Give the email one purpose, open with why you are writing and why now, say what you will ask before you ask it, and end with a single clear action. "Just checking in" fails because it asks the client to do work and hands them nothing in return.
Give the email one purpose, open with why you're writing now, and end with one specific action.
Busy people skim, so an email with a single obvious ask is the one that gets answered.
Open your last follow-up email and delete every sentence that isn't the one purpose.
The purpose of an email is never to sell.
Leah Neaderthal, Smart Gets Paid
"Just checking in" fails because it asks the client for a status update and gives them nothing to work with. The reader has to reconstruct who you are, what the thing was, what you want, and what to say, all before they can reply. Most people put that message down, and the silence that follows gets misread as a decision about you.
I keep one picture in mind for every email I send in a sales process: somebody behind a desk covered in paper, who looks up and says "what?" Everything I write has to survive that person.
Measured against them, "just checking in" fails three ways:
The replacement is not a cleverer phrase. It is a message with a purpose, which means deciding what you want to happen next before you start typing.
A follow-up email should contain one purpose, a reason it exists, a signal of what you will ask, and one clear action. Those four in that order.
The discipline that makes it work is the first one: a single purpose per email. Ask yourself what exactly you want to have happen after they read it, then delete everything serving a different goal. Two asks in one message reliably produce zero answers.
Be more direct than feels comfortable, because the discomfort is a misjudgment rather than a warning. Consultants soften asks to avoid imposing, and softening is what makes a message unanswerable.
Vanessa Bohns, reviewing research in which participants made requests of more than 14,000 strangers, found the error is "substantial (on average, requesters underestimate compliance by 48%)," and traced it to "requesters' failure to appreciate the awkwardness of saying 'no' to a request." People say yes far more often than the person asking expects, and the reason is that declining a clear, direct request is socially harder than it looks from the asking side.
A peer asks plainly. Somebody hoping to be chosen hedges, and hedging is what turns a reasonable request into something a busy person postpones.
Emails that get replies carry something the client did not have before they opened it. Four shapes work reliably, and all four can be written in five minutes.
| Shape | What it opens with | What it asks |
|---|---|---|
| The answer | "You asked how we'd handle onboarding." | Does this address it? |
| The forward-ready summary | "Half a page you can send your director." | Anything to change before you send it? |
| The relevant signal | "Saw the funding news, congratulations." | Does this change the timing? |
| The clean close | "I'm assuming priorities shifted." | Should I check back next quarter? |
None of these mentions a status update, and all of them make the next step obvious. The forward-ready summary is the one most consultants never write and the one that does the most work, because it is the thing your contact needs in the meeting you are not going to be in.
There is a version of this problem that is really about permission. You know "just checking in" is weak. You send it anyway, because the alternative feels like asking for too much.
So let me give you the permission. Being clear is not pushy. It is the opposite. A vague email makes your reader do the work of figuring out what you want, and that is a genuine imposition dressed up as politeness. A clear one takes fifteen seconds to answer.
The frame I want you to hold is that the purpose of an email is never to sell. It is to make one specific thing happen next. Once you decide what that thing is, the message almost writes itself, and the hedging falls away because you are no longer trying to do three jobs in one paragraph.
And remember who you are writing to. Somebody buried, skimming on a phone, between meetings. They are not judging your prose. They are trying to work out what you need in two seconds. Write for that person and your reply rate changes, without you having to send more messages.
Short enough to read on a phone without scrolling, which in practice means under about 120 words. Length signals how much work replying will be, so a long message gets postponed even when it is good. If you need to send something substantial, put it in an attachment or a link and keep the email itself to the reason and the ask.
Signal it at the top and state it at the bottom. A single sentence early on telling them what you will ask lets a busy person decide how to read the rest, and the specific action belongs at the end where it is easy to find on a reply. Burying the ask in the middle is how it gets missed.
Staying in the same thread helps, because it carries the context your reader has forgotten. Reply to your own message rather than starting fresh, and lead with the new reason for writing rather than referencing the earlier email. The thread does the remembering so your contact does not have to.
Having nothing new is a signal to find something rather than to send anything. Answer a question they raised, summarize something for forwarding, or send a piece of information their market makes relevant. If nothing exists after real thought, wait another two weeks. A message with no content is worse than no message.