When you’re a new service business, there’s the temptation to take on every client that pays. Even if you may not want to work with a client, you might say yes just to get revenue flowing. (We’ve all been there!)

But, if you’re an established business, there’s the fear of shifting who you serve. Maybe you’re bringing in a stable income with clients who were really exciting to work with back in the day… but now the work doesn’t quite light you up like it used to. Or, maybe your existing client base doesn’t align with your vision for the future.

Whatever the reason, that awkward twinge in your gut is your body telling you to think about client fit. Paying attention to client fit benefits your business, and starting now will bring you more peace and profit in the year to come.

Client fit builds an audience that’s absolutely right for you.

It feels scary to say no to bad-fit clients when you’re new. It’s even scarier to start building a new audience when you’re comfortable with the one you have. 

But, when you think about where your business could be a year or two from now, do you want your inbox to be full of inquiries from this type of client? If you don’t want that, but you keep saying yes to them anyway, you could end up growing an audience you never wanted in the first place.

You’ll save time by ensuring a clear and respectful relationship.

Even when a client needs what you have to offer, the client fit could fall short in other ways:

• Do they work in an industry that doesn’t fit you, or that you even find to be… boring?
• Does the client expect you to be available 24/7, or outside of business hours? 
• Are they asking for fast turnarounds or last-minute changes that you aren’t able to easily accommodate?
• Do they micromanage you when you’d rather be given creative freedom?
• Do they want to be totally hands-off when you prefer to build a more collaborative relationship?

When a client’s needs don’t align with your work style, you take on a bigger headache than you would for a client who fits you well… and you won’t even get paid more for your trouble! Sounds like a bum deal, doesn’t it?

Paying attention to client fit means that you’ll have a client who understands what you need from them and respects your boundaries. You get paid and get to work with someone delightful!

Client fit builds the potential for more ideal clients to come through with less effort from you.

If you’re building a referral-based business, it’s even more important to pay attention to client fit!  When your existing clients refer others to you, they’re most likely to refer you someone who’s just like them.

Think about it: if you just wrapped up working with the Client From Hell, would you want them to send you even more clients like them? Whether working with them was boring, frustrating, or just more than you bargained for, you know you don’t want to do it again.

On the flip side of that, if you just finished your work with an ideal client who was absolutely lovely to work with… do you want them to tell all of their like-minded friends and colleagues about you?

I think I can guess which option sounds better to you.

It doesn’t have to be hard to assess client fit, either.

Not sure whether you have the bandwidth to suss out whether a client fit is pitch-perfect? Even a brief conversation with the client can give you enough information to feel sure in your choice, or enough red flags that you know to pass them onto someone else. Spending that 15 minutes of time up-front could save you hours upon hours of time and frustration!

How can you shift your marketing or your consultation process to start making sure those dream clients come thru?

Every new platform promises that this is the only way you’ll connect with potential customers. This is the only way you’ll build an audience. This is the only way you’ll grow your business.

But is it really? 

Short answer—absolutely not.

While social media is a great way to gain brand awareness and connect with your ideal audience, it’s not always the most effective option for your marketing.

If social media just isn’t working how you hoped it would, Email marketing could be the answer. 

There are around 330 billion emails sent and received every day. 

Over half of the world’s population uses email.

According to marketing studies, 79% of marketers rank email as one of their top three marketing tools. Email is cost-effective no matter how big or small your business is. You can reach hundreds of people with one email, making the return on investment one of the highest across marketing strategies—around $36 for every $1 spent. 

How can email marketing help small businesses?

Lead Generation With an Opt-In

Gaining new leads is a never-ending process for a small business. 

Sure, you can throw all of your marketing efforts at the wall and see what sticks. Or you can target your efforts and only bring in leads that are already interested in your services.

Offering a lead magnet– a relevant freebie that your ideal audience wants or needs– in exchange for their email address pulls in potential customers that are already familiar with the problem you’re solving. 

It’s quality over quantity. Why waste your time pulling in as many people as possible when only a small percentage of them could become clients? It’s better to target your lead generation to those that are in your ideal audience to begin with.

Okay, so you have all of these email addresses. Now what?

