You’ve done the pitch. The client is excited. The proposal landed well and they’ve verbally agreed to everything. Then you send the contract — and nothing happens. Days pass. You send a polite nudge. More silence. Two weeks later, after a second follow-up, you finally get the signed document back, and you can start work. By that point, the client’s enthusiasm has cooled slightly, your project plan has drifted, and your team has had to hold resource in limbo.
This is one of the most preventable time sinks in agency life, and most agencies tolerate it entirely unnecessarily. The problem is rarely a difficult client. It’s almost always a friction-heavy process — a PDF contract emailed as an attachment, requiring a print-sign-scan workflow that nobody does anymore, or a wet-signature clause that makes e-signing feel legally uncertain to the client. Fix the process, and the chasing largely stops.
Here’s how to build a digital contract workflow that gets sign-off fast — and what to do when it doesn’t.
Why Slow Sign-Off Is Almost Always a Process Problem
Before fixing anything, it’s worth being clear about why contracts go unsigned for so long. In most cases, it’s not because the client has doubts — if they had serious doubts, they’d tell you. It’s because signing feels like effort, and effort gets deprioritised.
A client who receives a contract as a PDF attachment faces a small but genuine obstacle course. They need to download the file, open it, read it, decide whether they need their solicitor to look at it, then either print and sign physically or find a PDF annotation tool they may not have. At each step, the path of least resistance is to leave it for later. “Later” becomes next week. Your chaser email arrives, creates mild guilt, and they mean to deal with it — but they’re in a meeting.
Contrast this with a client who receives a link to a digital contract on their laptop or phone. The document loads immediately in their browser. They can read it scrolling down a clean page. At the bottom is a signature box they can sign with a mouse, trackpad, or finger. They type their name and click confirm. Done in three minutes, from any device, without downloading anything. The friction isn’t just reduced — it’s essentially eliminated.
The insight here is simple but often overlooked: your client’s speed of sign-off tracks almost exactly with your process’s quality, not their enthusiasm. An agency with a frictionless digital signing process rarely chases contracts. An agency with an email-a-PDF workflow almost always does.
Are Electronic Signatures Legally Valid in the UK?
The most common reason agencies haven’t moved to digital contracts is a lingering uncertainty about whether e-signatures are legally binding in the UK. This uncertainty is understandable but, in most cases, unfounded.
Under the Electronic Communications Act 2000 and in line with eIDAS regulations (which the UK retained post-Brexit as the UK eIDAS regime), electronic signatures are legally valid for the overwhelming majority of commercial contracts. A simple e-signature — where a person types their name and clicks to confirm their agreement — is legally recognised as a Simple Electronic Signature (SES) and is enforceable in the same way as a wet signature for standard commercial agreements, including agency service contracts, retainer agreements, and statements of work.
There are exceptions. Certain documents — land transfers, wills, enduring powers of attorney — require witnessing or specific formalities that a simple e-signature doesn’t satisfy. But those aren’t the documents agencies use day to day. A service agreement, a retainer contract, or an NDA? An e-signature is perfectly valid.
Practical note: if a client asks whether an e-signature is legally binding, the answer is yes — for standard commercial contracts in the UK. You can point them to the Law Commission’s 2019 guidance confirming this. Most clients who ask are simply unfamiliar with the law, not raising a genuine objection.
For higher-value contracts where you want additional assurance, some agencies opt for Advanced Electronic Signatures (AES), which involve identity verification. But for most agency engagements — a £2,000/month retainer, a £15,000 website build — a simple e-signature via a reputable platform is both legally sufficient and practically sensible.
Building a Contract Template That Minimises Questions
Slow sign-off isn’t only a delivery problem — it’s sometimes a document problem. If your contract is written in dense legal prose, covers unlikely edge cases in exhausting detail, or uses ambiguous language about scope or payment, clients will read it with a furrowed brow and either send it to their solicitor (adding a week) or sign reluctantly with unresolved concerns (creating friction later).
