I started using Slack many years back when it wasn’t nearly as popular as it is now. At that time, I was using it for internal communications with my team. We switched over from Hipchat (which was popular at the time). Eventually, Slack grew and communities for all sorts of topics were being created.

When we first started SumoDash, we used Slack internally for team communication (almost replacing email) and strictly communicated with our clients via email only, but things have changed for us. We loved using it for everything from monitoring our inbound leads, conversations with customers on our site, google analytics, company mentions, and how can we forget the giphy integration?

Starting about half a year ago, we started using Slack for all communication for our clients. This helped streamline our workflow and customers love us because of the on-going constant communication.

Anyone can get ahold of our team members at any given time without any issues.

Have a new piece of file we need to share with our client? No problem! Just upload directly to Slack.

So, let’s quickly talk about why we made this change and started encouraging all of our new and existing customers to use Slack to communicate with us instead of email.

Communication is key with Slack!

We believe that in order to provide the best service for our clients and to ensure that everyone is on the same page with goals and deliverables, communication is key! With Slack, we’re able to ask any questions we have right away and get an answer from their team almost instantly.

With traditional email, we’re stuck with chain emails and delayed response times which sometimes will lead to the deliverables not being delivered on time or not at the quality that they expected.

Clients love the fact that we’re always engaging in conversations with them. This is especially true when it comes to updates. Instead of taking a long time to write up a long email with an update, we can provide instant short updates more frequently through Slack.

Slack allows us to speed up our communication process as well as provide more of our expert advice almost instantly.

Not everyone likes to participate in conversations

Another big problem we ran into with emails is that there are a lot of people on the marketing/content team that we work with. Some clients that we work with have large marketing teams and when you send an email to all of them, not all of them will participate in the conversation.

This could be due to the fact that the individuals are waiting for someone else within the team to speak up before they do. With Slack, the whole team is more engaged and more open to discussing further marketing ideas.

This is huge for us especially since we offer multiple content services and providing our clients with good future ideas to work on together sometimes requires the whole team to buy-in.

With Slack, we’re able to encourage the entire team to speak up and chime in on ideas.

Revisions turn into a breeze

We offer unlimited revisions on all of the content that we provide for our clients. Feedback is crucial to us and helps us improve our future work for both the clients that we’re working with as well as future clients.

One of the biggest problems with revising content is that a client might say, “Hey, I need this part to have more context based on this…” Then a few hours later, they review the content again and have some other thoughts. It’s super difficult for both sides to keep up with on-going requests through email especially when the client isn’t constantly checking their emails.

With Slack, they can ping us with feedback and we’ll make the changes right away.

Sharing files isn’t difficult anymore

If you have a long email thread with multiple people within a company, files can get lost easily.

With Slack, everything is stored in one place and it’s easy to run a quick search to find a specific file that you’re looking for.

Sometimes client might request a simple screenshot of their Google Analytics and we can easily just send that over in a quick minute, then browse the history for it again a few weeks down the line.

This works for all types of files including content work etc.

It makes the planning process and delivery process much easier for both ends.

Client bonding <3

This doesn’t work for every client, but the giphy integration can make things fun. Clients are human too and like a good laugh. We like to celebrate wins together.

For example if we’re running a content promotion campaign and see that a top influencer within the industry made a post with our article, then we would all celebrate together.

We would also talk about offtopic stuff and that keeps our bonding going forward.

/giphy boom!

Now the downsides..

Not everything is perfect. There are upsides and downsides to using Slack for client communication. Some of the downsides include clients requesting a lot more details and work than we agreed on. There will also be other people who aren’t apart of the marketing team that would step in and make comments, but all of these things are considered minor issues. We’re more than happy to overdeliver most of the time and do extra work for free as long as it benefits the client.

Putting it together

Slack is a very powerful tool for internal and external communication. It’s improving day to day and we’re seeing more and more enterprise companies pick it up. Not only that, Slack is being improved and there are constantly developers working on new integrations for it. We love Slack and would recommend every other agency to start using it within their client workflow.

Moving forward, we will encourage all of our future clients to use Slack as the main form of communication over email.

Are you looking for a full service done for you content marketing service? If so, get in touch with us! We’ll take good care of you.