Same day if you can, within 24 hours if you cannot, and before the end of the week at the outside. The reason is memory rather than etiquette: someone who had sixty conversations on a show floor can still place you on Tuesday and cannot by Friday. At that point speed is doing more work than wording.
Why the window is this short
Nothing about a conference is designed to help the person remember you. Badges look alike, booths blur, and everyone opens with a version of the same sentence. The detail that makes you findable in their head — the problem they mentioned, the thing you both laughed about — is the first thing to go.
Follow up while that detail is still live and you are writing to a person who remembers a conversation. Follow up next week and you are writing to a stranger who recognises a company name, which is a different and much harder email.
What "same day" means at a show
Not the evening. Most exhibitors intend to write the emails at the hotel and then do not, because by six o'clock they have stopped being able to tell the conversations apart.
We are not going to quote you a statistic
There are numbers circulating about reply rates by hour, and most of them trace back to nobody in particular. We have not published our own yet, so we are not going to give you a figure we cannot stand behind.
What we can say is what the mechanism is, and the mechanism is memory. When we have enough of our own sending data to say something defensible about timing, it will appear on this page with the method attached.
Write it at the booth instead. Describe the conversation out loud and the email is drafted before you reach the next handshake.
Try the demoLast reviewed 28 September 2026 by the MeetDrop team.