How To Write A Trade Show Follow Up Email (Template)
After you’ve promoted your business at a trade show, it’s time to collate your leads ready to send out your trade show follow up emails. Many marketers and business owners wait for leads to come to them after such event, forgetting that the most important time to reach out to potential new customers is within the first 12-24 hours post-show. To avoid this happening to you, we’ve pulled together all the best email marketing tips for post trade show lead generation.
What is email marketing?
Email marketing is still one of, if not the most popular form of marketing, in both the B2B and B2C spheres. We are coming up to nearly 50 years since email marketing was first used and it has stood the test of time, triumphing over other forms of popular marketing avenues. All well seasoned businesses that exhibit at trade shows most likely have a solid email marketing strategy, so it’s important that new exhibitors are savvy to this top tip. In short, email marketing is the most effective way to spread the word about your businesses product offers, new releases, updates and more directly to those customers who have given exclusive permission for you to do so. It also forms part of a bigger trade show strategy plan that all exhibitors should follow.
Why should businesses send emails after an event?
Firstly, you need to consider how busy people can be and that life does just slip away from some people who have been meaning to contact you. Sometimes people just need a gentle reminder and some people don’t understand everything about trade shows and how they work. Secondly, there are a lot of exhibitors at one trade show and you don’t know how many businesses that one person has encountered or given their details to as well.
You have worked hard to get trade show leads so you need to make sure that you follow up on them! A shocking 2% of sales are made on the first point of contact* so you are missing out on a lot of sales by not following up! If you do follow up after the event, be prepared to follow up more than once. People need to be exposed to advertising of a product or service approximately 7 times before committing to the sale.
6 Tips to establish trade leads on the day
To establish leads on the day of the trade show, you must be prepared to do a lot of pre show work beforehand. This should be considered when you are working out your planning, timing and scheduling of the event:
- Set a goal of how many leads you want to acquire on the day and establish ways to outreach to them
- Reach out to old customers or business contacts to personally invite them on the day
- Generate a buzz on social media with organic posts and targeted ads before the event
- Create a QR code or direct them to a landing page to enter their details - it's more difficult to enter fake emails this way
- Research exhibiting businesses to find any to potentially collaborate with to could gain more leads
- Try to print business cards or connect on LinkedIn as other ways to drive leads
Quick tips for a good follow-up email
Before you go to the event, be sure to have a follow up email mocked up and ready to go. Create a spreadsheet so you can organise all of your lead information and create columns for the different criteria after you follow up. Then we recommend following the following tips:
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- You want to follow up more than twice but less than ten times, so create columns to track your follow up progress. You will also need to consider exactly where your customers are in the sales funnel.
- The first email should be sent between 12-24 hours after the event.
- The subject line of the email needs to be tailored to the specific lead type. and the subject line can be as simple as ‘Lovely to Meet You’ for new faces or ‘Lovely to See You Again’ for existing clients
- Create a schedule with regular spacing of your follow up emails – potentially 2 emails a week
- Remember to inject value and effective call-to-actions into your emails such as blog posts or industry news rather than focussing solely on the sale to avoid being spammy
Follow-up email example
This trade show follow up email example can be used for all new leads. Don’t forget to change the subject line for existing customers enquiring about a new product or from your latest event.
Subject line (for new leads): How lovely to meet you, [lead name]
Body:
Hey there [lead name]
It was so nice to chat to you today at [insert show name here]. We thought we’d include this picture of our office dog as it was so nice to meet a fellow dog lover! Plus, he’s really really cute (yes we know we’re biased). [change out this friendly icebreaker for something more relevant to you/your business]
We’re sure that you’re still reeling over the excitement of the event, we know we are! But we just wanted to touch base to introduce ourselves again and let you know that you can leave any questions or queries you might have for us here [insert link] or read more about us and our products here [insert link].
For now, grab a cuppa and some biscuits (you should have these supplies in your [insert business name] tote) and simply relax/reflect on the show! We’ll be in touch soon.
Thanks,
[your name]
