How to Send an Email to a Prospective Client (With LinkedIn Follow-Up)

You’ve found your potential clients, verified their email accounts, but don’t know how to pitch your products or services. We’ve been there. From expressing your thoughts in the right way to debating the right tools to use, cold emailing comes with a lot of process. 

In this guide, we will walk you through this process. You will learn how to send an email and follow up with a potential client. Let’s get started. 

Why reach out to a prospective client by email? 

If you’ve ever wondered whether email is the right channel to reach a prospect, you’re not alone. In this section, we discuss the top reasons why you should reach out to your prospective client through email.

1. It’s cost-effective

Cold emailing is almost free. Think about it. You don’t have to spend money on digital prints or TV. All you need to do is find the right person, get their valid email address, and send a personalized message that resonates with their needs. In short, you can get started with cold email on a budget to reach a larger audience. 

2. It’s a targeted approach

Want to send an email to the CEO of a Fortune 500 company? Cold emailing lets you do that. You can segment your audience and target specific individuals with high potential. This allows you to tailor your messages based on what actually matters to them, whether it’s their role, needs, industry, or pain points. 

3. It's scalable

Cold emailing lets you scale the size of your campaigns as you like. You can start with five emails per day and gradually increase to hundreds or thousands, while personalizing each message. 

(Note: We advise sending about 30 emails/day to ensure deliverability into your prospect’s inbox.)

4. You can measure results

You can track your cold email campaign’s performance in real time. Whether it’s the open rate, click-through rates, or response rate, you can get insight into what’s working or areas that require improvement.

What should you know before writing a cold email? 

If the impulse is to jump right in and start crafting that cold email, resist it.

The best cold emails don’t feel cold at all. By the time they land in the prospect’s inbox, they have already gone through some critical stages: research, relevance, and timing. The message is just the formality; the real work began before you hit the “send” button. 

Here’s the groundwork you need to cover first.

1. Understand the client’s business and pain points

If the cold email message you send to a “Head of Sales” is the same as a “CMO,” you may not get a response. Both roles perform different functions. Their pain points and goals aren’t the same. This is where you do your research. Otherwise, you would be selling to no one. 

Based on your lead generation techniques, ask yourself these questions:

• Who am I targeting? (e.g., Founders, CEO, COO, CMO, Sales Lead, etc.)
• What problems are they facing? (e.g., “They are losing 20+ hours per week with manual cold outreach.”)
• Why are you the solution they need? (e.g., “An automated outreach workflow that saves time and lets them focus on strategic tasks.”)

When you send a message that shows you’ve done your homework, you prove that you care and listen to their needs. This increases the chance of getting a response from them rather than attempting to sell to them.

2. Personalize your approach

A personalized email stands out from the crowd. It is relevant, catches interest, and triggers the prospects to respond. It isn’t creepy. It shows you’ve done your homework, such that you know your prospects can offer a solution that addresses their needs. 

Tal-Baker Phillips, Head of Customer Success at Lemlist, shares six hacks for crafting personalized messages in your cold campaigns. 

• Self-authored content: You put in a passion that speaks volumes and gets recognized by the client.
• Engaged content: Content that your prospects have engaged with, showcasing their interests and priorities. 
• Self-identified traits: These are the information your prospects openly share on their page. You build a bridge by referencing their words in your emails. 
• Junk drawer approach: Focuses on interests, hobbies, and affiliations. You leverage these details to humanize the content.
• Background-centric conversation: You explore their career trajectory and company shifts to show genuine interest in them or uncover something new. 
• Company-centric: Use news directly linked to their company. For example, congratulate the company milestone to make your prospects feel good. 

3. Set a clear objective for your email

Before you draft anything, you need to identify what you intend to achieve:

• Do you want to build relationships? 
• Generate qualified leads? 
• Drive brand awareness? 
• Or increase revenue growth?

Setting a clear objective directs the content of your email. You’re not crafting a random message; you’re writing bespoke content that speaks to users’ needs and persuades them to take an action, whether consciously or unconsciously.

Now that you know what to do before you write a cold email, let’s get into how to write one.  

How to email a prospective client and get a reply? 

Cold emailing is one of the quickest ways to get in front of your potential clients. In this section, we will discuss the specific information every cold email needs to include. Before we discuss the details, here is a ColdIQ email template for your prospective clients. 

This is to walk through what a cold email looks like, and we’ll start with an email template for prospective clients:

How to follow up with a client by building one like that? Here is the process.

1. Craft a strong cold email subject line

Subject lines are the gateway to your cold emails. They are catchy, short, and personalized words that pique your readers’ interest in your emails. Without it, your prospect won’t open your message. By implication, that means they won’t read or reply to your email.

