Chasing clients for a renewal is the least rewarding job in an agency. It isn’t hard: it’s repetitive, fragmented and easy to forget. And when you forget it, the damage isn’t the missing email. It’s the expired domain, the site offline, the client on the phone asking what happened.
Sending deadline reminders automatically solves exactly this. You don’t need a complicated system: you need clear rules about what to send, to whom and when, and a tool that carries them out without you having to remember.
Here are five ways to automate reminders, from the simplest to the most structured. You can apply them with any tool; at the end you’ll find what ours does and what it doesn’t.
1. Automate emails based on status
The first step isn’t writing emails: it’s deciding which statuses a deadline can have. In an agency, four or five are enough: to renew, awaiting payment, paid, renewed, cancelled.
Once they’re defined, every change of status becomes an event that can trigger a message. The client moves to awaiting payment? The payment request goes out. Moves to paid? The confirmation goes out. You no longer decide case by case: you decide the rule once, and it applies to every client.
The less obvious advantage is consistency. When emails go out by hand, the client you dealt with in March gets a different message from the one you dealt with in November. With rules, everyone gets the same standard.
2. Schedule deadline notifications
When a reminder arrives matters more than what it says. Too early and the client files it and forgets; too late and there’s no time to react.
A schedule that works for annual renewals such as domains and hosting:
- 30 days before: an informative notice. What expires, what it costs, what happens if it isn’t renewed. No urgency, just transparency.
- 7 days before: a practical reminder, with the link or the details needed to pay.
- On the day: a last notice, only if the payment hasn’t arrived yet.
- After the deadline: a service message. What happened, and how much time is left to recover.
That last point is the one most often missing, and the most important. A .it domain can be renewed with no surcharge for 15 days after it expires; for the following 30 days restoring it costs around €12 on top of the renewal. For a .com the restore fee goes past €60. Knowing there is still a window changes the whole tone of the conversation with the client.
3. Build multi-step reminder sequences
A single reminder gets lost. A sequence doesn’t, as long as each message adds something instead of repeating the one before.
The first message informs. The second makes acting easier: a direct link, the exact amount, the deadline up front. The third, if needed, explains the concrete consequences, as useful information rather than a threat: “if the domain expires, the site and the email addresses on it stop working”.
Rule of thumb: the sequence stops as soon as the client acts. Sending chasers to someone who has already paid is the fastest way to get your notifications switched off.
4. Set up internal notifications
Automations aimed at clients solve half the problem. The other half is you knowing what is going on, without opening a file and counting rows.
You need two different things. A periodic summary, weekly or monthly, with the deadlines coming up, to plan the work. And specific alerts on the cases that need a decision: payments that haven’t arrived, renewals turned down, clients who don’t reply.
Without internal notifications, automation becomes a black box: the emails go out, but you don’t know whether they’re working until something goes wrong.
5. Personalise the content of your reminders
Personalising doesn’t mean writing “Hi Mark”. It means the message contains everything the client needs to act without writing back to ask.
A complete reminder says which service is expiring, for which domain or site, on what exact date, what it costs, how to pay, and what happens if nothing is done. Six pieces of information. If one is missing, the client writes to ask for it, and you’ve lost the time the automation was supposed to save you.
It’s worth preparing different templates for each type of service: a domain renewal and a maintenance contract have different urgency and different consequences, and deserve a different tone.
What mistakes do we see most often in automated reminders?
- Automating too early. If the manual process isn’t clear, automation multiplies the confusion instead of solving it. Define the statuses first, then automate.
- One template for everything. It produces vague messages that clients ignore.
- No record of what was sent. Without a history you don’t know whether the email really went out, and if the client disputes it you have no proof.
- Forgetting the time after the deadline. It’s when the client needs you most, and it’s almost always left uncovered.
Where do you actually start?
You don’t need to automate everything on day one. The order we recommend, from direct experience:
- Put every deadline in one place. As long as they’re scattered across spreadsheets, calendars and memory, no automation is possible.
- Define the statuses and who updates them.
- Switch on a single reminder, the 30-day one, and check for a month that it goes out correctly.
- Add the next steps only once the first one works.
If you manage everything in a spreadsheet today, step 1 is already half done: you have the data, what’s missing is a tool that acts on it. We covered this in the comparison between Excel and a dedicated deadline tracker, where we also explain when Excel really is enough and switching isn’t worth it.
How do we automate reminders ourselves?
Dotify was born in a web agency that tracked client renewals in spreadsheets, until it lost a client to a forgotten deadline. This article comes from how we handle our own clients’ renewals every day; the full story is here.
In practice: you define the deadline statuses and types, link an email template to each status and set how many days ahead the reminders go out. From then on the messages leave on their own, the deadline moves to the next status, and the sending log shows what went out and to whom.
Two things in this article Dotify doesn’t do today: the notice after the deadline and the periodic summary for you. For now we handle those by hand.
The free plan is there so you can try it on your real clients before deciding whether you need it.
