How to follow up with people you meet Capture it, send it, come back on time.

A follow-up rarely fails at the message. It fails earlier, when nothing specific is left to say, or later, when you meant to come back in November and did not. Here is the whole thing in order.

Each step has its own guide if you want the detail:

• Step 1: how to remember people you meet, and the five facts worth writing down.
• Why step 1 matters: why follow-ups fail on Thursday, not on the night.
• Steps 3 to 5: when to follow up, stop by stop.
• The message itself: six UK follow-up email templates, or what to write on LinkedIn if that is where they are.
• Step 6: phone contacts, a spreadsheet or a personal CRM, compared.

The five facts are who, where you met, what they need, when to come back and what you promised. Only the first could be read off a badge. The other four are facts about the conversation, nobody else has a record of them, and they are the first things you forget. One dictated sentence covers all five: “Priya, Example Logistics, Manchester expo, wants a new CRM in November, said I’d send the case study.” (A made-up person, like every example on this page.)

The second half of the job is leaving with a way to reach them. Handing someone your card puts the follow-up in their hands, and they have twenty other cards. Ask for their email or number, or use a card that swaps details both ways. With a Cardr Apple Wallet card, the other person scans your QR, lands on your page, saves you to their contacts and can send their details back in the same step, so the exchange ends with them in your list.

Within one to two days they can still place you; after a week you are reintroducing yourself. The detail that makes it work is the specific line: “what you said about moving the warehouse team onto one system before the November peak” gets a reply; “what you said about your business” does not.

Use the channel they gave you. A business email means email. “Just WhatsApp me” means WhatsApp. If you only have their name and company, LinkedIn is the usual route, with its own limits on what you can say in a connection note; we cover those in what to send on LinkedIn.

This is where the value is, and the part that is easiest to let slide. The rules are short enough to fit in one decision:

“Just checking in” and “bumping this” are not follow-ups. They ask the other person to do the remembering. Every message after the first should carry something: the date arriving, an article that fits their problem, an introduction they would want. If you have nothing new, you do not have a reason to write yet.

There are no reply rates here because nobody has measured them honestly for UK networking conversations, and we will not invent one. The timing guide gives the reason for each stop instead.

Someone who said “come back in the spring” in October is a real opportunity in March, but only if you still know who they are, what they needed, and that March is their month. That needs somewhere to live that is not your memory.

• One list. Notes in one app and contacts in another means the note is never beside the name when you need it.
• One next date per person. Not a vague “follow up sometime”. A date, written as a date, that something will show you on the day.
• A way to mark it done. Otherwise the list fills with people you have already written to, and you stop trusting it.

That can be your phone’s Contacts app plus calendar reminders, a spreadsheet, a personal CRM, or Cardr’s contact list. Each wins somewhere; we compared them fairly in personal CRMs for networking.

Being straight about the split, since we sell the paid half:

• Free, for good: your card and signed Wallet pass, the two-way exchange that puts their details in your list, Meeting Memory (one sentence filed into who, where, need and timing, with the follow-up date worked out from your words), notes, tags, search, and export to CSV or vCard. One AI-drafted follow-up to try.
• Pro, £12 a month or £9 a month billed annually (£108 a year): a reminder email on the date in your note, or on day 3 after you met if you gave none; AI-drafted follow-ups for 200 people a month by email, WhatsApp or text, written from your note; a capture form on your page; and all sixteen card designs.
• Not built: sending on your behalf, sequences of automatic follow-ups, and connections to other CRMs. Cardr drafts and you press send. If you write to someone another way, “Mark followed up” stops the reminders about them.

What a tool cannot do is capture the specific thing for you. If you take one habit from this guide, make it the sentence written before the next conversation. The rest, including the meeting memory that files it, is there to make sure that sentence turns into a message.