Article: How to Write Personalized Follow Up Sales Emails

A great initial sales email is a fantastic start, but you’ll really start seeing results when you master the art of crafting engaging, personalized follow-up sales emails.

So why don’t more sales teams use follow-up sales emails effectively?

Well, scaling emails across multiple clients can be a daunting task for sales and marketing teams. It’s tough to maintain a personalized touch while juggling a large volume of contacts.

You don’t have endless hours to spend fine-tuning the wording and second-guessing the timing of every individual follow-up email, but that doesn’t mean you need to give up.

With the right strategies and tools, you can get incredible results.

We’re going to look at how exactly to put together successful follow-up emails, and we’ll be giving you some AI tips along the way.

Why? HubSpot found that 96% of marketers say personalization increases the likelihood of buyers becoming repeat customers — and 77% of marketers using generative AI find it helps them create more personalized content.

With just 31% of sales reps currently using AI to craft outreach messages to prospects, you can get way ahead of the curve here.

But even if you don’t want to use sales AI tools or AI prompts, this guide is still for you. We’re going to look at what to say in follow-up sales emails (with examples of great subject lines, intro paragraphs, and CTAs) as well as cover when best to follow up. We’ll give you templates you can use and tips on how to scale your follow-up emails using AI and improve your email open rates.

Tip: We used these AI prompts with Copy.ai’s software and with a specific brand voice selected.

Sales emails are the backbone of modern sales processes. They're essential for generating new leads, booking meetings, and ultimately closing deals. When crafted effectively, sales emails become powerful tools that can transform your entire sales pipeline.

The impact of well-written sales emails extends far beyond just getting responses. Effective sales emails directly influence key business metrics:

Increased Open and Response Rates: A compelling subject line paired with personalized content can dramatically improve your email engagement. Studies show that personalized emails deliver 6x higher transaction rates than generic outreach.

More Qualified Leads: Strategic email content helps you connect with prospects at the right stage of their buying journey. This precision targeting leads to more sales meetings booked and a healthier pipeline of qualified opportunities.

Higher Conversion Rates: The right email at the right time can be the difference between a lost opportunity and a closed deal. Effective sales emails nurture relationships throughout the sales cycle, directly impacting your win rates.

Expanded Market Reach: Email enables you to scale your outreach efficiently, reaching new prospects while maintaining personalized communication. This scalability is crucial for growing your market presence without proportionally increasing your sales team.

The landscape of sales email personalization has undergone a dramatic transformation. Understanding this evolution helps contextualize why AI-powered solutions represent such a significant leap forward.

The Traditional Approach: Before AI, personalization was a manual, time-consuming process. Sales reps would spend hours researching each prospect, finding relevant details about their company, role, and potential pain points. This research would then be manually incorporated into each email, limiting the number of truly personalized emails a rep could send each day.

The Personalization Challenge: This manual approach created a fundamental tension in sales teams. They knew personalized emails performed better, but the time investment meant they could only personalize a fraction of their outreach. Most emails remained generic, with only basic mail merge fields like name and company.

The AI Revolution: AI has fundamentally changed this equation. What once took hours of manual research and writing can now be accomplished in seconds. AI can analyze vast amounts of data about prospects, identify relevant talking points, and craft personalized messages at scale. This isn't just faster—it's a complete reimagining of what's possible in sales outreach.

The New Paradigm: Today's AI-powered approach means every email can be deeply personalized, not just with surface-level details but with relevant insights about the prospect's industry, challenges, and potential use cases for your solution. This level of personalization at scale was simply impossible before AI.

Effective follow-up is where deals are won or lost. While templates provide the structure, understanding the strategy behind follow-up sequences is crucial for success.

The timing of your follow-up emails can significantly impact response rates. Research shows that following up within 24-48 hours of initial contact maintains momentum while respecting the prospect's time. However, the optimal timing varies by industry and buyer persona.