A well-drafted agency contract doesn’t need to be long. A solid retainer agreement or project contract can cover everything that matters in three to five pages of plain English. The sections that matter are:
- Scope of services: what is included, explicitly. If something isn’t listed, it isn’t in scope. Be precise — “up to three rounds of design revisions” rather than “reasonable revisions.”
- Payment terms: the fee, the invoicing schedule, when payment is due (net 14 or net 30 — not “within a reasonable period”), and what happens if an invoice goes unpaid. A late payment clause with a specific percentage references the Late Payment of Commercial Debts Act 1998 and tends to prompt prompt payment.
- IP and ownership: who owns the work product during the project, and when does ownership transfer? (Typically: when the final invoice is paid in full.) This matters more than most agencies realise, particularly for design work.
- Cancellation and notice: how much notice is required to cancel, and whether any work completed to date is billable. A 30-day notice clause protects your revenue; a 60-day clause protects your resource planning.
- Liability cap: your total liability under the contract is typically capped at the value of fees paid. This is standard — most clients understand it — but needs to be explicit.
Write your contracts so that an intelligent person with no legal background can read the whole thing in under ten minutes and understand what they’re agreeing to. If a clause requires a solicitor to interpret, it will slow down signing. Plain language is not less legally robust — a court cares about what was agreed, not how formally it was expressed.
The Send-to-Sign Workflow That Actually Works
The mechanics of how you send a contract for signing matter as much as the contract itself. Here is the workflow that minimises delays:
Step 1: Send the contract as a signing link, not an attachment. When a contract is ready, the client should receive an email with a single, clear call to action: “Review and sign your agreement.” The link opens the document in their browser — no download, no PDF viewer confusion, no version control issues. The document should be clean and readable: normal text size, your agency branding at the top, clear section headings.
Step 2: Send it to the right person immediately. This sounds obvious, but agencies frequently send contracts to whoever they’ve been corresponding with — who may not be the person with signing authority. Before sending, confirm: “Who should I address the contract to, and is that the person who’ll sign?” Two minutes of clarification here saves a week of the document bouncing around internally on the client side.
Step 3: Set automatic reminders, not manual chasers. Good contract software sends automatic reminder emails if a document remains unsigned after 48 hours, then again at 72 hours, then again at five days. These are neutral, non-pressuring nudges — “your agreement is still awaiting your signature” — that operate without you needing to do anything. When the client eventually signs, you get an instant notification. You shouldn’t need to think about unsigned contracts at all — the system should manage that for you.
Step 4: Trigger the next step automatically on signing. The moment a contract is signed, something should happen without anyone manually doing it. Ideally: the client receives a confirmation email with a copy of the signed document, the project gets created in your agency management system, the first invoice is generated (or scheduled), and the account manager is notified to send the welcome email and kick-off details. The signed contract becomes the starting gun for your entire onboarding process — not a separate event that someone has to notice and then act on.
What to Include in the Contract Signing Email
The email accompanying your contract for signature does more work than most agencies realise. It’s the transition moment between “we’ve agreed in principle” and “this is formally happening” — and the tone, framing, and content of that email affects how quickly the client acts.
A well-crafted signing email should:
- Open warmly but get to the point quickly. The client knows what the email is — don’t bury the action under three paragraphs of pleasantries.
- State clearly what they need to do: “Please review the attached agreement and sign digitally — it takes about three minutes.”
- Summarise the key terms in two or three bullet points: the service, the monthly fee, the start date. This gives them confidence they’re signing what they expect without re-reading the entire document.
- Pre-empt the most common question: confirm that the e-signature is legally valid and equivalent to a wet signature.
- Include a specific deadline: “We’d love to get started on [date] — please sign by [date minus two days] so we can confirm the slot.”
- Tell them what happens next: “Once you’ve signed, you’ll receive a copy for your records, and [Account Manager Name] will be in touch to book your kick-off call.”
That last point — telling the client what happens immediately after they sign — is genuinely useful for accelerating sign-off. People are more likely to act when they can see the value of acting. If signing the contract means the kick-off call gets booked and work starts, the signature has immediate, tangible value. If signing just means a contract gets filed and nothing visibly happens for a week, the urgency dissolves.
