How are you communicating with your writing clients? Are you using the best method? It’s no secret that I’m an email girl. I like email because it makes it easy to communicate with people in different time zones at a time that suits me. But what do you do when email lets you down? Let me tell you a true story about something that happened to me a few weeks ago.
A client contacted me via LinkedIn. It was someone I’d met while working for someone else and he wanted to commission a couple of articles. Once we’d agreed terms and deadlines, we switched communication to email. The job was for a short and long article on a technical subject for a couple of trade publications. I completed the short one first, as agreed and sent it off to await feedback. I heard nothing. This was one case where no news was not good news, because I needed feedback before proceeding to the longer article.
Luckily, I was able to contact him via LinkedIn, which meant that I found out that for some reason he hadn’t received the email. It might have been because of a Gmail glitch or over-zealous spam filters at his end. I don’t know. What I do know is that it was useful to have another means of getting in touch, otherwise he might have thought that I’d disappeared, taking his deposit and giving nothing in return. That’s simply not good for business.
I also have – somewhere – a phone number for that client, so in a worst case scenario I could have called to speak to him or leave a message.
My point? It pays to have more than one way to get in touch with your clients.
But here’s another question. If you need to get in touch with a client urgently, is email always the best way? Recently I needed to send someone a message before they caught a plane. Since I knew the person didn’t have a Blackberry, I opted to send a text message (SMS) rather than email. The person got the message and was able to handle the job before catching the flight. That might not have happened if I had relied on email.
The lesson here is that you need to use the most appropriate method to communicate with your client – and that also applies when building a new client relationship. For example, even though I’m not a phone person, sometimes that’s the best way to communicate with a new client – as happened yesterday. Although I knew my client could brief me by email, I sensed that she would be more comfortable making the initial contact by phone – so I called her. She’s happy, I’m happy and we’ll be able to use email in future.
Have you got any communication tips or lessons to share? I’d love to hear them.
The post Client Communication – Are You Using The Best Method? appeared first on Get Paid to Write Online.
