Using AI to write and send personalised follow-up emails…

You get home from a trade show, dump a stack of business cards on your desk, and tell yourself you'll write personalised emails tomorrow. Then tomorrow becomes next week. Then you see those cards three months later under a charging cable.

This post walks you through a simple AI-assisted workflow for how to follow up after a trade show with AI — turning your event notes into personalised follow-up emails fast enough to actually send them while people still remember meeting you.

The good news: if you can jot a few notes on your phone and paste text into a box, you already have everything you need to make this work.

What you need before you start

ChatGPT{:target="_blank"} — an AI tool made by OpenAI that writes text based on instructions you give it. The free version works fine for this. The paid plan (ChatGPT Plus, around $20/month) is faster and lets you save a custom setup you can reuse after every event.

Claude{:target="_blank"} — an alternative AI writing tool made by Anthropic. Same idea as ChatGPT, slightly different tone. Also free to start. Use whichever feels more natural — both do this job well.

A spreadsheet — Google Sheets or Excel. You probably already have one.

Your contact notes — even rough ones. A name, a company, one sentence about what you talked about. That's the raw material.

Time required: About 60–90 minutes of active time for 30–40 contacts, most of which is reviewing and sending, not writing.

Skill level: If you can send an email and type into a search bar, you can do this.

Capture notes that actually make AI follow-ups feel personal

This part happens at the event, and it's the most important step in the whole process. The quality of your AI-generated emails depends entirely on what you feed it. Garbage in, generic email out.

You don't need a fancy system. You need four things for each contact, jotted on your phone immediately after each conversation:

Their name and company. Obvious, but write it down while you're still holding their card.
One specific thing you talked about. "Mentioned she's trying to reduce no-shows at her salon" or "frustrated with his current supplier's lead times" — that kind of detail.
A problem or goal they mentioned. What are they trying to fix or achieve?
The agreed next step, if any. Did you offer to send something? Did they ask you to follow up in a month?

The whole note can be three lines in your phone's notes app. That's it. The AI does the heavy lifting — you just need to give it something real to work with.

That evening, open a Google Sheet and drop these into columns: Name, Company, Topic Discussed, Problem/Goal, Next Step. One row per contact. This setup takes maybe 20 minutes after a full day at a show, and it's what makes the next morning's email session genuinely fast.

How to follow up after a trade show with AI: step-by-step

Once you've got your spreadsheet, here's how to turn it into actual emails.

Open ChatGPT or Claude in your browser and start a new conversation.
Paste this setup prompt first. This tells the AI who you are so you don't have to repeat yourself for every contact.

You're helping me write personalised follow-up emails after a trade show. I'm [your name] from [your business name]. We [one sentence describing what you do]. My tone is [friendly and professional / warm and casual / etc.]. Keep emails short — 3–4 short paragraphs max. Start with a reference to what we discussed, then briefly mention how I might help, then suggest a clear next step. Subject lines should reference either the event name or the specific topic we discussed.

Adjust the bracketed parts to match your business. You only set this up once per session — or once ever, if you use Claude's Projects feature or ChatGPT's custom GPT feature to save it.

Now paste the first contact's details from your spreadsheet. You're giving the AI the raw notes and asking it to write the email.

Contact: Sarah Chen, owner of Bloom Salon, Portland. We talked about how she's losing clients because of last-minute cancellations and she mentioned she'd never tried automated appointment reminders. I offer a done-for-you setup service for small business software tools. We agreed I'd send her some info about options. Event: Pacific Northwest Small Business Expo.

Review what comes back. It should take about 20–30 seconds to generate. Read it like you'd read something before forwarding it to a client — does it sound like you? Does the specific detail land naturally?
Copy the email into a draft in Gmail or Outlook. Don't send yet — we'll get to the review checklist in a moment.
Repeat for each contact. Just paste the next row of notes. You don't need to re-explain your business context because the AI remembers it within the same conversation.

Most people find they can move through 40 contacts in about 40 minutes at this pace. That's one email every minute, and each one is actually personalised.

Writing personalised AI follow-up emails after networking at scale: 40+ contacts in under an hour

If you want to speed this up even further — or if you exhibit at multiple events a year — there's a slightly more automated version worth knowing about.

Tools like Zapier{:target="_blank"} connect your Google Sheet directly to an AI model, so you can feed in a full spreadsheet and get a generated email back in each row, without copying and pasting one contact at a time. You set up the prompt once, run it across the whole sheet, and review the outputs. It takes a bit of setup the first time, but after that it's genuinely fast.

Make{:target="_blank"} (formerly Integromat) does the same thing with more flexibility if you want more control over the flow.