On crafting an intriguing cold email subject line, Alex Vacca, COO and Co-Founder at ColdIQ, shares a hack: “Pose questions and try to pattern interrupt.” This prompts your readers to open your email. 

That said, here are some other tips to follow when you write a cold email subject line:

• Keep it between 3-5 words max.
• Use lowercase.
• Make it relevant to their world, not yours.
• Keep it short and sweet. It shouldn’t take more than 10 seconds to read.
• Add a space or two before the subject to create a pattern interrupt

Remember that subject lines aren’t clickbait. They aren’t meant to mislead your audience. Instead, it shows them what you do, the problems they have, and how you intend to solve them.

2. Create a perfect preview text

Now that you have their attention with the subject line, the next step is to entice them further. That’s what the preview text does. It’s a short snippet of text that appears below the subject line in the inbox. It’s what gets your prospects to continue reading your message.

Michel Lieben, CEO and Founder of ColdIQ, shares a tip for writing a preview text. 

He says, “Start with something relevant, specific, and different from the 20 other emails in their inbox that day.” This means you must have researched your audience and understand their pain point. It’s the hook that intrigues your reader into knowing who you are and what you do.

3. Include a sales trigger 

Messaging your prospects at the right time increases the chance of getting a response. Sales trigger (hiring trend, funding news, relocation, etc.) shows a prospect’s interest in your product or service. All you need to do is watch for them and leverage them with the right opportunity. 

Sales prospecting tools like Common Room and Unify let you monitor these signals that indicate your prospects are in the market for your products or services. Then, weave your story around it. 

Here is an example: 

Scott, noticed you have over 30 positions open on your job portal.

This catches their attention and prompts them to reply. 

4. Address a specific problem

If you had to capture your client’s biggest pain point in one single, impactful sentence, how would you put it? You could think of:

• The biggest drive behind the purchase (e.g., they’re manually tracking outbound leads across multiple spreadsheets).
• The consequence of their problem (e.g., they’re wasting 10 hours on tracking the spreadsheet).
• How can you solve it (e.g., an automated outreach process that eliminates manual data entry).

In short, make it all about them. Rather than asking for 30 minutes of their time, show that you understand their world and can improve it. 

5. Add social proof that reinforces value

Now that we mentioned the “what” and “how,” back up the “why” with social proof. 

Clients want to see others who have had a positive experience with your products or services before they commit. This helps them to feel more confident in their own decision. This can be a quote, testimonial, case study, short demo videos, or relevant industry certification.

Here is an example:

A company I worked with in the SaaS industry last year got a 35% faster outreach cycle with two extra deals per month.

Make sure your social proof is honest, relevant to your audience, and straight to the point. Provide more details if your recipient requires them. 

6. Incorporate a strong CTA

Don’t make your buyer reach out to you, asking, “What’s the next step?”

Include a clear call-to-action that grabs their attention. Some examples include:

• Worth a chat?
• Is this something you’d be interested in?
• Can I share how?

Having a clear CTA in your email persuades them to perform the desired action. Keep it short, simple, and easy to understand. 

7. Don’t forget your email signature

Include an email signature to indicate who you are and why the recipient should listen to you. It also proves you’re the legitimate sender.

An example includes:

Jane Doe, 

COO and Co-founder,
GoodLife SaaS Limited. 

With an email signature, you make it easy for your prospects to contact you and build meaningful relationships.

8. Write a follow-up email to a potential client

Your initial outreach email isn’t all about cold emailing. You must follow up with a potential client to improve the likelihood of getting a response. For the most part, you may need to follow up more than 5 five times to close a deal. 

While you’re consistent, you must also offer value. 

Follow-ups are usually shorter than the usual cold emails. You don’t need to spend time figuring out what to craft. It should follow the content of your previous email to resonate with your audience. 

How to follow up with prospective clients via LinkedIn messages? 

Prospecting on LinkedIn is a different game. Its follow-up process requires you to stay on top of your prospect’s mind without being pushy. How do you do that? 

Alex Vacca, COO and Co-founder at ColdIQ, shares some tips on what makes up a LinkedIn messages that get replies, which you can use to follow up with a client.

As mentioned earlier, your sales prospecting techniques aren’t complete without a follow-up. But how many times do you need to follow up with a client? Let’s find out. 

How many times should I follow up with a client?

We know follow-ups are crucial after sending an email. But how many times do you send one? Research reveals that 80% of sales require five follow-ups after the meeting. This shows the essence of multiple interactions to close a deal. But, how exactly do you do this? 

Alex Vacca revealed proven techniques you can use to follow up on your prospects.

