Website Design Blog. Evoart

The relationships that you forge with your clients are fundamental to your business. Its one thing getting the clients, but its another thing keeping them, and maintaining an excellent working relationship with them. In this little article Im going to share with you five ways in which you can really help to build strong bridges with your client base, and keep them coming back to their favourite designer — you!

1. Help clients understand design decisions.

This is critical in making the presentation of your fabulous designs easy for your clients to understand. When you finish a concept and show it to your client, don’t just send them an email saying ‘heres a link to view the concept’, go a step further and take the time to provide a rationale. Your rationale will save you so much time in the long run as it will elimate most of the questions and uncertainties that the client might have about your design.

So whats a Rationale?

A rationale is a simple document that explains the reasoning behind your design, and the decisions you made when creating it. So for example if you placed a ‘Call to Action’ at the top of your page, explain your reasons for doing so. You might go on to say that as the CTA is the most important part of the site, you placed it in the main column at the top so it would be clearly visible to the sites visitors, and that research shows placing things in the sidebar (for example adverts) leads to much less click throughs.

2. Regular Contact

Even if you haven’t heard from a client you finished a job for a few months back, make an effort to contact them. Give them a ring, ask them if nows a convinient time to talk, and ask them how their companies doing, and how the site your did for them is working out. Chances are it could lead to another job, or a small job — but work none the less! Even if you don’t turn them into a repeat client, its courteous to keep in touch. People appreciate good manners and this will definitely increase your chances of being refered business by this client.

3. Honesty

Everyone appreciates honesty, even if not at first. If you’ve got a client or potential client asking something of you that you reckon is going to be a push for you to do, for what ever reason, be honest. Explain to them your thoughts. From my experience sometimes clients will ask you to do something totally ridiculous to their site. One of the most popular seems to be — ‘Can you make that image spin around, and then flash repeatedly so we make sure our visitors see and click it?’. Yes, that old chestnut! In this case all you can do is be honest, give them your oppinion and back it up with some valid reasoning. If they still want to go ahead, then fine, you were honest with them.

Honesty also comes into play when discussing money and how much your likely to quote. You don’t want to be having a chat with your client on the phone and give them a rough idea of price and then in the quote raise that by a couple of thousand pounds/dollars.

4. Make sacrifices

Got a deadline fast approaching? Then put in that little bit of overtime to get the project finished for your client. Or, if an exisiting client has a job that you could probably squeeze in, but would rather not, bite the bullet and accept it. Politely make your client aware that your slotting them in and they’ll really appreciate you for it. Obviously going back to number 3, honesty, don’t squeeze someone in if you think you can’t do the job well. Its common sense really.

5. Keep your ears open! Refer business.

This is pretty tough to do, but if you are a good listener and have a wide client base and good contacts you might well be able to send a referal one of your clients ways. For example, if you did work for a florist and you just so happen to be out months later and hear someone complaining that they can’t get quality flowers delivered for love nor money, step in and recommend your client. To do this you’ve got to be confident that who your recommending can do the job well, but it will no doubt please your client to have gained a job from their association with you.

You might be thinking that this doesn’t benefit your business, and initially it doesn’t. But the fact that you passed a referal means that (fingers crossed) your client will want to recommend you to one of their friends and return the favour. Basically, what goes around comes around.