How to Write a Follow-Up Email After a Meeting: 7 Templates

It can be easy to forget to send a follow-up message after a meeting. You might get caught up in ensuring your business meeting runs smoothly or working through your to-do list. However, sending a follow-up post-meeting can be the difference between a successful or disappointing outcome or even having your employees complete their action items. 

Let’s learn why it’s crucial to follow up after a meeting, how to write them, and follow-up examples or templates you can use for reference.

• Why is it important to follow up?
• How to write a meeting follow-up email
• 7 follow-up email templates
• Tips to write great follow-up emails
• How to seamlessly send a meeting follow-up email with Fellow

Why is it important to follow up?

It is important to follow up after a meeting for many reasons. First, showing appreciation for meeting attendees will foster a positive environment and relationship. 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. Therefore, it is important to show your appreciation and thank your meeting attendees. For example, sending a thank you email after a sales meeting could be a crucial step in closing. 

It is 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 percent more likely to agree that leaders cared about building a human workplace.” 

2 Recap the meeting

Nothing is worse than ending a meeting and not remembering what was said. Your brain was so focused on the last topic discussed that every prior decision has gone in one ear and out the other. Therefore, in your follow-up email, it is important to include a recap of the meeting. 

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
• A reminder for the next meeting

3 Summarize key decisions

Summarizing your key decisions in your follow-up meeting email is important because it will ensure that your meeting attendees know the main takeaways of the meeting. Having pointless meetings is a waste of everyone’s time. Therefore, summarizing the key decisions outlined in your meeting will remind attendees that the meeting had a purpose—and what that purpose was.

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 their next steps by having it down in writing to retrieve whenever they need it. This is also important for those who were unable to attend the meeting so that they stay informed on their action items. 

5 Include the next meeting date

At the end of your follow-up email, it is important to reference your next meeting, whether by including the set date or scheduling it via email. 

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.

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

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

It is important to send your follow-up email after meeting someone within 24 hours. This is important so that if attendees want to look back on anything discussed during the meeting, they do not need to wait more than a day. It also outlines what attendees’ responsibilities are and urges them to get started on their next steps. 

Finally, this will reflect your 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

The ugly truth is that when emails are overly long, we simply just don’t read them. We scroll through, skim the topics, and never give it a second thought. Therefore, 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 email for what it is.

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 things 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 and help 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.

How to seamlessly send a meeting follow-up email with Fellow

With Fellow, you can tackle meeting follow-up tasks in one place. With Fellow’s AI Meeting Copilot, you can automatically record, transcribe, and summarize the meeting notes, allowing everyone to review key insights easily. 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.

You can also 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:

• 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.
• Automatically send Post-Meeting Recaps, so you don’t have to!