1. Day 2 - Suggest a meeting time after 2 days of no response
2. Day 4 - Ask them to suggest a time that works for their schedule
3. Day 10 - Check if the core problem you discussed is still relevant
4. Day 20 - Share a targeted case study demonstrating social proof 
5. Day 50 - Provide a valuable insight, a guide, or an industry update 
6. Day 100 - And then continuing every 100 days after that, try to follow up with something relevant (case study, guide, interesting resources

As you follow up with your prospects, there are some best practices to keep in mind. In the next section, we’ll discuss these practices to ensure you get positive responses from your prospective client. 

Best practices for sending an email and LinkedIn follow-up message 

Ready to send those emails and LinkedIn messages? Here are a few best practices to help you get started. 

1. Build a relationship before outreach

If anyone will hop on a meeting with you, it’s because they trust you. This is why you need to build a rapport before pitching your products or services. 

First, research your audience. You can’t start a conversation without knowing who your leads are. Delve into their background, industry, recent works or achievements, or the challenges they may be facing. 

Also, engage with them on platforms like LinkedIn or Twitter before sending a cold email. Provide upfront value like sending a helpful resource or sharing relevant insights to show you understand their specific needs. 

When you build a rapport with them, it increases the chance of getting a response. 

2. A/B test the elements

A/B testing involves testing two or more versions of a single email or email campaigns to see which one resonates the most with your audience. It doesn’t mean rewriting your entire element. You’re making micro-improvements with some of the elements to see which is better. Think of the subject line, opening sentence, emojis, angle of sales pitch, CTAs, and more. 

Before you run variations, you can test the elements for different lead segments in this way:

• Different pain points for cold leads
• New subject lines for warm leads
• Alternative CTAs for hot leads

This approach enables you to know which element performs better and informs your decision-making process. 

3. Track your campaign performance

You can’t improve what you don’t measure. B2B lead generation strategies involve tracking your campaign performance to gain insights into the campaigns that are performing well and those that need some adjustments. 

A great way to track your campaign performance is to watch for key metrics. Analyze your open rates, click-throughs, reply rates, and more:

This approach lets you understand whether you have achieved your goals or need to optimize for improvements.

4. Improve email deliverability

Sending an email without ensuring deliverability is like throwing darts into the dark. In other words, your cold emails would likely end up in the spam folder, rather than your prospect’s inbox. You don’t want that to happen. So, here are a few tips to help:

• Properly authenticate email protocols like SPF, DMARC, and DKIM
• Set up secondary domains to protect the primary one
• Verify your prospect’s email addresses
• Warm up your domains with ideally 30 emails per day. 
• Personalize your email messages
• Clean your email list
• Avoid sharing IP addresses with multiple domains

In the next section, we will talk about the tools to help with emailing and sending LinkedIn messages to prospective clients. 

What tools can help you with emailing a prospective client + sending LinkedIn messages?

Here are some email outreach and LinkedIn automation tools to help you get started.  

1. Expandi

Expandi’s main focus is LinkedIn automation. You can use it to find quality leads on LinkedIn, send numerous connection requests, and create hyper-personalized messages for a prospective client. Expandi also implements safety measures to prevent your LinkedIn account from getting banned. 

Pricing: Expandi offers a 7-day free trial, but paid plans start at $99 per month.

2. Heyreach

Heyreach is another tool to automate your LinkedIn activities. You can auto-rotate LinkedIn sending accounts, combine various activities (sending connection requests or messages) into a single workflow, manage replies from a centralized inbox, or integrate your existing tech stack for easy data transfer

Pricing: Heyreach’s pricing plan starts at $79/sender per month.

3. Lemlist

Lemlist works best for automating email outreach and LinkedIn activities. You can validate email addresses, personalize messages, and send emails without switching tabs. You can also automate sending connection requests and LinkedIn messages in a human-like manner to prevent your account from being restricted. 

Pricing: Lemlist offers a 14-day free trial, but its paid plan starts at $69 per month/user

4. Woodpecker

Woodpecker is our final option on the list. You can set up authentication protocols and send cold emails from one spot. You can also automate LinkedIn activities by sending connection requests or creating a LinkedIn campaign. 

Pricing: Woodpecker offers a 7-day free trial, but its paid plan starts at $29 per month.

Send your cold emails and LinkedIn messages with ColdIQ

If done well, cold emails and LinkedIn messages can get you a “yes” from your potential clients, without spending extra money. 

ColdIQ makes it easy. 

Our sales experts leverage AI sales tools and implement unique sales prospecting techniques to flood your pipeline with sales opportunities. Book a call today!