How to send a follow-up email after a meeting [w/ templates]

Whether you’ve just had an intro meeting with a potential customer or a project kickoff meeting with your team, sending a follow-up email isn’t just good manners – it also has tremendous benefits. 

You get to show appreciation, reiterate key decisions (or key benefits of the product you’re pitching), and build trust with your fellow attendees. 

If you’re wondering how to step up your meeting follow-up game, you’ve come to the right place. This guide has all the tips you need plus some follow-up email templates that you can start using right away. 

Why is it important to follow up after a meeting?

Following up with an email after a meeting lets you summarize the key takeaways and show appreciation to the people who took the time to attend. 

But that doesn’t necessarily mean that you need a follow-up message after every meeting. Sending a follow-up after a daily stand-up, for instance, would be overkill as you’ll all see each other again tomorrow (and ideally you have a record of the meeting to go back to if needed). 

Follow-up emails work best for:

• Cross-functional meetings with multiple stakeholders 

• Quarterly planning meetings, project kickoffs, or board meetings 

• External meetings with agencies, freelancers, and potential customers or clients

If it was an important meeting with multiple stakeholders — and you want everyone to have clarity on the decisions and next steps — following up shortly after the meeting is a good idea. Here's why:

✅ It shows appreciation

Everyone likes to feel appreciated. When you’re meeting with your team or clients (current or prospective), one of the goals is to form or strengthen relationships. Expressing thanks is never a bad move. 

To take this to the next level, don’t just send a generic thank-you email. You’ve got to personalize it, which means:  

• Addressing  the recipient by name

• Thanking them for their contributions: e.g., considering your product or service, providing insight or an idea, offering a potential business opportunity, etc.

• Referencing a detail from the meeting to show that you paid attention

✅ It reminds attendees of key points of discussion

A follow-up email reminds attendees of the main points covered in the meeting. By following up, you’re ensuring that people remember what happened and stay aligned with the decisions made. 

Don’t waste a great meeting: For prospects, a follow-up keeps your company and your product in your prospect’s mind and it’s a chance to re-engage and keep the conversation going. For team members, a follow-up keeps goals and projects top-of-mind and doesn’t let key takeaways get lost in the shuffle. 

If you're hosting meetings in Vowel, you can go beyond bullet-point summaries by sending clips of the most important parts from any virtual meeting. These come with time-stamped transcripts, too.

Plus, every meeting includes a recap with attendees, shared links, and action items, alongside the recording, transcript, and shared notes.

✅ It builds trust

Following up after a meeting gives you a chance to position yourself as a person others can rely on. A manager needs the trust of their team members, a seller the trust of a prospect, a potential employer the trust of a candidate… 

The best way to build trust with an email is to think about how you can enrich the conversation. In some cases, this might mean you have to go beyond just a meeting recap.

For example, you can send articles based on the topics you discussed, or a few case studies and blog posts that support the use case of your product and how it solves the customer’s pain points.

Talk about a productive meeting experience!

How to write a follow-up meeting email in 4 steps

Follow this step-by-step guide and write effective follow-up emails (with great subject lines + action items) in no time.

1. Hook them with the subject line

This is the first thing people see when they get your email, so make it informative and clear. 

Some variations to try are:

• [Meeting subject] recap + next steps, e.g. New onboarding recap + next steps  

• Follow-up: [Meeting subject], e.g. Follow up: Extending your free trial

• Recapping today’s [type of meeting], e.g. Recapping today’s proposal meeting 

According to studies of outreach emails, long (but not too long) email subject lines can boost email response rate by 24.6%. Personalized subject lines increase the response rate by 30.5%, so consider including the recipient’s name if it feels natural.

2. Thank the attendees

Don’t forget to thank the attendees. After all, they’re busy people who took time out of their schedules to meet with you.  Not only is it good manners to say thank you, but you’ll also be showing your contacts that you appreciate their participation and input. 

Leaving a good impression can make the difference between a prospective customer choosing you or your competitors. For internal meetings, it can add cohesion to the team if you express gratitude and excitement in working together. 

3. Recap key insights and decisions

People’s attention spans and memories are limited: we often only remember the last thing we heard or saw. Key takeaways from a meeting can be overshadowed by the last item discussed. 

Counter this by always including a meeting recap in the follow-up email to summarize what happened. The recap should contain: 

• A list of discussions points from the meeting 

• A list of action items and their owners and due dates

• Any reference documents or other resources you used during the meeting

• A reminder of the next meeting’s date and time (this can be casual, e.g. “Talk to you in 2 weeks!”) 

