Maximizing Client Retention: Your Blueprint for Agency Success

This is the 7 Figure Agency Podcast. Discover the strategies and techniques to grow a highly successful and profitable digital marketing agency with your host, Joshua Nelson. What's up, digital marketing agency owners? On today's video, I wanna talk about your 2024 client retention strategy and the key things you can do in 2024 to maximize retention, reduce churn, and accelerate the growth of your digital marketing agency. Agency. And there's a model that I, I really believe in. I unpack in our book, The Client Retention Handbook, called the, the model for maximum client retention. It boils down to 3 key things you have to get dialed in that will massively improve your retention and reduce that churn rate. Number 1 is you've got to have world-class onboarding. The way you come out of the gates with your clients in the first 24 hours, in the first week, and in the first month will dictate how they feel about you and ultimately whether they're with you a year down the track. Really, getting your onboarding dialed in is that important. Number 2 is your communication process, the way you communicate with the client. The way you show them what you're doing and kind of bring you along on the journey will determine whether they're, they're plugged in and they don't like kind of just white noise you and disappear after a certain period of time. And then number 3 is your success management process. How you manage the clients through a team so you don't personally have to be involved in all of the day-to-day communication with your clients and the monthly reporting and everything else. So when it comes to onboarding, there's 3 key things we tend to focus on. Number 1 is we wanna make sure we kick off with a bang and appreciation. So for us, that's sending a welcome gift, a welcome box in the mail. It's dropping Sherry's Berries in the mail. So they just signed up and they've had a great sales process. If you're doing things the way we like to show you how to do, they've had a great process, they've just signed up, and we wanna make sure right after that they get a confirmation in the email, kind of restating they made a good decision, A personal message from you as the owner saying, "Hey, thanks so much for your business. I saw you just signed up. I know Tony took good care of you," whoever the salesperson on your team is. "Excited about working with you." And then you want to drop Sherry's Berries in the mail, which means that gets to them quick. Within 24 hours or less, they get a gift that's like, "Hey, super excited about working with you." And then within that first week, they get a box that's branded with your stuff on it, kind of painting expectations. When you come out of the gates in that way, they're not expecting any of those touchpoints. And so that's why I place a big emphasis on that. Number 2 is we've gotta make the collection of the data that we need in order to do what we do as seamless as possible. 'Cause this can be a friction point, right? In order to launch our service with the client, we've gotta get access to their domain, we've gotta get all of their services, we've gotta understand their USP, we have their logo and pictures, we gotta get logins to their online directory. So there's lots of things we need to capture. And so you want to really think that process through. You want to boil it down to a couple of forms they could submit, a couple of questionnaires your account managers can go through with them on the call, so that this becomes, rather than a point of friction, it becomes a really smooth, natural process. We're like, wow, that was so easy. They've got everything they need, and your team can hit the ground running. And then number 3 is we've got to engineer quick wins. Regardless of what your program looks like, you're doing SEO and pay-per-click and social media and funnels, oftentimes we launch the client, we put them through our project management system, there's a million little tasks to do, right? Ordering content or writing content, setting up websites, designing comps, and that stuff's happening. The client may or may not know that's happening. And even if they do, what do they care about? They care about, is my phone gonna ring? Am I gonna get some sales? How long is this gonna take before I start to see a return on my investment? And so you can engineer quick wins by saying, hey, what can we do in the first week that would generate a lead or a sale? What can we do in the first couple of weeks that would provide a tangible, measurable win for the client? Some of the quick wins we found that work best: launch a paid search campaign, right? Whether that's Facebook Ads, Google Ads, LSA, turn on a campaign that will start to drive traffic that the client's paying, obviously, for. That can generate some quick wins while you're doing the rest of the things. Do a database reactivation campaign. Get the names and email addresses of their past customers. Load them into your HighLevel account and send out an offer to their past customers to get those client win-backs, those customer win-backs. Just be intentional about how you create a tangible, measurable result within the first couple of weeks. It will make a big difference in addition to everything else that you do. So that's world-class onboarding. From there, when it comes to effective communication, we want to make sure we're not over-reporting and we're not hiding behind the technology. So number 1, we want to make sure we dial in some strategic reporting and KPIs. And in my mind, your client cares about one thing: did you generate a return on investment for me? Right? Yes, we want to drive links. Yes, we want to drive citations. Yes, we want to move up rankings. Yes, we want more traffic. But at the end of the day, what they care about is how much did I spend, how many leads did I generate, and is there a return on investment? Right? If so, high fives, keep going. Right? And so you— while you want to have all that other reporting available for your internal team, you want to have it available, you want to make sure you get an easy way to show your client how much they spent, how many leads they got, what their cost per lead is, and what the return on investment is. This makes a big difference, where they can clearly cut through the noise and see what did you actually do, what's the impact of what you're bringing to the table. You also want to think through your meeting rhythm. If they're going to pay you on a monthly basis, regardless of how good your onboarding is, there needs to be a communication rhythm where you're meeting with the client, you're showing them what's happening, you're going through the