The idea of losing out on some of your most important clients can make even the best digital marketing agencies worry. Customer retention strategies aren’t something you should only begin implementing into your business as you start noticing clients dropping off. Being proactive is the best way you can ensure you manage to keep your customers from leaving you and potentially falling in the hand of another agency.
Keeping your customers is a crucial part of your agency’s capability to maintain success and has a positive effect on your budget. That’s why customer retention strategies have become a crucial part of almost every business. For this article, we’ll go over several ways strategies that can help digital marketing agencies retain their customers.
Positive first impressions
One of the most effective ways you can retain your customers is by creating a positive and unforgettable impression. When you’ve managed to make a positive impression on your client at the start, you’ll have a higher chance of dealing with them in marketing collaborations in the future. This type of engagement shall lead to your digital marketing agency receiving more sales and revenue.
There are several ways you can secure a positive first impression.
First of all, you can send your client a welcome email that can encourage any new customers to sign up for future email updates. When using this strategy, consider making an additional effort to greet the new customers by creating unforgettable first impressions. Make sure you manage to pull off a friendly tone when speaking to potential new customers. Your clients may walk into your building or chat with one of your representatives on social media. These potential clients must be greeted in a positive and friendly manner so they won’t be turned off from wanting to acquire your services.
You should always keep in mind to create content that is intended for your target audience. By coming up with personalized and targeted content, you’ll be able to develop a lasting relationship with your clients.
Remember, if your potential customers’ first experience with your agency doesn’t manage to go well, it can have a massive impact on them. While it’s possible for your company to make amends, it will take time and effort to accomplish this.
Choose your clients carefully
When you’re out looking for new clients to onboard, it can be difficult to turn them down, but there comes a time when this becomes necessary. There are a variety of reasons why you should be picking when choosing what you decide to conduct your business with. Having to deal with problematic clients will take a huge chunk of your team’s day in order to solve the issue they are complaining about. Furthermore, there is a chance that the client will make such a huge stink about the situation that your reputation can be damaged, even if there is nothing you can really do to satisfy the client.
The best thing you can do is let them go instead of wasting time delivering work and services that won’t satisfy them until they decide to go away on their own terms. This approach will only fuel the fire and lead to your reputation from being further damaged in the long run. Chances are, you’ll be eventually spending more time seeking out for new clients in the market instead of concentrating on keeping an existing client satisfied.
Clients are the lifeblood of your business and ensure that you can keep your business running, so you’ll need to keep the majority of your clients. If you manage to select the appropriate people from the start of your acquisition stage and say no to clients who won’t fit well with your agency, then you should be capable of keeping most of your existing customers.
Be aware of their business goals
It’s pretty much improbable to deliver any fantastic results to your clients if you are not aware of what they wish to achieve with their business. You’ll need to take the time to understand the ins and outs of their offer, along with getting an in-depth assessment of what their main objectives will be. While utilizing KPIs has always been an integral piece for digital marketing, they won’t really mean too much if your client isn’t fully aware of how this manages to affect their business.
By taking the time to assist your client and making it clear on how your agency’s marketing efforts in helping them achieve their business goals will ensure their trust in your agency increases. Plus, it will make it easier for them to remain as one of your many customers for a long time.
To pull this off, you want to ask them the appropriate question to start the meeting in a positive direction. Consider coming up with some questions you can ask during the meeting with your client to better understand them, which should allow you to collect valuable information to help align your strategy to your client’s goals.
Some questions you can consider asking them are:
- What is your company’s best selling product/service?
- Who are you trying to target?
- Who do you consider your main competitors and what sets your business apart from theirs?
- What’s the value of your customers to your company?
Coming up with questions that will be relevant to their interest in advance will ensure the meeting runs smoothly and make sure you are capable of managing the first couple of months of handling your relationship with the new client.
Temper your expectation
Being able to deliver more value than you initially promised is considered another fantastic way to retain your existing clients. Take the pricing you offered into consideration before you manage to make any concrete promises on what you’ll be presenting to them. You don’t want to overextend yourself on promises and not deliver them at the end of the day. This will lead to you being placed in a negative light in the long run. Don’t make any promises you won’t be able to keep, instead try to deliver on what you’ve already promised so you can retain more clients.
