3 Ways to IMPROVE CLIENT RETENTION & Reduce Churn In Your Marketing Agency | Seven Figure Agency

I want to share 3 easy tweaks you can make in your agency to dramatically reduce your churn. So if you'd like to reduce your churn and increase your client retention, you're going to want to watch this video. So we all know when it comes to growing and scaling our digital marketing agency, we have to land clients But we also have to retain the clients that we have, and we want to retain those clients at the highest level possible. And I'm the author of the book, The Client Retention Handbook for Digital Marketing Agencies. I've studied retention strategies and churn strategies within our business ad nauseam. I spent a lot of time thinking about what are the, the simple tweaks that we made in our agency and that we've suggested other agencies make that have had the biggest impact. And so retrospectively, the number one thing I truly believe that will have the biggest impact on your ability to retain is to— the, the clients that you choose to work with, the clients that you choose to focus on. So within a niche-based agency, right, we work with plumbing and HVAC companies. We could choose to work with anybody that runs a plumbing and HVAC company, right? Could be a one-man operator, could be a multi-million dollar plumbing and HVAC enterprise, or a $10 million plumbing and HVAC enterprise. And when we started our agency, we were working with the entire spectrum, right? And a lot of our clients were on the smaller side. They were the one-man operator, the guy that was answering the phones but also doing the plumbing work in the field. And when that was the client that we tended to work with most, we had super high churn, right? Because those clients don't have a great operational infrastructure. They don't have a true business mindset. They don't have a team that's helping to support what they do in their businesses. They aren't necessarily really successful business people. And when we recognize that and say, hey, you know what, in the, in the vast array of clients we could work with, there's also companies doing at least a million dollars per year. So in the plumbing space, on a million-dollar plumbing or HVAC business, typically has at least 3 to 5 trucks, right? They've got somebody in the office that answers the phone. The owner is no longer the person answering the phone, driving the truck, and the house, turning the wrench. They're— they've got a true business enterprise. They've already spent money on marketing. They, they're willing to invest to grow. And obviously, when we started working with those types of clients and we generated tangible, measurable results, those clients tended to value what we brought to the table, to stay with us longer, to, you know, have respect for what it is that we were doing for them from a marketing perspective. And so I want you to think in your own mind, as you think about the clients that you work with, that you could work with, are you going after the higher side of the market or the bottom of the market? I can tell you, if all we did at Plumbing and HVAC SEO was work with one-man operators, smaller operators, we would probably have like a 20 or 30% monthly churn just because that's the nature of the beast on that side of the equation. We're working with the larger companies, the million to $10 million plus businesses, much more established. Again, we, we tend to average about a 90, 97, and 98% retention, right? And I think choosing to work with the higher side of the market regardless of the other things you do, from delivery, from how you come out of the gate, will absolutely reduce your churn. So that's tip number 1. Tweak number 2 would be go longer-term commitment, right? When we sell these services, we have the choice to say, hey, this is going to be month to month, let's see how it goes, or to say, hey, look, we're going to do a lot of work on your behalf and we want to have long-term business relationships. Let's commit to work together for a year. Let's give this a full 1-year commitment. And when you choose to come into the business relationship setting a long-term time horizon, setting that expectation on the front end, logically, the clients are gonna be more bought in. They're gonna stick with you longer. And as I think back on Plumbing and HVAC SEO, we were month to month, right? So as we were growing, as we were scaling, It was, hey, look, we're gonna build a website, we're gonna do the SEO, we're gonna get you results. We're so confident in what we bring to the table that if you're not happy, you can cancel any time, right? And you can keep everything. It was a strong value proposition for the client, but it really set the expectation that, hey, this may or may not work out. You know, if you wanna cancel, just let me know. We'll, we'll stop things outright. And at some point in the business, we decided, Well, if we're gonna build the website, we're gonna do the SEO, we're gonna invest this time and the energy, why not set the expectation that it's gonna be an annual commitment? And I fought that, I struggled with it for quite some time 'cause I really liked the month-to-month idea. And one of my mentors at the time said, look, it's gonna improve your retention. It's not going to reduce the amount of clients that you can sell. And you can always negotiate down, right? If the client is interested in doing business and the term is a problem, you can always say, hey, look, in your case, I'll bring it to 3 months, or I'll bring it to 6 months. And you