How To Write a Follow up Email After No Response (+ Templates and Best Practices)

Getting ghosted is every sales professional's nightmare.

You think everything is going right—the prospect is the right fit for your target audience, your product is within their budget, and they are genuinely interested in buying it—until it's not.

No response. Missed calls. Just pin-drop silence.

You can't understand what the hell went wrong. Don't worry, though. You have to up your follow-up game.

To help you out in these tricky situations, we'll show you how to write a follow-up email after no response and get the deal back to track.

So let's get started!

Why Should You Send a Follow-up Email After No Response?

The whole point of sending up a follow-up email is to increase your chances of getting a response from your prospect.

According to research, you can boost your reply rates by 65.8% when you send a single follow-up. What's more, the first follow-up email has a 40% increase in reply rate compared to the first sales email. This means your prospect is 40% more likely to reply to your email.

What's more, no response doesn't mean any interest. Tons of factors affect a prospect's decision to not respond to your email:

* You may have caught them at the wrong time

* They may not have seen your email

* They may have seen your email but forgot to reply

* Your email may be deeply buried in their inbox

* They may not be interested now but can be later if you stay in contact.

Even after getting zero response, sending up follow-up emails may give you the leverage you need to close a deal.

The moral of the story is to never skip on following up—you might just lose a closed-won deal.

When Should You Follow Up After Getting No Response?

Sending follow-up emails is an art. In addition to the contents of your follow-up email, you also want to get the follow-up timing right.

A week is too long, and sending a follow-up on the same day is—for the lack of a better word—desperate. That's why we recommend waiting three days before following up after no response.

You can send 2-3 emails in your follow-up email sequence to urge the prospect to get back to you. And while you should leave the prospect after sending a few follow-ups, don't send them a breakup email. Instead, leave the conversation open and return to it sometime in the future.

How To Send a Follow-up Email After No Response

No response means you've already sent your first follow-up email after talking to the prospect. So here, we'll give you suggestions on how to write an email after your first follow-up.

A) Send a Fresh Follow-up Email

If following up after no response involves you cutting and pasting—or forwarding—the original email, we've got to stop you right there.

First and foremost, your prospect will feel you're trying to guilt them for not responding. Secondly, it's also possible for your second follow-up email to get filtered by spam or even get blocked by the prospect.

That's why every follow-up email should be a blank slate. Instead, try new and witty subject lines, opening lines, and calls to action. And not only your second follow-up email, but all subsequent follow-up emails should be fresh.

Think about it: why limit yourself to one email thread that already has several old messages weighing it down?

B) Maintain a Friendly and Cordial Tone

Following up after no response can feel personal. But sales professionals need to have thicker skin.

Don't waste precious email real estate by using passive-aggressive lines like “I know you're busy, I'm busy too, “or “Was waiting for a reply to my previous email but to no avail.”