When you are being approached by a potential client via email, there are certain things that you need to have in mind in order to make a good first impression.

1) The language
Probably one of the most important things is the language. If your English sucks, than go take some lessons and come back when you are ready. Don’t get me wrong, quality work and competitive prices are a “must” but your ability to communicate with the client is crucial.

2) Introduce yourself!
Even if the potential client doesn’t ask for it, make a short presentation of you/your company. Include info about your experience, how long have you been in this business and where are your clients located; the last one is particularly important because it proves that you where able to work and communicate with people from different cultural, social and even religious environments.

3) Testimonials
This part is critical also. Many people are very cautious when outsourcing their work, and for a good reason. You must include written reference from your current (or past) clients along with their names and companies that they work for. Otherwise, they are worthless. If you don’t have something like this, go and ask your clients for it, but don’t try to fake them! (Sooner or later you will get caught).

4) Samples of your work
If you’ve been in the architectural visualization business for a long time, you may have hundreds of renderings in your portfolio, but you don’t have to send all of them! Usually 10-12 renderings will do. However, it is important that you show as much variation as you can, in order to prove that you are able to do a good job, no matter what the specific constraints and difficulties of the task are.

To be more precise, you should include something that highlights your modeling abilities, something to show how well you can texture and some samples to show how good are you at lighting different kind of environments at particular times of the day (interior and exterior renderings, at mid day, late afternoon, dusk, night).

5) Rates and timings
Every rendering that you send as sample work, must have a stamp that indicates the price and time spent working on it. The important thing here is that you should mention the time as number of hours that where necessary to WORK on the job, and not include how much time you waited for feedback from your clients during preliminary revisions. It happens some times that you do the modeling part of a job in 1 day and you wait for the approval for another 3 days.

However, you should let your client know that what you have indicated represents the time effectively spent working on the job, so he does not get the wrong idea.

General guidelines

Be professional and polite
As a general idea you must address to the client in a professional and polite manner. Remember that people working in the architectural visualization industry are usually highly educated, so if you sound like a high-school kid they won’t want nothing to do with you.

Make it short but comprehensive
Also, keep in mind that the reason why architectural visualization companies outsource their work is because of the lack of time. Therefore, don’t turn your email into a 2500 words essay; make it brief, but make sure you cover all the important aspects.