When you’re creating assets or setting things up for clients, there are three essentials elements you’ll want your clients’ feedback on:

1. The process. Are they enjoying working with you, is there anything that would make the process go smoother?

2. Your work in progress. If you’re offering revisions, you need feedback so you can get back to them with something “better”

3. The end result.

Below, we’ll tackle #2 – receiving effective feedback on your work so you can go back to the drawing board and create a better version (for them).

It Starts with Onboarding

Clients often have different reasons for not giving (much/detailed) feedback.

• They don’t want to offend you

• They don’t realise you can’t deliver good work if you don’t get good feedback

• They’re not sure how to give you feedback

• They’re not sure when to give you feedback

During your onboarding call with new clients, bring up the topic of feedback: explain to them how important it is for you to do a good job, and tell them that constructive feedback will never offend you.

You may also want to check with them and see if something else might keep them from giving you timely/detailed feedback.

Last but not least, tell them exactly how you expect the feedback (e.g. written, video, audio), how you do not want the feedback (e.g. if you hate getting loooong Loom videos with hardly any useful content!), and how fast you expect the feedback (e.g. 24 or 48 hours) in order to allow for revisions.

The timeframe is essential – if your client asks their whole team for feedback and it takes weeks for them to get back to you, this could be an issue to tackle sooner rather than later.

Another element to tackle in the onboarding process, is making sure you have access to or will get all the information. You can’t do a good job if you don’t know who their ideal audience is, don’t know what they’re hoping or expecting from you, don’t know enough about their products or services, don’t have access to their brand assets,…

Feedback Hack: Presenting your Work on a video call

For first-time clients and bigger projects, it can be worth the effort to get them on a call and “present” your work. A short call to check in with the client can save you a lot of time going back and forth by email, video, or voice messages!

When you can walk them through your work (even if it’s a first draft), you can talk them through why you e.g. chose certain words or made certain design decisions. You get to see their faces and immediate reactions while you’re screen sharing, you can tackle some issues right away.

Benefits of getting feedback on a call:

1. You can walk the client through your work and explain why you chose specific words or made certain design decisions. Saves them from wondering or asking questions later.

2. You can see their immediate reaction, whether good or bad. Most clients might be super happy with your work but only talk about the things that don’t work in written feedback – and others will send you an email saying “thank you for your great work” while what they’re actually thinking is “this is not at all what we expected, we’ll need to hire someone else to fix this”.

3. If their faces tell you it’s not at all what they expected, you get to ask them what they were expecting instead. Nip misunderstandings in the bud!

4. If they have some immediate feedback (e.g. “I hate this picture” or “this section doesn’t sound like me”), you can tweak or fix it before sending it to them for further review and feedback.

Instructions for Feedback or approval

Most of us will request our clients’ feedback in an email or written message. And even if you don’t (e.g. if you ask them for feedback on a call, or at the end of a video you send them), adding a written message can make the process faster and smoother.

• Make it easy for them to access the assets. E.g. instead of “Can you please review the new pins I put in your Trello?”, make it “Click here to review your new pins in Trello”.

• Give them a deadline. E.g. instead of “Can you please review the new pins asap?”, tell them “if you review them before [date], I can schedule them on Friday. If not, it will have to wait until next week”

• Make it easy and straightforward to give feedback. This is something you can discuss ahead of time! You can use a tool like MarkUp, ask them to comment in a Google Doc, or set up your own system – as long as your clients know exactly what to do.

• Tell them how to phrase their feedback.

  • You can’t work with something like “I don’t like it” – unless they add “because”. I don’t like it because it doesn’t sound like me, I don’t like it because it doesn’t feel on-brand, I don’t like it because our clients don’t look like the people in this picture”.

  • “It’s too …” and “there’s not enough …” can work well too. E.g. a client gave us feedback at one point saying “I hate the pink”, which surprised us because it was one of the main colours in her brand’s pallette… turns out she meant “there’s too much pink on the images”, which was much easier to fix – the pink turned out to be an accent colour.

  • While most professionals don’t love the client making suggestions, it can be useful to know what direction your clients are thinking in.

Feedback vs Approval

There’s a difference between requesting feedback and requesting approval on your work – make sure your request is clear!

E.g.