First Follow-Up: 2-3 days after initial outreach Second Follow-Up: 4-5 days after the first follow-up Third Follow-Up: One week later Final Follow-Up: Two weeks later (the "breakup" email)

Each follow-up should provide new value, not just ask again for a response. This could include:

Sharing a relevant industry insight

Offering a useful resource or tool

Providing a new perspective on their challenge

Introducing a time-sensitive opportunity

Modern follow-up strategies extend beyond email. Coordinating email follow-ups with LinkedIn messages, phone calls, or even direct mail creates a surround-sound effect that's hard to ignore. AI can help orchestrate these multi-channel sequences for maximum impact.

The key to automated follow-up is maintaining a human touch. AI enables you to:

Personalize each follow-up based on previous interactions

Adjust messaging based on prospect engagement

Stop sequences automatically when prospects respond

Maintain consistent voice while varying the message

Persistence is important, but so is respecting prospects' time. After 4-5 touches without response, it's generally time to move on. However, AI can help identify signals that suggest continued outreach might be worthwhile, such as email opens without responses or website visits.

Crafting compelling follow-up sales emails is key to driving more conversions. Here’s how to put your email together, step by step.

Your follow-up email subject line has a lot of heavy lifting to do, and you may want to A/B test different options to see which results in the best open rates.

Keep it under 50 characters for mobile optimization

Create curiosity or urgency without being manipulative

Personalize with the prospect's name, company, or industry

A/B test different approaches to find what resonates

Avoid spam trigger words like "free" or "limited time"

AI Optimization Tip: Use AI to generate multiple subject line variations based on your prospect's industry and role, then test which patterns drive the highest open rates.

Let’s take a look at some typical follow-up situations and run through examples of great sales email subject lines.

You’re sending a general email to check on a potential client. Perhaps they sounded interested, but they haven’t yet bought anything, or they’ve made a purchase in the past, but they haven’t bought anything in a while.

Here are some great examples of general-purpose subject lines:

Tip: Including the prospect’s name or their industry helps make your email instantly look more personal and relevant to them.

Something exciting has happened, and you want to follow up with prospects or past customers to let them know about it.

Let’s say your company has just launched a new product. Here are some subject lines you could use:

It’s always disheartening when your carefully crafted emails to hand-picked prospects are met with stony silence.

Following up appropriately can make the difference between losing a sale and winning a lifelong customer.

If this is the last email you plan to send, it’s what sales professionals often call a “breakup email”.

These types of subject lines can work wonders.

Keep in mind your brand voice here. If your company (and audience) is serious and sedate, you don’t want to use an overly cutesy subject line.

Or you can check out our article on Follow-Up Emails After No Response for more detailed guidance

Writing sales subject lines can be so tricky.

You know how crucial it is to get the subject line right (you don’t want decision-makers to delete your carefully crafted email without even opening it) … but you don’t want to spend hours on every subject line.

AI can be a huge timesaver here.

We’ve included the exact prompts above that we used for our examples, but you can get Copy.ai to generate email subject lines based on any quick description (like “follow up after sales conversation”).

Your email introduction should be short and to the point.

Mention any previous interactions to remind the prospect who you are, and to create rapport: this should improve your response rate.

Start with a compelling question or observation

Reference something specific about their company or role

Establish relevance within the first two sentences

Show you've done your homework without being creepy

Create a reason to keep reading

Again, think about your company’s brand voice and your relationship with the prospect to decide on the right tone. Focus on how you can help the prospect, addressing their pain points.

Here are a few examples:

The body of your follow-up message needs to give your prospect enough information to take action, without being overwhelming.

A long email will get skimmed or ignored, so keep it to the point, and focus on the details that will be most valuable for your prospect.

Keep your email body to 2-4 short paragraphs, and explain the key benefits of your product/service to your prospect. Make sure there’s a clear value proposition. You can also include some sort of social proof, like use cases or testimonials.

AI Optimization Tip: Use AI to match your value proposition to the prospect's likely challenges based on their industry, company size, and role.

