Email is very much a thing in client work.
If you work at an agency or are a contractor or the like, you likely don’t have quite the same in-house setup as employees of the company you’re doing work for. Nor does either party want that in most cases.
So, they use the great time-honored communication tool of email. Email has the virtue of not needing any special specific tools or permissions to use. You type in someone’s email address in the to: area and it will find it’s way to them with your message. No system administration needed, for the most part.
I was thinking about this reading Dan Mall’s The Crystal Email. Crystal being executive producer Crystal Vitelli that Dan worked with at Superfriendly, the agency. Dan, sorry, but I have to snipe half your post:
[The CMO] kicked off the project by sending us a 305-word email with some polite instructions about what she would like us to do next. Talk to this person. Set up this meeting. Look into these assets.
There was nothing wrong with this email. On one hand, I appreciated the pointers for our team and some clear next steps on a gigantic project that might have otherwise been ambiguous.
But my Spidey-sense was tingling. An email like this from a client could indicate that they see us as just another party to have to manage. That’s not the kind of project we liked to run at SuperFriendly. We wanted our clients to feel like we were taking care of them, not the other way around. They were paying us to make their work easier, not give them another thing to do.
Luckily, before I could even figure out what I wanted to do about this, our executive producer Crystal Vitelli swung into action. She replied to our client’s 305-word email with a 655-word response of her own.
IT 👏🏽 WAS 👏🏽 MASTERFUL.
In her email, Crystal pleasantly acknowledged that tasks our client sent and excitingly informed her of how we had already completed them. Crystal then added 4 more things we had on our radar that our client wasn’t aware of, our status on each, and when she could expect them to be completed.
What was our client’s reply? A 10-word email that said:
Crystal, what a great email, thank you. Already love ya. ☺
From that point on, our status changed in our client’s mind. We moved from being “just another vendor to manage” to a preferred partner and advisor, always on the inside track.
This might have worked as a Slack update or the like, but somehow I feel like it would lack the punch of an email.
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