Client and business letters
Project completion letters
The end of a project is the one moment when a client knows exactly what you are worth, and it is almost always allowed to pass in an email with an invoice attached. A letter that lands a week after the final handover arrives when they are using the thing you built and still remembering what it cost them to get there.
Written by Autopen Australia · Updated
Straightforward completion
[FIRST NAME],
[PROJECT] is finished and handed over.
The part I am most pleased with is [DETAIL], which was not in the original brief and turned out to matter more than either of us expected. The part that was hardest was [DIFFICULTY], and you were patient about it.
From here, [CONTACT NAME] looks after anything that comes up, on [NUMBER]. That does not expire and there is no support window to run out.
Thank you for the work.
[NAME]
Where the project changed shape along the way
[FIRST NAME],
[PROJECT] is done, and it is not the project we scoped in [MONTH].
That was the right call. What you have now solves the problem you actually had rather than the one we both described at the start, and the change cost less than carrying on would have.
Anything at all, [CONTACT NAME] on [NUMBER].
[NAME]
A long engagement coming to an end
Different letter. The relationship is closing rather than a piece of work, and the letter should acknowledge that rather than pretend otherwise.
[FIRST NAME],
That is [NUMBER] years of work together finished.
I have been through the file and it is a longer list than I remembered. Thank you for giving us the difficult ones as well as the easy ones, which is not how most clients work.
Everything is handed over and documented. If anything surfaces later, ring me directly rather than the office.
[NAME], [DIRECT LINE]
Getting it right
- What to mention. What was delivered, in their language rather than yours. One honest line about a part that was hard. What happens now, including who to call when something goes wrong in six months.
- What to leave out. A summary of the scope, which they already have. Claiming the project went perfectly when both of you know about the fortnight in the middle. Pitching the next phase in the same letter.
- How long. 80 to 140 words. This is a letter and the content earns the length.
- How personal. Confident and specific. Vagueness at the end of a project reads as a lack of pride in it.
- When not to send one. Where the project ran over or ended badly. Ring instead. A warm letter about a job the client is unhappy with reads as an attempt to rewrite what happened.
Personalising more than a handful
The fields that earn their place here: [FIRST NAME], [PROJECT], [DETAIL], [CONTACT NAME], [NUMBER].
The detail field cannot be merged from a project code. "The part I am most pleased with is PRJ-4471" is the worst possible ending to a job that went well. Either write the clause per letter or cut it, because a generic version of this sentence is more damaging than no sentence.
Before any run, read the piece with the longest value in your data, the shortest, and the empty one. If all three read as English the merge is sound. Personalising direct mail at scale covers the rest.
Sending these at volume
Completion letters arrive one or two a week in a firm of any size, which is the pattern that never becomes a habit. The volume case is a practice that finishes thirty or forty engagements a quarter and wants one going out on every single one.
Autopen Australia writes each piece individually with a real ballpoint and hand-addresses the envelopes.
Finishing more jobs than you are writing to? See the writing first
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