By over-delivering on your promises, you’ll likely have the client tripping over their own feet and renewing their contract once again. And, let’s not forget the possibility of them spreading the word about the astounding work you’ve managed to provide for them.
Report monthly to show the value
While you may be increasing sales for your client, that doesn’t mean that they are automatically attributing the results due to your efforts. Coming up with a monthly statement may seem like a hassle, and your client may only skim through it instead of fully absorbing it, but solely receiving the report and being aware of your ongoing progress and accountability will make the client very happy with your agency.
The moment your client sees that monthly report inside their inbox during a specified date every month, they’ll become quite thrilled to see what the agency has managed to accomplish for them over the past several weeks. The report should be delivered consistently, without the client requiring to ask for the report.
Developing your own report all comes down to the type of service you are offering them, but it should be a smooth, branded reporting template that should be easy for your team to include pie charts and slide graphs inside. For instance, if your digital marketing agency is in the inbound market, the reporting should highlight the content you’ve developed that month, traffic, and other relevant stats, along with the number of leads every single one of these activities has managed to provide for your client.
Communication efforts
When you are staying in touch with your client every step of the way, it will develop trust and increase the possibility of them renewing their contract with you. Some agencies tend to make the mistake of only communicating with their clients when there is some progress or for an update on what’s currently happening, but this is a fatal mistake. You should be communicating with them at all times, even when you don’t have much to say to them.
Your client will become nervous if they aren’t being told about what’s going on and start to assume that the agency they hired isn’t pulling their end of the bargain. You can either call them or email them during the start of the week to let them be aware of what the tea is currently working on and what they’re attempting to accomplish. At the end of the week, send them another message telling them what the team has done, and if they are currently ahead of or behind schedule, or if they need confirmation from the client to proceed.
If something has gone wrong on your end, don’t try to hide it from your client. You should be reporting even the bad news to them. Client retention doesn’t mean you should roll over for your client, there are moments when you’ll have to inform the client something they won’t like to hear, so don’t hesitate to do so. Most of them would prefer to be told about the bad news than going a long while without any updates.
You should also take the time to consider how your client would like to stay in communicating with your agency. While some agencies would prefer to place everything in a single email, chances are, your client may be the type of person who has trouble managing their email because they receive so many each day. If that is the case for any future clients you acquire, then you’ll have to come up with alternative means of communication. Consider using other communication platforms such as Slack, Skye, Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, text messaging, or any other way you can get in contact with them, as long as the method works for both parties.
Personal touch
When you are hiring an account manager, make sure you place a higher priority on seeking out people who are likable and empathetic instead of getting someone who is overly organized and far too serious about marketing. While having a skilled account manager is essential for the success of your business, you want to make sure they are a people person at foremost. Account managers hold a critical role they must play in customer retention, and including a personal touch to their approach will make a whole lot of difference.
Your account manager should be empowered and motivated to surprise their clients regularly, by either sending them a birthday gift, or holiday gift, taking them out to lunch, or solely getting touch with them over the phone to check in and offer any advice they may currently need. There are a variety of ways you can include a personal touch to your customer interaction with your agency.
This all comes down to reciprocity, which is something that occurs naturally to most people. If someone does something helpful for you, there is a chance you’ll return that favor and do something kind for them. This is one of the main reasons why personal touches will have a massive impact on your customer retention rate.
Conclusion
Customer retention is the key for any business to succeed out there no matter what industry they may be involved in, and that’s especially true for digital marketing agencies. We rely on our customers to approach us and allow us to provide them with the assistance they need to take their business to a whole new level.
To pull this off, you’ll need to make sure you are not only providing them with the work you’ve promised, but ensure you stay in touch with them, letting them know your team is doing everything they can to meet their business objectives. If your client is satisfied with the work you’ve done, then they’ll most likely recontract you on the spot. Hopefully, this article has managed to give you ideas on how to improve your customer retention strategy.
