Hello everyone! Today we talk about advanced management of follow-ups with clients and useful tips to handle the process of catching up with them in a consistent and organized manner. How? Using Google Sheets!
The most important thing is keeping track of the clients you contact. You don't want to risk losing precious information on the long way toward your freelance success in a long-term career.
This is also important to avoid recontacting clients who clearly expressed their lack of interest in our service, offer, proposal - whatever you want to call it.
So, to get to the point, what is important is to start keeping a record of stuff like, how many follow-ups you made, and the date of your first contact with a client, if they do not want further emails/contacts from you (this can be done with a checkbox), and possibly the method of contact. Even if we didn't do it until now, what's important is to start.
For the method of contact, I usually use a dropdown in Google Sheets with simple labels such as 'ProZ Mail', 'ProZ Jobs', 'Website', 'LinkedIn', and 'Email from client' - this last one in case it's the client to reach me instead of the opposite, and in all cases until now this always happened via a direct message from the client popping in my Gmail inbox.
For follow-ups, I use another simple yet effective strategy: counting the number of follow-ups with a client, inclusive of the first contact. So it would start with 1 when adding a client, then increase by +1 for each new follow-up.
You can also use conditional formatting if you know the basic use of formulas, for example, to color the whole row in red when the client does not want to be recontacted (i.e., the do not recontact checkbox is ticked). You could also add additional rules like blue for clients who contacted you instead of the opposite. And you might also want to color based on the number of follow-ups (a bit exaggerated, but might result in a nice visual to have a clear understanding of who is best to follow up first). With this I mean green for 0-1 follow-ups, yellow for let's say 2-4, and orange for 5+.
I would not go over 5 follow-ups. Also, starting with the follow-up 2-4, depending on the circumstances, I would add in the email a brief text such as 'If you're not interested in receiving further emails regarding the services I offer kindly let me know and I will avoid further recontacts.'
I do this to avoid getting blocked or annoying the client too much, while still trying to be 'just enough pushy with my marketing'. Another important thing to consider is that I don't add this in the first 1-2 follow-ups as I feel it might weaken the statement I make with my offer (but this is subjective). Surely you're not going to put that in the very first message with the client.
That's all for now. Hopefully, these were useful tips for you!