Here are a couple of examples, plus the AI prompts we used for each:

You don’t want to be overly forceful or pushy in a follow-up email, or you risk turning off a prospect entirely.

A hard or clear call to action might ask, “Can we schedule a phone call next week?” or “Let me know a good time for a 30-minute call”, or “Here’s my phone number: we can have a quick chat whenever is convenient”.

A soft CTA (call to action) is an easier and gentler ask, making it more likely you’ll get a “yes” and move the conversation forward.

Make it clear and specific

Offer value in the next step (not just "let's chat")

Create urgency without being pushy

Limit to one primary CTA

Make it easy to say yes

Instead of specifically asking for the prospect’s time or money, you’re encouraging them to learn more or offering to share a helpful resource.

Here are a few examples:

Note: You’ll need to add information about your unique CTA to this prompt.

The time that you send follow-up email campaigns can make a big difference to your success rate. So, how do you find that sweet spot between following up so soon (and so often) that you annoy the prospect … and following up so late (or so little) that they’ve completely forgotten about your product?

There’s no one-size-fits-all solution to knowing when to touch base, but in general, it’s a good idea to:

Send the follow-up to your first email within a couple of days after your first contact with the prospect, so they know you’re thinking of them and you’re keen to help.

Space out subsequent follow-ups based on the prospect’s response. If they seem eager, you might check-in again after 3-4 days. If they reply to say, “I’m slammed this week” then give it a full week before following up again.

Just pick one of these sales follow-up email templates and add your company name, product details, and so on.

If you’ve reached out to prospects with a cold email (an email to someone who you’ve not met or been in touch with before), then it can be tricky to know how best to follow-up. Even if your initial email didn’t get a response, a great follow-up could turn things around.

Here’s a sales email template you can use. You can adjust the language to make it more or less formal, depending on your brand.

Tip: Want emails that are pitch-perfect for your brand voice?

Use Copy.ai’s Brand Voice feature (you can add multiple different voices to suit your various brands, products, and/or audiences). You can also easily switch out words in the templates, e.g. using “hello”, “hey”, “dear”, or whatever suits your style.

Hope you're doing well. Just wanted to drop you a gentle reminder regarding my previous email about [Your Company/Product/Service].

I totally get that you're super busy, but I wanted to make sure my message caught your attention. Have you had a chance to review it? I'd love to hear your initial thoughts or any questions you may have.

Based on your industry and challenges, I genuinely believe our [solution/offerings] could be a game-changer for [Prospect's Company]. We've helped similar businesses achieve [specific outcomes/goals], and I'm excited to explore if we can do the same for you.

If you're open to it, let's schedule a quick call to dive deeper into your unique needs and see how we can assist. Or, if you prefer, I can send you more info or share success stories from other companies in your shoes.

I totally understand the struggle of finding the right solutions, but I'm here to make life easier for you. Just let me know the best next step or if there's someone else I should connect with.

Tip: Track metrics for your cold follow-up email, like the open rate and reply rate, and tweak it to continually improve as you carry out more email outreach.

If you’ve already had some engagement with a prospect, either in response to your cold email or before sending your first warm email, then you’ll want to use a warm follow-up email.

Here’s a template you can use for your first follow-up after a conversation:

Some other lines you could include, as applicable, are:

Hopefully you got my voicemail about…

You asked about pricing and…

Last time we spoke, you mentioned you were having difficulties with…

You might remember we met at [e.g. networking event].

What if you want to follow up with a customer who’s already purchased … and you’ve got a new product that would help them get incredible results? Here’s a warm follow-up template you can use:

Let’s say you’ve demo-ed the product for a prospect who seemed interested … but they didn’t want to sign up on the spot and you haven’t yet heard more from them. Here’s a template you can use to encourage them to take action and close deals.

Implementing AI-powered sales emails delivers measurable business outcomes that extend far beyond improved open rates. Understanding these strategic benefits helps justify investment in AI tools and align sales initiatives with broader business goals.

