Cold email: Referral V2

Hi [first name],

I hope I'm not bothering you. Could you please refer me to the person in charge of [something that's
relevant to my product]?

Thanks for your time,

Sig

Cold email: Referral V3

Hey [first name],

My name is [my name] and I'm with [my company name]. We work with organizations like [company
name] to [insert one sentence pitch].

[One sentence unique benefit].

Could you direct me to the right person to talk to about this at [company name] so we can explore if this
would be something valuable to incorporate into your events?

Cheers,

Sig
The next referral cold email is a template directly from the team at Predictable Revenue.

Subject: Can you point me in the right direction?

Hey [first name],

I'm sorry to trouble you. Would you be so kind as to tell me who is responsible for [insert your biggest
pain point here that resonates with your ideal customer; OR insert function like “sales” or “recruiting”]
and how I might get in touch with them?

Thank you,

Sig

Let's check out two cold email templates that are using approach #2 and pitching the decision maker
directly on the value proposition and next action steps.

Cold email: Selling V1

Hey [first name],

I hope this email finds you well! I wanted to reach out because [explain how we got their contact
information and how we relate to them: talked to a colleague, saw your company online, etc.].

[Name of company] has a new platform that will help (your team at) [organization name]. [One sentence
pitch of benefits]. We do this by:

Benefit/feature 1

Benefit/feature 2

Benefit/feature 3 (optional)

Let's explore how [name of your software] can specifically help your business. Are you available for a
quick call [time and date]?

Cheers,

Sig

Cold email: Selling V2

Hey [first name],

I hope this email finds you well! I wanted to reach out because [explain how we got their contact
information and how we relate to them: talked to a colleague, saw your company online, etc.].

[Name of company] has a new platform that will help (your team at) [organization name]. [One sentence
pitch of benefits].

I know that [our product] will be able to help [name of your company] [insert high level benefit here].

Are you available for a quick call [time and date]?

Cheers,

Sig

Cold email: My higher-up asked me to reach out

Another cold email template is based on the "my higher-up asked me to reach out" technique.

Basically, you, the sales rep, write an email that is written as if a higher-up (e.g. your CEO) asked you to
reach out to this company specifically. You then forward that email to the prospect, included the
"forwarded email". The subject line plays into this with "Fwd: YourCompany + ProspectCompany"

Here's an example of a company that's been using this cold email strategy a lot recently: