The best way to send overdue payment requests to your customers

Keep your business healthy

No one really enjoys sending out overdue payment requests to clients (and we enjoy receiving them even less). Unfortunately chasing payments is an unavoidable, necessary part of running a successful business.

As most business owners will attest, best practice in this situation is to prompt your customers into paying their outstanding accounts before too much time passes. The longer you wait to follow up with them, the lower your chances of actually receiving payment. Whilst a “friendly reminder email” is the traditional method of notification, the lack of urgency in both the language and the communication type often results in customers failing to take immediate action. This is why we suggest that businesses also use SMS, as 90% of all messages are read within three minutes of receiving.

Be persistent, but professional

This overdue payment alerts journey is built to recognise when a contacts’ payment is overdue and send them reminders until they update their details or their account is cancelled. As soon as a payment is marked as overdue, we’ll email the contact asking them to rectify this. Over the course of 6 weeks, we’ll continuously send them email and SMS reminders about their outstanding payment. These SMS reminders will be delivered straight to the contacts mobile, targeting them directly.

It’s not worth hanging onto customers that refuse to pay, so be upfront in your communications, and give them enough time to pay before cracking down.