Building a Strong Audience Through Email

Thanks to your opt-in, you have a list of people who you know are already interested in your services. 

Now is the time to build relationships with those people. 

Reaching out through email to welcome them into your community is the first step. A short email sequence that welcomes them in, tells them about you, and lets them know what to expect builds trust and credibility. 

Email is the perfect medium for building a direct rapport with your prospects: 

• It’s more personal than social media, and you won’t get buried by a sea of posts or back-burnered by “The Algorithm.” 
• It’s something that almost everyone uses. 
• It’s mobile-friendly.
• The metrics are easy to track, and content is easy to adjust.
• You aren’t limited to a certain number of characters, and you don’t have to find an image to go with every piece of content you write.
• You can reach large numbers of people.

Increasing Brand Awareness with Email Marketing

Once you have a strong relationship with your email list, it’s time to start encouraging people to look at how your services can help them. 

Use an email sequence to let your audience know about your services in a more personal, detailed way. Let them know about new products, sales, features, and success stories. You’re raising brand awareness and promoting your services without paid ads. You’re also driving more traffic to your website as your audience looks for more information. 

An email marketing campaign builds excitement and interest in your services by doling out information a little at a time. You always want to leave them wanting more!

Email Marketing For Customer Engagement

Email marketing is a great way to engage with your audience directly. 

Invite them to reply to your emails with feedback, questions, or just to say hi! Letting them know you’re a real person behind the words establishes credibility and trust. 

You’re also able to gather information about your audience and give them more relevant information. By segmenting your email list, you can direct content specifically for certain followers rather than giving your entire list information relevant to only a few of them.

Your followers will appreciate your content as less of a sales pitch and more of a conversation. 

Your sequence should lead them through a journey. You understand their problem, you know how they feel, and you have the solution for them.

Email marketing isn’t going anywhere. Just the opposite, in fact. It’s more reliable than social media–and less work, too.

If you’re not using email in your marketing plan, now is the time to start. If you’re not sure how, reach out and let us help. Email marketing is a service we’lll be offering in the near future so get on our radar now and let us know you’re interested!

I’m one of those who felt fired up to make a difference, and together, Team Upswept took the Anti-Racist Small Business Pledge last June. Now that we’re in a new year, it feels like a good time to take a look at how our own efforts towards anti-racism are going so far.

Supporting Black People, Supporting Our Community

We’d already been providing support to our small business friends during COVID with our online learning series, so one of our first moves was to harness that audience by collecting and matching community donations for local, Black-led nonprofits. Since June of 2020, we’ve been able to support a different organization each month, and I’ve loved having the chance to shine a light on some of the amazing work that’s being done in our community.

I also more recently had the pleasure of offering pay-what-you-will scholarships for our new Purpose-Powered Website program to Black and Indigenous small businesses and nonprofits. It feels like a small step, but making education and resources accessible, especially for marginalized populations, is something I feel strongly about. It’s one step of hopefully several to follow.

I also did some digging on the companies we support with our dollars each month for services like website hosting, social media analytics, etc. I found that the companies we’ve come to trust with online support have made clear statements and efforts in the realm of equity and inclusion.

Many of them have a long way to go when it comes to bringing BIPOC folks into their ranks, particularly in leadership roles. That wasn’t exactly surprising, given how the tech industry has historically been, shall we say, less-than-welcoming towards folks who aren’t white and male. However, there was one bright spot: I was delighted to learn that our scheduling app of choice, Calendly, is Black-owned!

Learning, Refining, and Raising Our Voices

Even though we’re a small company, I want to make sure that embracing anti-racism as a business feels like a group effort for our team. Even though Upswept is a woman- and minority-owned business (fun fact: one of my parents is a Taiwanese immigrant), we all recognized that we are a predominantly white crew, and we almost certainly have quite a bit left to learn.

I’m lucky to have a very mindful social media manager, and being able to trust her judgment was a gift during tough times. Anna did an incredible job of being both aware of and sensitive to the maelstrom of current events, and adapting our content to better suit the moment.

Still, we as a team know how massively important content is in creating actually-good, impactful website design and social media, so I chose Alison Tedford’s “Stay Woke Not Broke” summer program as a starting point for our education. The program focused on creating content that better speaks to our values, and it guided us through creating our first honest-to-god DEI Statement. 

