Every agency has the client who goes quiet. You send content Tuesday, you follow up Thursday, you follow up again Monday, and on Wednesday they reply "sorry, crazy week — these look great."
The instinct is to blame the client. Usually the more accurate diagnosis is that the process you designed costs them more than they are willing to spend, and going quiet is the rational response.
Here is how to make the process cheap enough that it gets done.
Count the steps you are asking for
Open your own approval email as if you were the client. Count the actions required.
A typical bad flow: open the email, click a link, land on a login page, find the password, fail, reset the password, log in, orient yourself in an unfamiliar interface, find the pending items, review them, figure out how to leave a comment, submit.
That is eleven steps for a restaurant owner who is currently short a line cook. Of course they went quiet.
A good flow: open the text or email, tap a link, see the posts, tap approve.
Three steps. The difference in completion rate is not marginal.
Remove the account requirement
The highest-leverage change most agencies can make is letting clients approve without an account.
A review link that opens directly to their pending content — no password, no signup, works on a phone — changes approval from a task requiring preparation to something done at a stoplight. Agencies who make this switch typically see approval turnaround go from days to hours.
If your tool cannot do this, it is worth changing tools over. This is the mechanism by which agency content actually ships.
Batch, always
Send two weeks at a time, not one post at a time.
One post at a time feels considerate and is actually the worst pattern available. It generates fourteen interruptions, each of which requires the client to reload the context of what you are doing and why. Interruptions are what people ignore.
A batch is a single scheduled task. The client sets aside twenty minutes, reviews everything, and is done. It also produces better feedback, because they can see the arc of two weeks rather than judging one post in isolation.
Give a deadline and a default
"Let me know what you think" has no deadline and no consequence. It will be deprioritized against everything that does.
Use this instead: "Please review by Thursday at 5pm. Anything not commented on by then goes live as scheduled."
This is the single most effective sentence in agency client management. It works because it converts approval from an action into an option. The client who is happy does nothing. The client who has a problem raises it. Both outcomes are fine, and neither requires chasing.
Put default-approve in the contract at signing so it is never a surprise. Almost no client objects when it is framed correctly: "we do not want your inbox to be the bottleneck on your marketing."
Ask a specific question
"Any feedback?" invites open-ended review, which invites delay.
"These are the four posts for next week — anything you want changed before Thursday?" invites a scan and a yes.
If you want feedback on something particular, ask for that thing only: "The third one uses the new tagline — does that land right?"
Make comments attach to posts
Feedback that arrives as an email saying "the second one is a bit much" costs you four minutes of decoding. Feedback attached to the specific post costs you zero.
This is a tooling requirement more than a process one. Your approval interface should let the client comment on the item they are looking at, and that comment should be visible to whoever does the revision.
Escalate on a schedule, not on feeling
Write the sequence down so it happens the same way every time and does not depend on anyone's mood:
- Day 0: Batch sent with a stated deadline
- Day 2: One short reminder, friendly, restating the deadline
- Deadline day: Content publishes as scheduled per the default-approve policy
- Publish day: A note saying what went live, with the link
If a client repeatedly lets everything default-approve, that is not a failure of the process. That is a client telling you they trust you. Some agencies formalize it and move that client to a monthly review of themes rather than individual posts.
Handle the chronic reviewer differently
The opposite problem is the client who rewrites every caption. This is usually a symptom of an unresolved voice disagreement, not a personality trait.
Stop treating it post by post. Schedule a call, pull up five posts they heavily edited, and ask what specifically was wrong with each. Extract the pattern. Update the voice document. The edits usually drop by half within two weeks.
If they do not, the client is buying a copywriting collaboration rather than a managed service, and you should price accordingly.
What good looks like
Approval turnaround under 48 hours. Fewer than one chase per client per month. Revisions on under 20% of posts.
If you are outside those numbers, the problem is almost certainly friction in the flow rather than character in the client. Friction is fixable.