reports, you're answering questions, and you're seeding the vision for what's coming next and where we're headed in this business relationship together. All too often I see agencies feel like no news is good news, right? Oh, you know what, they haven't called us, it's been a couple months, we'll just let it run, right? Or they wanna hide behind the technology in that they've got like AgencyAnalytics or one of these other tools that sends a report every month and it's like, hey, that automation's taking care of the game. That's a recipe for high churn, right? You wanna make sure you've got a communication rhythm, whether it's weekly or whether it's monthly or whether it's quarterly, where you're meeting with the clients, you're showing them where you're headed, and you're showing them what's next. And you're always seeding the vision. There's so much competition in this agency space. Even if you're amazing at what you do, your client is getting calls, they're getting emails, they're getting drop-ins from other agencies that wanna get their business. That's showing them the next technology that's on the horizon, that's getting them excited about this shiny object over here. And if you're not consistently meeting with the client and seeing the vision of, hey, here's where we're at right now, you told me the goal is to get to here, here's what we're working on next, Here's what we're doing with the website or with the SEO or with the paid strategy to seed the vision for where that business relationship is headed. If you are not doing that, you will churn clients. They just have too many other possibilities and too many other organizations they could do business with. And then number 3, to really improve and maximize your client retention, is we have to have great client success management. You know, as you grow and as you scale, you can't manage those client relationships. It will become a bottleneck for you. You'll be— you wind up being busy just talking to clients and going through reports. And so after removing yourself from operations, the second position I recommend you remove yourself from is account management. And so as part of your client success management process, you need to learn how you're going to recruit and train account managers. You also need to be tracking your retention, tracking your churn. You need to have a quick dial on what's our churn rate this month, what's our churn rate this quarter, You can't improve what you don't measure. So you're gonna have a mechanism in place to track. You need to have KPIs, key performance indicators, that you're looking at on a consistent basis as it relates to the account management side of the equation. What percentage of the clients had their monthly meeting? What percentage of their clients might be in a frustrated state right now, like not getting the results that they're after? You need to know those KPIs, and I suggest putting some type of traffic light system in place where you can see at a bird's eye view especially once you're past 25 or 30 clients, where you can see on 3 columns, who are my clients? Which ones are green, which ones are yellow, and which ones are red? So that you can make sure you prioritize those clients, they get the attention that they need, and you can retain at the highest level possible. I find when you get this dialed in, you think about your 2024 client retention strategy, make sure you've got world-class onboarding, make sure you've got a great effective communication process, which includes your reporting, which includes kind of what that monthly review looks like, And then make sure that you've thought through that success management process so that you can manage the account management team as you grow and as you scale. Couple of benchmarks to shoot for from a client retention perspective in 2024. Shoot for a 97% monthly retention, which means you churn no more than 3% in a given month. 95% is still solid. So if you're churning a 5% or less, Still solid. Once you get to less than 95%, so you start to churn 6, 7, 8% or more any given month, that's a red flag. It's a red flag that says, "Mm, maybe something's off," in terms of maybe how we're selling it, or the deliverable that we've got, or the, the account management process. Potentially, there's a red flag, 'cause you're losing way too many clients at that stage in the game. I think if you're churning more than 10%, which means your retention is less than 90% a month, you should just pause sales. And I never suggest pausing sales, but more than 10% a month, you should pause sales and re-engineer. Re-engineer the niche, re-engineer the service offering, figure out what's wrong, because that's way too many clients going out the back door for you to ever have consistent growth and momentum within your agency. And so this— I just wanted to show this visual of what a client, um, bird's-eye view client success tracking board would look like. You could do this on HighLevel, you could do this on Trello, if you use Trello Teamwork, these systems give you the ability to put all, all of your clients that would be green, all of your clients that would be yellow, all of your clients that would be red, and it's easy for you as the owner, or it's easy for your director of account management to meet with the team on a weekly basis and see who's happy, good, those high fives, let's make sure we keep them there. Who's kind of yellow because they're not engaging or they're not getting great results, and who's red, like who's already just said like, they're gonna give us 30 more days, or they're asking for usernames and passwords, or they're just getting a really bad result in terms of rankings or return on investment. And this way you can prioritize those clients and give them additional attention to move them back to green. Find it's really, really beneficial. I suggest you set something like this up going into 2024 so you can have a bird's-eye view of your clients and quickly be able to address them as they go. So there's your 2024 Client retention strategy, lots of things to think about, lots of things to focus on. I've got a great resource I wanna make available to you, and that's our client retention checklist that walks you through the key things you wanna focus on. Onboarding, monthly reporting, client success management. And you can access that by going to 7figureagency.com/retention-workbook. There you'll get the checklist, the workbook, and some additional training on how to set up your client retention strategy. For 2024. That's it for today. I hope you get value. If you got some good insights or ideas from this video, please hit the like button. Be sure to subscribe for future videos, and thanks for watching. I'll talk to you soon.