After spending days talking with prospects, engaging them with fun games, and providing them with neat giveaways, closing the sale should be easy, right? If only life were that simple. While you may get lucky and close a few sales at the show (congrats!), the reality is you’ll need a standout follow-up approach to push leads toward the finish line—that’s what trade show follow-up emails are for. Below, two marketing experts share real email examples they used that garnered success.

3 Trade Show Follow-up Email Examples

1. Florida Title Center

Joshua Leavitt is a marketer for insurance companies like Florida Title Center (FTC), a real estate title insurance agency. Leavitt has extensive expertise in the areas of follow-up emails and email sequences. His client FTC mainly attends realtor-focused trade shows within the state of Florida, and he handles the follow-up email process.

Leavitt is a strong believer in giving value to recipients right from the start, which is why he follows up with leads by sending a newsletter. “The idea is to think about what you can give to your prospects besides the services you offer. What ongoing value can you provide them for free that will encourage consistent, strong engagement with your brand?”

For FTC, he asked the question, What do realtors need? The answer: to sell properties. This led to him asking what realtors would need to scale up their real estate business and accomplish this goal. Leavitt and the FTC team determined the best approach was to send realtor prospects a high-quality newsletter sequence that contained marketing tips specifically developed for realtors.

The first email (seen below) simply serves to reconnect with leads, and informs them about what they can expect to receive from FTC in the near future.

After the initial welcome email, leads then receive a series of tip-filled emails like the one below.

Leavitt and FTC are satisfied with the success of this and similar email campaigns. Here are a few telling stats from one campaign they sent to targeted leads after an event:

• Recipients: 7,144
• Opens: 2,039 (~28.5%)
• Click-throughs: 157 (~2.2%)

In addition to these emails, Leavitt recommends a few other trade show follow-up best practices:

• Always provide value to not only get your leads’ attention, but keep them engaged with your brand.
• Consider what your leads are interested in. This may not always be a product or service you offer, but could be related or complementary.
• Try moving the unsubscribe option to the top of the email. While this may sound counterintuitive, Leavitt has seen this tactic reduce “report as spam” and “unsubscribe” rates. Your results may vary of course.

2. Replyify

Ryan O’Donnell is the co-founder of Replyify, a sales enablement platform that automates emails for B2B prospecting. O’Donnell and his team regularly attend events like LeadsCon, which claims to be the world’s largest lead generation conference.

The example emails O’Donnell provides differ based on whether the contacts are ones his team actually met or didn’t meet (but wanted to); either way, he strives for simplicity. For leads his team met, he sends the following (which you can easily use as a trade show follow-up template):

Subject: LeadsCon

Hi {First_Name},

Nice to meet you at LeadsCon last week.

You're probably busy following up with folks you met (like I'm doing here).

Let me know how your schedule looks next week for a quick call. I can show you how to automate all your follow-up emails so you don't have to waste time sending one by one.

Feel free to pick a convenient time with my *scheduling link* or send yours.

Thanks,

Ryan

The post-trade show email for leads his team didn’t meet reads similarly, but is distinct in its own right:

Subject: LeadsCon

Hi {First_Name},

Missed you at LeadsCon this year. How was it?

I wish we could have met because I really wanted to learn more about {Company}’s business and how you’re scaling your sales team.

You're probably busy with all the post conference follow-ups this week so let me know if you have time next week for a quick call.

Feel free to pick a convenient time with my *scheduling link* or send yours.

Thanks,

Ryan

The stats for O’Donnell’s campaign are promising:

• Recipients: 297
• Opens: 136 (~45.8%)
• Click-throughs: 12 (~4%)

O’Donnell also shares a few trade show follow-up best practices:

• Send multiple emails. Most salespeople only send one email that they type on the flight home; once they’re back in the office they forget to follow up. “Fifty percent of our replies actually came from our second and third emails,” he notes.
• Send emails over the weekend. O’Donnell says his clients tend to work on the weekend, so they’re still in the right frame of mind to receive follow-ups. “Plus, most other companies think weekends aren’t a good time to email, so you’ll stand out in your leads’ inboxes,” he explains.

3. Hill & Partners

Our turn! Here at Hill & Partners, we’re a company of dog lovers—so much so that you’ll probably see a pup or two if you visit our office on any given day. To promote some interest amongst prospects, we decided to leverage cuteness and crafted a marketing campaign that aimed to entice recipients’ sense of curiosity.

The email below features exhibit designer Trevor Beniak’s handsome dog Mo’ and compels the recipient to find out exactly how dogs relate to their face-to-face marketing program. After clicking, the recipient is sent to a special landing page with an overview of H&P’s offering as presented by a few of our team’s pups.

Subject: We Work Our Tails Off So You Don’t Have To

Here are the stats for our campaign:

• Recipients: 619
• Opens: 176 (~28.5%)
• Click-throughs: 36 (~5.8%)

In addition to email, we used this campaign across print and social and saw pretty excellent results in terms of clicks and follow-up.

Sparking curiosity in an email is a great way to entice people to open it. Your prospects are inundated with emails from numerous companies trying to get their attention, and making them curious can help differentiate yours in the midst of a crowded inbox.

Effective post-trade show marketing is essential to closing the sale, but first you have to make a great impression at the show with a stunning Branded Environment. Reach out to us to talk about creating a uniquely customized space.