Following up after a trade fair: the window matters more than the wording

Two things decay after a fair, and they decay at different speeds. Your memory of the conversation goes first, within a day. Theirs goes slower but goes further, because they spoke to thirty exhibitors and you spoke to one of them at a time.

Everything about follow-up follows from that asymmetry.

The first message goes out at capture

The most useful email is the one that leaves while the person is still standing at your stand or walking away from it. It is not a sales message. It confirms who you are, gives them a way back to you, and puts your name in their inbox at the only moment when "the stand near the entrance" still means something.

LeadShake sends that one automatically when a contact is captured, under your name rather than a platform's. That last detail matters more than it sounds: a message from a marketing system reads as a list, and a list is what people unsubscribe from.

The second message goes out within three days

Three days is not a magic number, it is the outer edge of shared memory. Inside that window you can write "you asked about the integration with your ERP" and the sentence lands. Outside it, you are introducing yourself again.

This is where the note you wrote at the stand earns its keep. Sorted by note rather than by capture time, a register of forty rows separates into the six people who described a problem, the ten who were comparing vendors, and the rest who took a brochure. Three different emails, and only the first six deserve a personal one.

What kills a follow-up

A template that could have been sent to anyone. If the message would read identically to the other thirty-nine, it tells the recipient they were a row.

Delay. Covered above, and it is the most common failure by a distance.

A sender they do not recognise. Your name, not your company's marketing address, and certainly not a tool's.

Asking for a meeting before giving anything. The conversation at the stand was an exchange. The email that only takes is a step backwards from it.

The part that is not optional

The person left their details for a purpose they agreed to at the moment of capture, and following up on the conversation is that purpose. Adding them to a newsletter is not: that is a new purpose they were not asked about, and it is the single most common way a compliant capture turns into a non-compliant database. The GDPR side of capture sets out what that means concretely.

What the email actually says

Three parts, in this order, and none of them is a paragraph.

The reference. One sentence naming where you met and what they said, taken from your note. This is the whole email, in the sense that everything else fails without it.

One useful thing. The document you promised, the answer to the question they asked, the name of the person who handles their case. Something they can use whether or not they reply.

One clear next step. A specific proposal, not an open invitation. "Does Thursday at eleven work" is answerable in four words. "Let me know if you would like to discuss further" is not, which is why it never gets an answer.

Keep the whole thing under six lines. A long email after a fair reads as a brochure, and a brochure is what they already took.

The second touch, and when to stop

If the first message gets nothing, one more is reasonable, ten days later, shorter than the first and adding something rather than repeating it. After that, stop.

Silence after two useful messages is an answer. Continuing past it costs you the thing you were building, which was the possibility of contacting them again in a year when their situation has changed. The register keeps the record either way, with the date and the note, ready for that year.

Automatic follow-up in LeadShake is per campaign, with a delay you set in days, and it goes to the people who ticked the box on that campaign's form. It stops there on purpose.