• I have put the new designs [here] for your approval. If something is not right, please communicate this before [date].

• I have put a first draft [here] for your review. Please communicate your feedback before [date] so I can apply any revisions.

It’s a funny thing but if you request feedback, some people will go out of their way to nitpick – because you asked for it. But if you just need their approval, things might go a lot faster!

Helping people “see through” things

As experts, we’re often so close to what we do (and our expertise feels so natural to us) that we have a hard time seeing how other people perceive it…. and we don’t understand why people have difficulties “seeing through” things.

E.g. I once went house-hunting with someone who was utterly unable to see through the ugly floor or outdated wallpaper – and when I visit a furniture store, I’ll be drawn to the furniture with the right colours and textures and completely overlook any white leather couches (they’re not my style).

Same with writing emails, designing a website, sales page copy, or funnel automations: when presented in the wrong format, they will just not resonate.

Some tips to make it easier for everyone:

• When working on copy for a website that hasn’t been designed yet, create a “content wireframe” – a document that has the right words in the right places, but that’s all black and white and has grey placeholder boxes for pictures or videos. That way, the client can concentrate on the words and not get distracted by colours and pictures. You can technically do this in any platform you’re already using (e.g. Google Docs), create a template for it on your preferred website platform, or use a dedicated tool like Draftium.

• When proposing new brand colours, apply them to a (fake/template) page or design. People have a hard time imagining how the colours will be applied on their website or social media accounts.

• Giving people options to compare can be pretty effective too – read more in the next section!

Giving your client options to compare

When your client pays for you to create something, they get the thing, and it’s “not quite it”… it can be incredibly hard to tell them why it’s not perfect yet!

It gets much easier when they have different options to choose from – or to compare.

• It allows them to give you feedback like “this one is too … and the other one is not enough of that”, enabling you to better understand where they’re at

• It allows them to say “I like this part from model A and that part from model B”, allowing you to combine things

A couple of tips:

• When presented with 3 tiered options, people most often pick the middle one. It’s been scientifically proven… but it doesn’t always work 🙂

• If you present a client with options they shouldn’t pick (e.g. option A demonstrates “too bright” and option C shows “too dark”), make this clear! You don’t want to end up with a client who picked something you really think they shouldn’t do.

• This also works in the initial (information-gathering) stage. E.g. when we ask clients to share some websites they love or hate (so we can learn a bit about their preferred style) and they come up empty, we’ll send them a couple of links and ask them to tell us what they like or don’t like about those websites.

When the Feedback Just Doesn’t Stop

If you have a “satisfaction guaranteed” clause in your contracts (which is great!), sometimes the feedback just doesn’t stop… For every version you create, there’s new feedback – and sometimes you even need to revert to older versions.

When this happens, we often tend to find the client a terrible PITA – but in reality, if often means something in the process isn’t working. In order to avoid or solve this,

• Keep earlier feedback on hand and see if you can find patterns.

• Offer different versions so it becomes easier for them to compare and make choices

• Walk them through your process and tell them why you made certain choices. This is where you might discover that you’re e.g. using their old and discarded brand guidelines, or that they ommitted to send you crucial information.

• Offer the opportunity to hop on a call. People often have a hard time formulating what’s wrong, and talking 1:1 can solve this.

• Get super clear on expectations! E.g. we had one client who kept saying our Instagram work was “underwhelming”; it turned out she expected us to come up with a completely new and very different look for her Instagram visuals, even if it didn’t match her website, Pinterest designs, or any of her other assets.

• Repeat the “rules” again and often. How should they formulate their feedback, what’s the deadline for giving you feedback,…?

One last thing to leave you with…

If your client asks you to do things you believe won’t work (as well), look bad, sound horrible: remember that while they’re the client, you’re the expert. You’d be amiss to implement their feedback without a word, if you know the results won’t be as good.

“I understand you want this because X, but in my expert opinion/experience it doesn’t work because Y. If you insist on doing it this way, of course, I will make the change – but may I suggest Z as an alternative?”

If you apply erroneous feedback without a word and someone tells them later on why it doesn’t work, you will be remembered as the person who didn’t know their job well enough to keep them from making mistakes.
If you apply their feedback because they insisted (even though you told them about potential issues), you may be remembered as the person who did know their job after all, and they should have listened to.