If you're already using a CRM — a customer relationship management tool, basically a database for your contacts and deals — some have AI writing built right in. HubSpot{:target="_blank"} has a feature called Breeze AI that can draft follow-up emails from your contact notes. Pipedrive{:target="_blank"} has a built-in AI email assistant too. If you're already in one of those tools, it's worth checking whether you even need a separate AI subscription.

For most small business owners, though, the copy-paste-from-spreadsheet method above is genuinely fast enough and requires zero extra setup. Start there.

The best tools for AI follow-up emails after a trade show (from free to full automation)

Here's a quick lay of the land so you can pick what fits your situation:

Free and fastest to start: ChatGPT free tier or Claude free tier. Manual copy-paste per contact. Good for under 50 contacts.

Free with built-in CRM: Zoho CRM{:target="_blank"} includes Zia AI for email drafting — check which plan tier includes it, as AI features vary. Useful if you're already tracking contacts somewhere.

Moderate investment, more automation: Zapier or Make connecting Google Sheets to ChatGPT API. Requires a small paid API subscription (usage-based, often a few dollars for a batch of 50 emails). Better if you do multiple events a year.

Full outreach automation: Tools like Apollo.io{:target="_blank"} or Instantly.ai{:target="_blank"} integrate AI writing into full email sequences. These are more powerful and more expensive — better suited to businesses doing high-volume outreach regularly, not just post-event follow-up.

For most people reading this, start with the free ChatGPT or Claude approach. You can always add automation later once you've done it manually a couple of times and know what you actually need.

What to review before you hit send

AI makes this fast. It doesn't make it perfect. Read every email before it goes out — it takes 20 seconds per email and it matters.

Symptom: The email sounds stiff and overly formal. This happens when the input notes were vague. Fix it by going back to your notes and adding one more specific detail, then regenerating. Or just edit the tone manually — it usually only needs a sentence or two changed.

Symptom: The AI made up a detail that isn't quite right. This is called hallucination — the AI fills gaps with plausible-sounding but wrong information. It's not common with short factual notes, but it happens. The fix is to read carefully and catch anything that doesn't match your actual conversation. Delete or correct it.

Symptom: Every email starts the same way. The AI sometimes falls into a pattern ("It was great meeting you at...") across multiple emails. Vary the openings manually or ask the AI to start differently ("Open this one with a question instead of a greeting").

These are normal speed bumps, not signs something is broken. A quick review pass catches almost all of them.

One real caution worth mentioning: don't paste sensitive personal information — anything medical, financial, or shared in confidence — into the free versions of these tools. For most trade show follow-ups, this isn't an issue. But if you work in a sensitive industry, look into enterprise plans or API access with a data processing agreement.

What to do next

Send the emails — that's the whole point, and the 24–48 hour window after an event is when people are most likely to respond. Don't let perfect be the enemy of sent.

After you've done this once, the second time takes half as long because you know the system. Consider saving your setup prompt in a notes app so you can paste it fresh after every event.

If you want to build this into a proper follow-up sequence — not just one email, but a gentle series over a few weeks — check out our guide on setting up simple email workflows with AI tools.

FAQ

Does the AI actually sound like me, or is it obvious it was written by a bot?

With a decent setup prompt that describes your tone, and real notes to work from, the output usually sounds natural. It won't be a perfect match for your voice on the first try — edit the bits that don't sound right. After a few rounds, you'll get a feel for how to prompt it to match you better.

What if I only have a name and company — no notes from the conversation?

That's a tough spot. Generic AI emails aren't much better than generic manual emails. Your best bet is to look up the person on LinkedIn quickly and note one relevant detail about their business before prompting. Even something like "they're a two-location plumbing company" gives the AI something to work with.

Is it weird to use AI to write these? Will people know?

Good question — most people wonder this. The honest answer is: no one can tell, and it doesn't really matter. What matters is that the email references your real conversation and offers something genuinely useful. That's what makes it feel personal. The tool that wrote the draft is irrelevant.

How do I handle follow-up emails in bulk without them going to spam?

Send from your normal Gmail or Outlook account, not a mass email platform, for post-event follow-up. You've already met these people — it's warm outreach, not cold email marketing. Personalised subject lines (referencing the event or your conversation topic) help with open rates too. The AI can generate those for you at the same time as the email body.

What's the best subject line format for post-event emails?

Something that references either the event name or your specific conversation topic works best. "Great talking about your rebooking problem at [Event Name]" will outperform "Following up from last week" almost every time. Ask the AI to write three subject line options for each email and pick the one that feels most natural.

Using AI to write and send personalised follow-up emails after a trade show or networking event without spending a week on it