Trade shows are an amazing opportunity to make contacts, generate leads and spark conversations, but the real business is often done in the weeks following the event.

If you want to get the most out of your investment and effort participating at any trade show and not miss your chance to close deals, you need to follow up like a pro. Here, we show you how:

1- Put it in context

Provide your prospects with some context to make sure they remember you and why you are contacting them. Keep in mind that your leads probably met a lot of people at the show, so give them something (a conversation you had, or a shared interest for example) that will jog their memory about you.

2- Make it personal

Sending off the same email to every contact you made in bcc would be wasting a potentially great response rate. You put time and effort into making those contacts, so make sure there’s a payoff. Always, include the recipient’s name, and if possible the name of the recipient’s organisation.

… but here’s the easy part. Don’t waste your time sending individual emails. Instead use a tool that allows you to send personalised emails to multiple recipients in one go.

It’s best to divide your recipients into segments (for example by nationality, industry or company size) in order to compose messages that feel highly personalised.

The goal is for everyone on your list to feel like you are engaging with them individually.

3- Don’t get attached (to attachments)

It’s something you may have never considered, but it’s an effective rule to live by: Don’t send emails with attachments to a prospect if it’s your first communication with them.

Nobody likes to receive heavy emails that take forever to download and unnecessarily cram inboxes. Instead upload your documents and content onto the cloud and then share the links with your recipient. This simple action will reduce the email size and increase drastically their deliverability rate.

Start using the technologies available that allow you to create one click links to your documents exactly for this purpose.

4- Get tracking

Having the power to track who’s opened and clicked on your emails is a tool you need to have in your quiver if you want to increase conversion rates.

Knowing which prospects have engaged in the sales process by reading your emails multiple times or clicked on links you have shared with them, means you can focus your follow up on those key prospects who have showed the most interest in doing business with you.

5- Content is key

In life or in business, you need to stand out to succeed. Your emails are no different. Get noticed, differentiate your communications from those of your competitors, and engage with your prospects on a deeper level by embedding digital content such as images, videos, and links to brochures and web-pages.

6- What’s the point?

What do you want your prospect to do after reading your email? Do you have a call to action and is it clear? For example, is it to schedule a show-round or meeting, or to forward the information to the relevant person in their organisation? Finish your email by letting your recipient know exactly what you are expecting from them.

If you are not asking your recipients to take a specific action, don’t expect them to do anything at all, other than delete your email.

7- Last, little thing…

Keep it short!!!

Less is more when it comes to emails, so keep them short, punchy and to the point.

If you’re not already using these simple follow-up techniques after trade shows, your competitors most likely are. Don’t miss out on a massive opportunity to increase your productivity and conversions rates.

If you are interested to learn more about how hospitality salespeople convert more leads in less time [ninja-popup ID=1200 ]subscribe to our newsletter.[/ninja-popup]

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Based in London, UK, UpMail is an email plugin for hospitality sales people to increase one-to-one email communications productivity and sales conversion rates. UpMail customers includes Jurys Inn, Iberostar, citizenM, Guoman, and many more.

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