3 Email Templates Your SMM Biz Needs for Effective Client Communication
It’s time to put the days of burnout and clients overstepping your boundaries behind you. Social media might be on 24/7, but that doesn’t mean social media managers should have to be.
If you’ve been keeping up with us on IG lately or have checked out our Soft SMM course, you’d know we’ve made it pretty clear — we have allll the tips and tricks up our sleeve when it comes to setting boundaries. It isn’t always easy, but remember: you have your policies in place for a reason, and most often, it's to ensure the success of your partnerships! Through our 5+ years of experience as an agency, we’ve learned that clear communication is key, and it only gets easier over time, especially when you have trusty templates by your side to pull from.
Read on for a sneak peek at a few of the valuable email templates you can find in our SMM Client Success Bundle to ensure effective client communication!
CLIENT COMMUNICATION TEMPLATE #1: OFFICE HOURS
Say goodbye to feeling obligated to reply to that client’s text while you’re at Saturday night dinner. The #1 boundary you’ll want to enforce from the start is your hours of operation.
When the time comes that your client contacts you outside of your office hours, you’ll want to send a gentle reminder of when you are available to them. Once you’re back in the office, send over a reply clarifying the days and times you are available, and that any messages sent outside of those hours will be responded to the following business day. We also recommend sending ongoing, subtle reminders by including your office hours somewhere in your email signature.
Bonus tip: enable automatic messages to be sent when clients contact you outside of office hours through apps like Open Phone. Another tip you can learn more about in our Open Phone blog is keeping your work and personal phone numbers separate to prevent ever seeing the message in your off-hours in the first place.
CLIENT COMMUNICATION TEMPLATE #2: CONTENT REQUEST DUE DATES
Another thing we’re leaving behind? The last-minute post requests — for free, that is.
Enforcing content request deadlines prevents you from making last-minute changes to content calendars and throwing off the beautiful and strategic grid cadence you previously had planned.
A client just sent a request after the deadline stated in your contract?! You don’t want to shoot down their creative suggestion and possibly damage this working relationship. Here’s how you’ll send a gentle reminder:
Show your appreciation for the idea
Remind the client of the contract stating your content request deadlines
Explain why this policy is in place
Offer to fulfill their request within your usual turnaround time, or if your team has the bandwidth, offer to fulfill their request by billing hourly
CLIENT COMMUNICATION TEMPLATE #3: REVISION LIMITS
Just when you think you have it all figured out… your client replies with edits to the content they already reviewed. 🙄That's why we only allow clients to submit 1 round of revisions within our allotted 48 hour approval window. We’ve ensured our service agreement and client communication clearly states this policy, encouraging our clients to provide thoughtful and intentional feedback that saves all of us time in the long run!
If your client requests further edits after the revision limit has been reached, show your appreciation for the time they took to review the content, but remind them that they are given one round of edits and explain how this ensures the best use of both parties’ time. Add that changes can be made if billed hourly, and ask how they’d prefer to proceed.
We hope you found this blog post helpful in establishing clear and effective email templates for client communication. If you want a complete and exclusive guide to client communication — with the exact word-for-word email templates we use for the above scenarios and MORE — check out our SMM Client Success Bundle! For more digital marketing tips, be sure to follow us on Instagram and subscribe to our digital marketing newsletter. Chat soon!
xx,
The Homies