The email that accompanies a contract sets the client’s emotional expectation of the engagement. Efficient, clear, and specific signals an agency that runs a tight operation. Vague and lengthy signals the opposite.
Handling Retainer Renewals and Contract Changes
The contract problem doesn’t end at the initial sign-off. Retainers need renewing. Scope changes mid-project need written agreement. Price increases at the annual review need documenting. Each of these situations is another opportunity for sign-off delays to erode momentum — or to demonstrate that your process is seamlessly efficient.
For retainer renewals, the key is to initiate early and make the renewal feel like a formality rather than a negotiation. Send a renewal summary 45 days before the contract end date, noting any price adjustment and the proposed new term. Frame it as confirmation of a continuing relationship, not a new sale. A renewal contract that arrives 45 days early, clearly referencing the existing agreement, with a digital signing link and a two-week deadline, almost always gets signed promptly.
For scope changes — when a client asks for work outside the original agreement — the instinct is often to just do it and sort the paperwork later. Resist this. A brief change order document, sent the same day the scope change is agreed verbally, locks in the additional fee before the work starts. These don’t need to be elaborate: a single-page document confirming the change, the cost, the revised timeline, and the payment terms is sufficient. Send it digitally, get it signed within 24 hours, then proceed. Agencies that do this consistently almost never have scope creep disputes — because every piece of additional work has a signed paper trail.
Marque’s contracts and e-sign module handles all of this within the same platform as your projects and invoices. You can create a contract from a template, link it to a client and project, send it for e-signature, and trigger the onboarding workflow automatically on signing — without switching between tools. Renewal reminders are built in, change orders can be generated from existing contract templates, and every signed document is stored against the client record where it’s accessible from anywhere.
When a Client Still Won’t Sign
Even with an excellent process, some contracts take longer than they should. When that happens, the approach matters. A passive “just wanted to check in on the contract” email is easy to ignore. A direct, specific conversation is harder to defer.
After your automated reminders have run and the contract is still unsigned after five to seven business days, call the client — don’t email. Ask directly: “I wanted to make sure you received the contract and there’s nothing in it that’s unclear — is there anything you’d like to discuss before signing?” This does two things simultaneously: it gives the client a face-saving reason to raise any concerns they hadn’t voiced, and it makes clear (politely) that their continued delay is holding up the project.
If the contract is genuinely unsigned because of a concern with the terms, that’s useful information. Most client concerns about contract terms are about specific clauses that feel unfair or ambiguous — liability caps, ownership of work, or payment terms that feel punitive. Being willing to discuss these openly, and amend genuinely unreasonable terms, is sensible. What you shouldn’t do is water down clauses that protect you commercially because a client pushes back reflexively. Know which terms are negotiable and which aren’t, and be clear about the distinction.
A client who will not sign a standard, fair agency contract after two weeks and a direct conversation is telling you something worth hearing. Either they have a legitimate concern you haven’t addressed, or they are not yet as committed to the engagement as they seemed. Either way, don’t start work on an unsigned contract. The short-term awkwardness of holding the project start is far preferable to the long-term exposure of delivering work without a signed agreement in place.
The Agency That Doesn’t Chase Contracts
The agencies that have eliminated contract chasing from their workflows share a common characteristic: they’ve treated the signing process as a designed experience rather than an administrative necessity. The contract itself is clear and readable. It’s delivered through a frictionless digital channel with a single action for the client to take. Automatic reminders do the follow-up work. And signing triggers immediate, visible next steps that make the client feel the engagement has genuinely begun.
This matters beyond efficiency. How you handle contracts signals how you handle everything else. A client who receives a polished, easy-to-sign digital contract within 24 hours of verbal agreement experiences an agency that clearly has its operation in order. A client who receives a PDF attachment three days later and waits for a chaser email two weeks after that experiences something rather different.
Contracts are a client touchpoint. Treat them accordingly, and sign-off ceases to be something you manage — it becomes something that simply happens.
For more on building a smooth client lifecycle, see our guides on building an onboarding process clients love, handling scope changes without losing money, and getting clients to pay invoices on time. To see how Marque handles contracts, e-signatures, and client management in one place, visit the features page.