5 Tips to Keeping Old Client Relationships Healthy

Its amazing to see where you currently are in your life when you look back to where you started. Those clients that helped you get your first paycheck, or those that gave you more work as time went along. The problem with most freelancers are that they finish a job and then the client never hears from them again, unless the client hasn’t paid of course. This article basically states 5 tips that you can use to keep old clients interested and potentially provide you with more work as time goes along.

1. Setup a Client Email List

I’m sure most people do this anyway. Its easy to email your clients when you have your email addresses sorted out, it isn’t easy if you have to look for each clients email address separately. Setting up a email list might take some time at first, but once its in place adding new clients email addresses to the list is a breeze. This gives you the opportunity to email your old clients quickly and easily and removes the pain of searching for email addresses in between thousands of others.

2. Don’t be demanding

The thing most clients want to hear is praise. They want to know how nice it was to work with them, what great company they are running even though your experience at the time didn’t feel so great. Approaching a old client for new work should be a done in a subtle way, no outright demands should be made. This way if the client had a pleasant experience working with you, he or she wouldn’t hesitate to work with you again.

3. Send out seasonal greeting cards

Most clients appreciate it when you think of them. If Christmas is approaching or even St. Patrick’s Day, your client will be gleaming to find a little seasonal greetings card from you wishing them a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. It could either be in the form of a nice email newsletter, or personalized postcards that you created and mailed to them. This also just shows that you appreciate them and it helps keeping you in contact with them.

4. Send out a Promotion

Don’t bomb your clients inbox with promotions, if they wanted to subscribe to your newsletter that would have. I’m referring to a once every 6 months email. Send them a email offering them a few hours service for free or a huge discount on a service that you provide. This will show them that you aren’t just someone chasing there money.

5. How do you keep relationships healthy?

Now we need to find out from you, how you keep your client relationships healthy. Do you offer them promotions or discounts? If they are returning customers, do they get some services free?

See you in the comments.