Had a person finally respond today – I’d messaged him two or three times on LinkedIn a few weeks ago – no response. So today I sent him an email, and contrary to popular belief he didn’t tell me to go jump off a cliff, he said, and I quote, “Your cold outreach is damn good! Send it over.”
Which is funny, because last week I saw a post on LinkedIn that said don’t follow up. This was about outreach. Somebody had messaged them, they didn’t respond, and then the sender followed back up.
And the comments all agreed. Why do people keep following up? If I didn’t reply the first time, I’m not going to reply the second time.
And you know what, if you had no intention of ever replying, that holds.
But here’s the thing I think people miss.
If you’re sending out messages, you have a good offer, and your messages are doing what they’re supposed to, every time you send them you’re going to get people who almost replied.
People who meant to reply. People who were going to… and then the phone rang. The kids were screaming in the back. Something distracted them.
That follow-up is what gets the response the second time. Or the third.
And this isn’t just outreach. Same goes for direct mail.
You can go back decades to Dan Kennedy’s work with restaurants back in the day to see this in action (Giorgio’s Italian Restaurant if you want to look it up). He found people would respond to the first mailing, but send a second one and a third one and you’d get just as many people replying to the second as the first. In some cases more people replied to message two or message three than the initial one.
Because with the first one it’s “eh, I don’t know about these guys.”
Then you see another one, and it seems more legitimate. Seems like it’s not just some fly-by-night scam.
So yes, you should follow up. Even in outreach. Even knowing some people are always going to ignore every message you send… because if you’re doing it well, there will be people out there who almost replied to your previous message.
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