All seems to be going well. Your client seems happy. You’ve been delivering work. But then they disappear. No word from them. In fact, it’s so quiet you think you just saw a tumbleweed drift by. 

Where did they go? What did they do? Was it something you said?

I’ve faced this problem a number of times in my career and I still face it from time to time today. If you have been freelancing for a while, you’ll likely have faced it too.

Here are some tips to help you solve the mystery and keep it from happening too often:

• Do they owe money? Not every client who disappears is one who owes money but that is often a motivator for clients to vanish. If they’ve already disappeared, just give them regular reminders. Try to ping them on different media. At some point, you may need to write them off and resell their work to someone else. It sucks but it happens.
• Try them through a different form of communication: If you haven’t heard back by email, contact them through Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, IM, phone, their web form… yeah, there are a zillion different ways. I’ve found at least once that someone I thought had disappeared was wondering the same thing about me because all of my emails were mysteriously ending up in their spam folder. A quick ping through LinkedIn alerted them to the spam issue and they resolved it by whitelisting me.
• Check their website or blog. If they’ve hired you to blog for them and you don’t hear from them but you see that they are blogging prolifically, there’s your answer. They’ve solved the need you once solved – and they either solved it with another freelancer or on their own and just didn’t bother to tell you.
• Check your deliverables. Have they been on time and on scope and of the quality that your client has come to expect? I confess that I can think of a couple of clients in my 15+ years of freelancing that disappeared because I stopped delivering what I had initially committed to and they wanted to avoid a confrontation by simply finding someone else to do the work. In those cases, it’s perfectly understandable and the fault is mine (or yours, if that has happened to you). I don’t think there is much you can do in these except use it as a motivator for the clients that remain.
• Review your communication. Were there underlying issues that you missed at the time but see now? Maybe they were paying you to do some kind of work for them that they weren’t convinced they needed and after paying you they realized that it wasn’t returning what they needed. By reviewing your communication with them and checking for those undercurrents, you might be able to revive the relationship by addressing the issue.
• Re realistic about the time that they seem to have vanished. If you messaged them on a Thursday and by Monday evening you haven’t heard from them, don’t panic. Maybe they took a long weekend and are still going through emails; maybe they have a personal emergency that is taking their time. Contact them a couple of times but don’t consider someone to have officially disappeared for at least 2 weeks.

Avoiding this from happening again:

• Get multiple contact points from them. Ask them for your email and phone number but be sure to follow them on Twitter and LinkedIn.
• Make sure you have a minimum reply-by date and try it keep it within one business day. That way, at least you can’t be accused by them of disappearing.
• Get paid up-front (or at least in escrow) so they have financial motivation for sticking around.
• When a project is wrapping up, prompt them that you are ready to work on the next project with them.

By following these tips, you’ll be able to solve the problem of disappearing clients and keep it from happening too often in the future.