4. Include the next steps and action items + arrange the next meeting

It’s the nightmare of every manager: the next meeting rolls around and to the shock of everyone – last week’s action items are not completed! 

Turns out Dave thought Mike was drafting the templates for the cold emails and Mary was convinced that Alice was handling the social media calendar for next week.

Don’t risk another wasted week: as mentioned above, include action items (and their assignees) in your follow-up email. 

If you’re using Vowel as your video conferencing tool, you can track action items in your collaborative notes, and quickly pull up previous notes for recurring meetings to check in on what happened. 

Now, if the meeting you’re following up on is a sales pitch, you’ll want to summarize any next steps for your prospect that they agreed to and try to gently prod them to schedule the next meeting with you.

3 tips for better follow-ups

Want to send out effective meeting follow-up emails that will be opened and read? 

Here are some tips to help you out. 

✅ Keep it short and sweet

Long emails simply don’t get read. People might scroll through and scan the content a little but it’s unlikely to sink in. They should find your email helpful; if it feels more like homework, you’re doing it wrong. 

To make sure your follow-ups are concise and to the point, include only the most relevant takeaways. Use bullet points or lists to break up information so you don’t have a wall of text. 

Research shows that the optimal follow-up email length is between 75 and 100 words.(That’s about as long as this subsection 😉) .

✅ Be specific 

It can be tempting to use a template and simply plug in names and details. But that isn’t the best idea and here’s why: No matter how good a follow-up template is (and we think ours are pretty good 😎), the recipients will know when you’re just going through the motions. 

Always try to personalize the follow-up: Mention something about the meeting you enjoyed, refer to a topic you discussed, or highlight something you discovered you have in common. And add relevant detail to the points you cover — this will show that you listened and cared.

✅ Send it at the right time

There’s a simple rule on when to follow up: Do it within 24 hours so that your email is timely and the discussions and decisions are still fresh in the minds of the meeting’s participants. 

This works for any kind of business meeting or deal, or with contacts you made at conferences or other events. Sending timely follow-ups reflects well on your business etiquette, as it shows stakeholders and potential clients that you’re proactive about getting things done.

2 follow-up email templates to inspire you

If you find yourself stumped when trying to draft a great follow-up email, it’s good to have a template to work from. 

Just remember to make it your own and add a personal touch where appropriate. Here are two follow-up email examples to inspire you and help you save time.

Template #1: After a meeting with a prospect

Hi {Prospect’s Name}, 

Thanks for taking the time to let us demo our SEO platform for you. I appreciate the insight you shared about your team’s pain points with performing content audits. Getting first-hand feedback like that helps us understand the customer’s needs better. 

I’ve attached a couple of case studies from our knowledge base showing how you can streamline your content audits by using our tools.

When could we schedule a follow-up meeting to discuss your company’s SEO needs? 

I’m looking forward to hearing from you, and I’ll follow up later this week to schedule another demo for you. 

All the best, 

{Your Name}

Template #2: After a meeting with the team

Hello {Marketing/Development/Sales/etc} Team, 

Thanks for meeting with me today. I appreciate you taking time out of your busy schedules for the meeting and the hard work you put in for {Company Name/Project}. 

I’d like to reiterate some key points:

{list of key points/discussion topics}

In our discussion, we came to the following decisions:

{list of decisions made}

Here are the action items to be completed before our next meeting:

{list of action items, their owners, and the due dates}

I am also attaching the documents we referenced in today’s meeting, should you need more clarification. 

Once again, thanks for your time and hard work, and I’m looking forward to seeing you all again on {date of next meeting}!

{Your Name}

Improve your meeting follow-up game with the right tool

Following up after a meeting is part of a good meeting culture, as it lets you reiterate key points, build a relationship, and foster trust. 

Staying on top of recaps is much easier if you have a good meeting platform in your tech stack to help you with everything from meeting preparation to email summaries.

Vowel can summarize all your meetings in a handy post-meeting recap that shows attendees, action items, and shared links. It’s tied to the meeting recording, transcript, and collaborative notes — no separate files and nothing to download!

After the meeting, team members or guests will get a link to the recording, transcript, and notes for easy access. You can always send a personal email for an added touch — but all the heavy lifting will be done for you. 

Want to try it out for yourself? Sign up now for free!