can negotiate those on a situation-by-situation. And so I decided to test it. Let's give it a whirl. We added that little term to our agreement. We're going to do annual contracts. What we found was Very, very rarely does anybody have any concern about the annual contract. And when they do, we negotiate it, right? Uh, one out of 10 potentially. But we also found that because we were selling into a longer time horizon, the clients gave us the time to build up our strategy. They gave us the grace to get things off the ground. And yes, obviously we're doing our best to generate quick wins. Yes, we're doing our best to show our value as early as possible. But just the mental framing for that client is long-term versus short-term. And so in your agency, if you're selling a 30-day trial, if you're selling a no-risk money guarantee and you've got massive churn, you may consider just changing the dynamic, right? And setting different expectations. This little tweak can have a huge impact on your retention, the consistency of your revenue, and ultimately the profitability of your agency. Okay, number 3 strategy, a quick tweak that you can make that will massively reduce your churn is to have a more comprehensive program. So if you're running an agency today that just does Facebook ads or just does SEO or just does content, we found that lends itself to a very high churn rate, right? Because if you're just doing Facebook ads and that's the only play that you have, maybe you can spin it up quickly, maybe you can start to get some wins. But if something changes in the algorithm, if something doesn't go quite right, they're either not getting results or they're like, hey, you know what, I'm gonna turn off the ads. 'Cause they see you just as their Facebook ads lead provider versus you have a more comprehensive approach, right? Let's just say instead of just doing Facebook ads, you decide, you know what, We're gonna build the website, we're gonna do some on-page SEO, we're gonna run Facebook ads, we're gonna run Google ads, we're gonna bring a comprehensive solution that is absolutely going to generate tangible, measurable results within your business. That does a lot of things, right? First of all, you can charge more because you've got more, more that you're bringing to the table. But second of all, you've got more hooks into the client. You're adding significantly more value And so they wouldn't look at you just as the SEO provider or just the Facebook ads provider. They'd look at you as their marketing partner that's bringing this comprehensive strategy to the table. And when you've got more hooks, it's much harder for them to say, you know, hey look, I, I'm not seeing results from the SEO thing right now. Let's pull that, right? And you can more consistently generate a tangible, measurable return, right? Which at the end of the day, the true reason they're gonna stay is because you're helping them win. Right? Because you're generating a tangible, measurable return on investment. And so sometimes the Facebook ads thing kicks off and it generates some leads, but the average cost per lead is high. But because we've doing some SEO and we got the website ranked, now they start to get some organic traffic, some branded traffic, some lead flow that we're helping them generate. And, and maybe we're putting marketing automation in place. And so the leads that they're getting from the organic traffic and from the other marketing channels, we're helping them convert more of those leads. We're helping them reengage their past customer base to get more repeat and referral business. And, you know, in addition to that, we turn on retargeting. So we're able to advertise more effectively to the people that have gone to their website or gotten to their landing pages. And so you can see by taking a more comprehensive approach, you can get a more tangible, measurable return on investment. Your average cost per lead across the different sources you're bringing to the table can be significantly less. And so it's easier to charge more, it's easier to show your value, and it's really a lot more sticky with the client, and you can feel more confident you're actually gonna knock it outta the park for the client. So this probably isn't a simple tweak that you can put in place, but if you're willing to modify the value that you bring to your client, that's significantly gonna impact your churn rate and improve your client retention. And so, you know, that's just a couple of the basic tweaks that you can make. Strategically to improve your client retention. We've got this client retention formula that talks about the onboarding process, the communication process, and kind of success management as you build out the team. I've got a great checklist that walks you through how to maximize client retention. I'd like to get that in your hands completely free of charge. You can access it by going to 7figureagency.com/retention-workbook. That's retention-workbook. You'll find a checklist, and a training that walks you through the client retention model that we found really effectively to kind of get that churn rate into the 2 or 3% range or less. So hopefully that helps. Let me know in the comments which of these 3 tweaks, just drop a number 1, number 2, or number 3, you can or will implement within your agency. And if you got value from today's video, please hit the like button. If you know another agency owner that can benefit, from one of these 3 tweaks, please share it with them. And thanks so much for watching. We'll talk to you again soon.