How to Write a Meeting Follow-Up Email (+ Examples)

Many factors determine whether or not a meeting is successful. Were decisions made? Did you cover everything on the agenda? Did you generate a list of action items?

However, an often-overlooked factor key to making a meeting successful is following up with a timely email that keeps momentum moving forward.

Let’s go over why it’s crucial to send that follow-up email, how to write a follow-up email, and follow-up examples or templates you can use for reference.

Why is it important to follow up?

It is important to follow up after a meeting for many reasons. First, it’s a professional courtesy that fosters positive relationships. Remember, they’re taking time out of their day for you.

Furthermore, the last thing your attendees will remember is the last thing discussed. Therefore, sending a follow-up email will help remind your attendees of the key points discussed during the meeting.

How to write a meeting follow-up email

Now that you know the importance of sending a follow-up email post-meeting, it’s time to learn how to send one.

• Show appreciation
• Recap the meeting
• Summarize key decisions
• Add next steps
• Include the next meeting date

1 Show appreciation

Taking time out of your day to attend a meeting isn’t always easy. Instead of getting important work done, you are using your valuable time to be at a meeting. With that in mind, it’s considerate to show your appreciation and thank your meeting attendees. 

Sending a follow-up email also demonstrates proper etiquette, especially when working on completing a deal or after meeting with someone for the first time. For example, sending a thank you email after a sales meeting could be a crucial step in closing. 

For internal meetings, it’s also important to show appreciation for your team members because it helps build trust and fosters a good relationship between you and your coworkers. 

A study done by the Workhuman Research Institute found that “when workers agreed ‘I feel appreciated for the work I do,’ they are 47% more likely to agree that leaders cared about building a human workplace.”

2 Recap the meeting

Even after the most productive meeting, it can be hard to remember everything that happened, especially if you’ve been talking for an hour or more. Therefore, in your follow-up email, it is important to include a recap of the meeting to keep everyone on the same page

Now, you may be wondering about how to write a follow-up meeting recap. So, let’s see what important information you should include:

• A list of everything discussed during the meeting
• A list of the action items and who were assigned to them
• Any reference documents used during the meeting

Refer back to your agenda, meeting notes, recording, and transcript to find all the information you need to summarize the meeting.

3 Summarize key decisions

Your meeting had a purpose, and key decisions needed to be made during it. A good practice for follow-up emails is to restate the purpose as well as the decisions you came to as a group.

As a rule, meetings that don’t have a clear purpose or concrete results are the ones that need to be reevaluated. If this is a common problem, make sure to implement meeting agendas, note-taking, and a meeting management solution like Fellow.

4 Add next steps

When writing your follow-up meeting email, it is important to include the next steps. This will hold everyone accountable for what they’ll do next by having it down in writing to retrieve whenever they need it. This is also important information for those who were unable to attend the meeting so they stay informed of their own action items.

5 Include the next meeting date

At the end of your follow-up email, be sure to reference your next meeting, whether by including the set date or proposing a time.

You can add the next meeting date to the bottom of your follow-up meeting email so you won’t have to search your inbox to find out when your meetings are. If you need to schedule the next meeting, you can use templates to figure out the perfect wording. They can be especially helpful when the meeting is skip-level or with someone unfamiliar.

This will allow attendees to easily find out when the next meeting is and keep you from reminding yourself to send out meeting reminder emails later.

How to send a meeting follow-up email with AI

You can automate your follow-up email with Fellow. Simply use the Ask Fellow assistant, “Write me a follow-up email for this meeting.” Copilot will then automatically generate a professional and thorough follow-up email you can simply copy, paste, and send. This works best after the meeting has been recorded, summarized, and transcribed by Fellow.

After a meeting recorded with Fellow, you can also instantly share meeting recaps with participants for record-keeping and send them to other interested parties to keep them informed, eliminating the need to send separate meeting follow-up emails. Fellow’s AI generates human-level summaries, capturing nuances or even multiple languages so that everyone is on the same page.

Fellow also allows you to assign, visualize, and prioritize action items in one place, eliminating the need to list out each action item in the follow-up email.

Best practices for follow-up emails with Fellow:

• Automatically send post-meeting recaps, so you don’t have to!
• When sharing an agenda or notes with a teammate, add them directly to the calendar event for full visibility and collaborative access.
• When sharing an agenda or note with an external attendee, use the share button on the top right. You can add them as a guest user or give them a public viewing link.

Tips to write great meeting follow up emails

Use these tips when you’re drafting your next follow-up email:

• Send it within 24 hours of the meeting
• Keep it short and to the point
• Clarify and assign action items
• End on a positive note

1 Send it within 24 hours of the meeting

Don’t wait — send your follow-up email after meeting someone within 24 hours. Not only will the meeting be fresh in your mind, but if attendees,  want to look back on anything discussed during the meeting, they do not need to wait more than a day. It also means attendees can get started on their next steps and action items as soon as possible.

This also reflects good meeting etiquette with potential clients, showing them you are proactive in getting things done. If you wait too long, you risk your follow-up message being grouped with the many cold emails the recipient may receive.

2 Keep it short and to the point

No one wants to read a long email. It’s likely that recipients will simply scroll through, skim the topics, and never give it a second thought. If you want your attendees to read your follow-up emails (and you do!), you need to keep your emails short and to the point. 

Make sure you reflect this in your subject line so the attendees can clearly identify the follow-up email for what it is. Your subject line should be succinct, clearly reference the meeting’s topic, and hint at next steps. A well-written subject line ensures the follow-up email won’t get passed over in anyone’s inbox.

3 Clarify and assign action items

Clarifying what the action items are and who is responsible for them is very important to include in your follow-up emails to avoid tasks not being done. By clearly assigning each person a task, the responsibility is not on the whole team but on each individual to get their work done. If a meeting participant could not attend, you can also opt to send a separate email to someone who missed the meeting to recap the meeting and any action items.

4 End on a positive note

The final tip to writing a good follow-up email is to end on a positive note. Even if you get no responses, ending on a positive note will send employees off to do their work feeling empowered and ready to work. This will also foster a healthy work environment and promote psychological safety with team members.

7 follow-up email templates

Here are some examples of meeting follow-up emails to help guide you through how to create the perfect follow-up email templates:

• After a team meeting
• After a meeting with a prospect/potential client 
• After a networking event
• After an Informational Interview
• After a customer meeting
• To ask for meeting feedback
• To schedule another meeting

1 After a team meeting

2 After a meeting with a prospect / potential client 

3 After a networking event 

4 After an Informational Interview

5After a customer meeting

6To ask for meeting feedback

7To schedule another meeting