The need to be transparent with your clients

What are your transparency processes? At Embarque, we’ve been progressively creating transparency processes to foster trust between us and our clients. At the same time, I have some key learnings on the topic that challenge conventional wisdom on client relationship forming.

Share yours below!

Overcommunication is still a problem

Overcommunication is a better problem than a lack of communication, but it’s still an issue. Clients don’t want to know everything about the process, however hands-on or hands-off they want to be with the project. They want to know that the project is on-going and to be alerted when certain delays do arise in producing content on time.

It’s OK to reject prospects

Yesterday, I found this tweet from @DavisBaer (founder of OneUp) super amusing:

A customer was disgruntled about a product feature he didn’t have. Super relatable. So far with Embarque, I’ve had one unfortunate client interaction, but it’s burned me out for a couple of days.

I’ve come to realize that many people want to purchase our services, purely because they think that SEO should be in their marketing stack and not whether it’s actually good for them in their particular stage of growth.

Or even worse, they do not know how SEO completely works and do not have realistic expectations about how long it actually takes for content to rank, especially when they’re just starting out.

Since then, we’ve been forthright about whether a prospect should start SEO as a growth channel or not and pursue a relationship with us. Most of the time, we discourage founders who either (1) do not have audience market fit, (2) don’t have their customer personas defined, (3) have biases against SEO, or (4) have low DR and no plans to do backlinking.

I understand that this is a privilege that I can have from having a defined pipeline. Nevertheless, I also encourage everyone to define who their target customers are and really refocus their efforts towards targeting them.

Close your start- and end-points of interaction

Early on, I was going about our communication process the wrong way by sending my clients extremely thorough rundown emails of our processes. They did not and will not read that. They also didn't appreciate being bombarded with minute changes regarding keyword research and topic prioritization.

But they do appreciate quick overviews. In our case, this means:

1. Sending an introductory email that the order’s been received

2. Deadline setting for key deliverables (e.g. SEO keyword research, articles landing pages, etc.)

3. Sending a monthly recap at the end of each month.

The monthly recap was particularly useful, because most of our clients are on the highest package, at 8000 words. This brings assurance that all the deliverables were produced on time.

Being human helps

Profit is the reward for creating satisfied customers. And customer satisfaction also depends on a great experience. I’ve realized that just going on that extra mile by being congenial can make a night-and-day difference in rapports with our customers.

A one-time purchase is a transaction. A repeat customer is a long-term relationship.