AI automation dramatically reduces the time and resources required to generate qualified leads. By automating research, personalization, and initial outreach, sales teams can engage more prospects without increasing headcount. This efficiency directly translates to lower CAC, as the cost per meaningful sales conversation decreases.

AI-powered systems create a unified approach to prospect engagement. Marketing insights feed directly into sales personalization, while sales feedback improves marketing targeting. This alignment eliminates the traditional silos between teams, creating a seamless experience for prospects and more efficient resource utilization.

AI doesn't just help write emails—it helps identify which prospects to email first. By analyzing engagement patterns, company signals, and behavioral data, AI can score leads more accurately than traditional methods. This means sales reps spend their time on the most promising opportunities.

One often-overlooked benefit of AI email automation is its impact on data hygiene. AI can automatically enrich CRM records with updated contact information, company details, and engagement history. This creates a virtuous cycle where better data leads to better personalization, which leads to better results.

Perhaps the most significant strategic impact is the ability to maintain high-quality, personalized outreach as your target market expands. Traditional approaches require linear team growth to maintain personalization quality. AI breaks this constraint, allowing companies to scale their market presence without proportionally scaling their sales teams.

Copy.ai Workflows represent a paradigm shift in how sales teams approach email automation. Rather than simply generating individual emails, Workflows create entire automated sequences that adapt based on prospect behavior and data.

Automatically researching prospects before writing

Adapting messaging based on real-time data

Coordinating multi-step outreach campaigns

Learning from results to improve over time

Automated Prospect Research: Workflows can gather information from multiple sources—LinkedIn profiles, company websites, news articles—and synthesize this into actionable insights for personalization.

Dynamic Personalization: Unlike static templates, Workflows adjust messaging based on the specific prospect, their industry, their role, and their company's current situation.

Intelligent Sequencing: Workflows can manage entire email sequences, automatically adjusting timing and messaging based on prospect engagement.

CRM Integration: Seamlessly sync with your existing CRM to maintain data consistency and trigger workflows based on CRM events.

Starting with Copy.ai Workflows doesn't require overhauling your entire sales process. Begin with:

Identify Repetitive Tasks: Look for activities your team does repeatedly, like initial outreach or follow-up sequences

Start Small: Implement one workflow for a specific use case before expanding

Monitor and Optimize: Use workflow analytics to understand what's working and refine your approach

Track these metrics to understand the value Workflows bring to your sales process:

Time saved per rep per week

Increase in email personalization rate

Improvement in response rates

Growth in pipeline velocity

Reduction in cost per opportunity

Staying on top of follow-up sales emails is a tough challenge for any sales team — and it’s easy to just leave potential customers’ details waiting in your CRM.

But with Copy.ai on your side, you can make follow-ups a breeze.

Not only can Copy.ai write personalized emails for you (taking into account your brand voice and adding in details gained from lead enrichment), but we’ve also introduced Workflows to make life even easier for you.

Workflows let you automate at scale, integrating with other apps like LinkedIn so you can automatically incorporate personal details into your messages through lead enrichment.

Beyond follow-up emails, salespeople can also create sales outreach copy, create a whole sales funnel email sequence, and automate your email prospecting.

Copy.ai isn’t just for emails, of course. You can also use its powerful tools for every aspect of the sales process: to write sales pages, create sales enablement content, craft social media and email marketing content, and much more.

Be sure to join our community to access more detailed guides, and like-minded professionals excited about scaling their success with AI, and also look through our free tools site for more AI tools.

You can also explore our GTM AI platform. At Copy.ai, we understand the importance of avoiding GTM Bloat and offer invaluable GTM AI solutions to help your company thrive. This platform will improve your GTM velocity and enhance your GTM AI maturity. We'll work with you to assess your current strategy, identify areas for improvement, and develop a customized plan to help you succeed. Ready to make a change? Connect with us now to get started.