Upswept has never been particularly shy about our politics, but we collectively felt that fully stepping into our values in a public way was the right call. Not only did we strive to do more of that ourselves, we also encouraged other small businesses to do the same. Every small business who stands up for their values creates more space for others to follow!

There’s Always Room to Grow

There were so, so many things I’d hoped to do and give, but I have to admit that anti-racism efforts haven’t always been top-of-mind. After all, I not only had to keep running a small business, I had to do so at a time when many small businesses who might have become our clients were hit hard by a global pandemic. 

I would have loved to add some Black folks to our team, but hiring just wasn’t in the cards in 2020. I definitely wanted to do more learning, both on my own and with my team, but there were a lot of evenings when chowing on cookies and watching the DuckTales reboot was all my brain could hold. The reality is, 2020 gave everyone a LOT of emotional weight to carry, and it’s hard to do the work each day when you can barely muster the energy to get out of bed. 

That’s part of why this needs to be an ongoing effort: change needs to be sustainable if it’s going to be lasting. Burning ourselves out doesn’t help the movement—we need to be doing the work and giving ourselves breaks when we need them. If enough of us are working at making an anti-racist world a reality, we’ll still be collectively moving forward even when some of us need a break.

It’s spring in Portland! And what says spring more than flowers and hayfever? Spring cleaning. Now is the time to dust off your website, or start that business you have been dreaming of. And when you do so, these Pro Tips will make make sure you have the best experience you can possibly have.

While this isn’t the first time we’ve touched upon how you can make the most of the services you pay for, for the rest of spring we’ll be focusing on bringing you more pro tips and real-life case studies from those who made it work! We’ll tell you exactly how to plan out your first steps towards a successful website (especially if you’re new to the game), what to expect from a branding or website redesign, secret tips on having an (even better) headshot experience, and more!

Getting Ready to Pro-Level It

Many of our clients’ businesses started small – a hobby, a desire to break out of corporate culture, to become a successful model, real estate agent or actress, or to work independently. If your business is only just starting out, you may be hesitant to make an investment in getting a professional to design your logo, create your website, or photograph your product.

Many of us know a friend who takes “pretty good” photographs, has a printer that will print business cards just fine, or a buddy who built a website for his band back in the day. Why spend money when you don’t know if your venture will be successful – especially if money is thin on the ground? Once you start making money, then you’ll hire someone to do the logo, the design, and the business cards.

This logic is flawed – and much less likely to lead to success. Let me tell you why!

The trouble with hiring “friends” who will work for free or very little is that while intentions are often good, time is often hard to come by. You may find that if a lucrative job offer comes along, or the baby gets sick, it’s your project that ends up at the bottom of the to-do pile, leaving your business stuck in the starting blocks while others already finished the race.

A professional photographer, designer or social media manager does this for a living, and will do what they can to make sure your product is delivered on time and on budget.

Additionally, if your talented friend delivers a less-than-stellar product, or even just something that’s very different than you expected, you may find yourself in an awkward situation: now you’re stuck with something you got for “free”, but isn’t what you wanted or expected. Maybe you don’t even want to use it at all! All of a sudden, your relationship is affected, and things feel hard to reconcile, and “Free” is no longer “free of trouble”.

A professional is there to do her job – and that job is to make you, paying customer, happy with the final result. We expect revisions, and we expect critique. No hard feelings!

Having a hobby that you want to turn into a professional business is a wonderful place to be – you have passion for a specific idea, you know the market, you know your future clients. But, transforming a side business into a sustainable, viable, thriving business needs more than just passion and some inside knowledge – it requires the ability to evaluate things critically,  and to make decisions that are less driven by emotion, and more by what is good for business.

Any successful professional will give you their feedback on what they think you need to be successful, where your brand direction is on point and where it is lacking. Your success is our success.

If you are about to invest your time and energy into a project, your project is much more likely to be successful if supported by professional level branding, design, and marketing. Investing in the services of a professional means taking your business seriously, and giving it the best possible chance at success.

Ready to talk about making your passion project a success? Get in touch with us!