My clients never used to provide feedback on time. Ever. It would usually result in their project going weeks over its deadline, and I'd be pulling my hair out with stress.
Not anymore.
I use a free project management tool called Asana to manage my projects instead of emailing my clients back and forth. Inside Asana, you can have conversations, share files, feedback, calendars and more with your clients! The best thing about it? Everything is organized on one page.
Asana also allows you to set a 'due date' for every task you create. This means you can create a task, call it 'Feedback Is Due', assign it to your client and set a due date. Then, a day before their feedback is due, Asana sends them a reminder. Awesome, right?!
4. Automatically send follow up emails to past clients
Some freelancers never speak to their clients again after they're done working with them. They just... hand the files over and stop communicating.
Does this sound like you?
If so, I hate to break it to you but you're leaving thousands of dollars on the table.
If these clients are happy with the work you did, they will most likely want to work with you again! But if you don't keep in touch, they'll probably forget about you.
If you use an app like Dubsado* to manage your business, it's really easy to keep in touch with past clients automatically. Simply use Dubsado's 'Workflow' feature to automatically send follow up emails to your clients after their project is complete. (If you're interested in learning exactly how to do this, I teach it in my course, Dubsado In A Day!)
In my course, we add these emails to the sequence:
1. The 3 week follow up. In this email, you check in and see if they are happy with the work you provided, need any more work or have any questions.
2. The 6 month follow up. Check in and keep it more general- talk about how well they are doing and mention great things you've seen them do over the last six months. Then remind them you're there if they need to hire you again!
3. The 1 year follow up. You keep this email really short and simple. Just check in, wish them a happy year and ask if they'd like to work together again.
5. Automatically add clients to your mailing list
Stay in touch with your clients by automatically adding them to your mailing list so they can hear about future deals or new services you launch.
Just remember to get the client's permission first. (You can do this by adding a checkbox to your contact form, asking them to agree to being added to your mailing list!)
To automatically add a client to your mailing list, you'll need to sign up for a free Zapier account. Zapier allows you to connect apps and trigger automations.
You can create this zap or something similar:
1. Trigger: A client completes their payment via the invoice you send them.
2. Action: Zapier adds the client to your mailing list!
Here's an example of how you'd set this zap up in Zapier using two common tools: Freshbooks* for invoicing and Convertkit* for your mailing list.