How Humor Affects Response Rates for Follow-Up Sales Emails (We’ve Got the Data)

I preach the gospel of the follow-up almost every day of my life. I've written an entire book about it. And if you're in sales, you've probably come across these follow-up emails that employ humor to elicit a response. Do they work?

In this post, we share some general best practices, plus the exact follow-up email a B2B software company used. This email includes all the metrics that really matter to sales teams selling via email, namely, open and response rates.

How Do You Spice Up the Follow-Up?

Many ask me for new, creative ways to spice up their follow-up hustle, and I've recently come across an awesome guy who's adding some "funny" to his follow-up and seeing great results.

Rachman co-founded FunnyBizz, and we met at the Lean Startup Conference in December.

He gave an awesome talk on how to follow up with humor effectively.

One of my favorite ideas from the talk was that he used to follow up with potential sponsors for his conference, and when he didn't hear back, he would send them a funny gif of Cookie Monster waiting with no further text. :)

The response rates were great. (Watch the video below of his talk to learn more.)

Experiments in Humor Talk

After his talk, I told him I wanted to learn more about FunnyBizz. He reached out, and I thought I'd test his true follow-up hustle by not responding for a while. :)

You know, it's one thing to preach something on stage and another to practice it in real life. He sent this awesome follow-up video when he didn’t hear from me in a while.

Personal Follow-Up Video (the Funny is Happening in the Second Half)

This is a great example of being creative in your follow-up and creating immediate value in a relationship by putting a smile on someone's face and making their day a little brighter.

The Baby Ducks Follow-Up

A reader recently forwarded me a hilarious follow-up email he received from GoCo.io. I thought it was great and wanted to share it with you all:

We got permission from the author to share some results of how those emails performed.

It's important to remember that open rates and reply rates will greatly vary by industry, the size of the companies you target, and the roles within those companies. In the below scenario, GoCo.io is an HR and Benefits Software solution that targets the CXO of companies with 10 to 500 employees.

They shared both the results of the Baby Duck Goodbye email and how it compared to the previously used control, which is a straight text-only goodbye email. See the results below:

The reply rate on the cute baby duck email was nearly 2X that of the plain text email. They track positive, negative, and neutral replies, and they are willing to share that the ratio stays consistent between the two emails.

Learn (aka steal) these strategies to crush it harder in your follow-up hustle!

Want to learn more about following up with prospects?

If you need some sales humor inspiration, check out our sales memes, CRM memes, and cold calling memes. All the memes! Get those humor juices flowing and ramp up your own response rates.