The Ultimate Guide to Client Relationship Management in Digital Marketing Agencies | Boost Retention

Today I'm going to dive into the critical aspect of client relationship and account management for your digital marketing agency. So if you want to retain clients longer, you want to reduce your churn, you're going to want to watch this video. So when it comes to client relationship management, I think it's really important to understand You have to craft a world-class experience, but you also have to deliver results, and you have to make sure that the client feels understood, they feel cared for, that they're met with right in between. I really think there's this balance between delivering results and the client experience and the services that you offer. If you deliver amazing results, but you create a negative experience where they, they they don't feel like you care, they don't feel like you're engaging, you're gonna lose the client, regardless of how good the results are. On the other side of that spectrum, if you've got great relationship with the client, you're almost like best friends and you're sending them goodies and they love you, but there's no results, you're gonna lose them as well. So you really have to understand that it's about meeting expectations, delivering great results, but also crafting a world-class experience. We've got this client retention formula that we use, and we kinda unpacked in the book, The Client Retention Handbook, and there's really 3 key things that you need to put in place to maximize your retention and have great client relations. Number 1 is we have to have world-class onboarding, the way we come out of the gates with the client. We have to have effective communication, the monthly reporting, the meeting rituals and things like that. And then we've gotta have great success management, the KPIs that we look at, how we train and onboard account managers, and really how we, how we track how things are going on a client-by-client basis. Today I want to really focus on this client retention and client relationship management aspect of the business, which is right here on effective communication. And really, I think it starts with understanding we need to, we need to build strategic reporting and KPIs for the client. Yes, they, they need to understand that we care. Yes, we need to be doing little things that they're not expecting to create great, um, a great personal relationship. But if you're not reporting the right things and they don't feel like, okay, I'm spending this amount of money and I'm getting this amount of return, they're going to quickly disengage, right? Because they feel like there's a cognitive dissonance between what they were expecting and what they're getting. And so spend some time as you think about your client relationship management process getting clear what they really want. And from a reporting perspective, what I believe and what I found to be the case is they don't really need to know as much about the keyword rankings, the links, the, the really detailed minutia, um, even the analytics data. What they need to know, what they care about for the most part, is how much did I spend, how many leads did I generate, what's my return on investment, right? If you can Do that, in most cases you're gonna win. Now, should you run a ranking report? Yes. Should you have analytics? Absolutely. Should you have the deeper dive data on your, you know, your paid search and your different strategies that you put in place? Yes. But make sure that you're reporting the key things the client really needs and wants to know. Second to that is the monthly rhythm and the way that you communicate with your clients. What we found is if you're charging a retainer fee, of $1,000, $2,000, $5,000 or more on a monthly basis, the client expects some type of ongoing communication, right? Even if you're amazing and you've just knocked it out of the park for the clients, if you don't communicate that to them, if you're not showing them what they're— what you guys are up to, if you aren't seeing the vision on where things are headed next, they're going to leave, right? Because they've got so many different options, so many different people that are trying to get their business. And so while you're doing your work and while you're generating the results and while you're tracking that, be able to show them, hey, here's what the results are. Be sure that you, you figure out what that rhythm is for you. What we find works best is a standing meeting every single month with the client with the preset agenda of, hey, here's what we talked about last time, here's what we got done, here's what the reporting's telling us. Get the feedback from the client and then cast the vision. Hey, here's what we're headed off. Here's where we're headed over the next 90 days. Here's some goals, here's some specific outcomes we're gonna work on, here's some specific things you can work on. And when you do that and you've got a good communication rhythm, the client will understand the results, they'll feel like they're in a partnership and there's a clear direction, right? They're gonna leave due to perceived indifference, which means you just went radio silent and you haven't checked in with them at all, or they feel like your vision for the relationship, they've outgrown it, right? And it's time to move on to somebody else. And so you can be very intentional with how you see the, the vision and how you have that communication rhythm. And please don't feel like you need to do this yourself. As the owner within the agency, you've got a lot of things you need to focus on: growing the business, delivering the results, managing the team. If you're the person that meets with every client and has this review process, eventually you're gonna cap out. Usually it's around 25 or so clients where you're like, you know what, it's too much work. I either have to stop taking on new clients or I have to start to hire, right? I have to start to put a team in place. And that's where success management comes into place. This is one of those positions you want to remove yourself from and have a great team that's been trained, that knows how to go through this process and knows how to keep the clients engaged so that you can focus on being the CEO go. You can focus on the things that are going to move the needle for your business, as well as your clients, as well as the innovation that you bring to the table. Some good benchmarks to look at for client account management and, and retention as a whole is you want to be shooting for 97%+ monthly retention. And you should be tracking this down to the month, down to the quarter, down to the year. We have a thing called the Sales Retention Tracking Sheet that we have all our members use, that we use religiously within our business, that makes it really easy to see how many clients did we churn this month, and what is our retention rate. A good benchmark we wanna be shooting for 97% plus. 95%, now that we've worked with several hundred agencies across a variety of different niches and verticals, we find 95% is pretty average. And you're not doing terrible. Like, at 95%, you're, you're pretty much in the industry norms. So I don't want you to, like, go crazy if you drop to 95%. Shoot for 97%, right? Dial in the onboarding, dial in the communication process, dial in the deliverables. You should be able to get 97% or higher. I think where it starts to become a red flag is if you're, you're less than 95%, so which means you're churning more than 5% any given month. That's an indication there may be something wrong with the account management, what's being sold, how it's being sold, or some other aspect of what you're doing for your clients. If you're churning more than 10% a month, which means your retention is less than 90, that's a huge red flag. I mean, just a massive red flag. Something's wrong. I, I don't ever recommend pausing sales, but if you're churning more than 90%, it's probably time to go re-engineer the offer, re-engineer the deliverable, something's drastically wrong because we want to be really at 95% at a minimum in terms of our monthly retention rate. And so since this video is all around account management and, and client relationship management, ongoing customer communication process, I really believe it should be done on a monthly basis via live communication where possible. So ideally that's on Zoom or it's on a phone call where you can share screens, you can have a detailed conversation. Doesn't have to go hours and hours. Could be 30 to 45 minutes with a set agenda where the client's perceiving the value of what you're doing, but they're also getting value. I find that sometimes the clients disengage from these review calls because they're— the account manager's just regurgitating the report, right? And if you do that enough, they're gonna be like, "Well, I get a report. I can just read it myself." You need to make sure it's strategic conversation, that there's some discussion around the future, there's some discussion around feedback from them that's informing the outcome. So really engineer that into the process. We want to review the progress, the rankings, the analytics, the calls, discuss what we need from them, right? Don't make it a one-way conversation. On these meetings, we want to also ask, hey, we could use some more pictures. Hey, what are some events and things that you guys are plugging into? Hey, you know, we've got this platform in place where we're trying to help you guys build reviews, we need you to do XYZ in order to make that work. Give them some homework, that way it's not a one-way conversation, it's a give and a take. You're working, you're driving strategy, you're bringing up issues, but you're also giving them some things to do that they can bring to the table to elevate the outcomes. Um, and then be sure you've got a fallback strategy. Every once in a while the client won't be able to meet. Or there's certain clients that just don't have the bandwidth and they don't want to meet, and that's okay. That doesn't mean you can disengage from this process. Have a tracking mechanism where every client you can see, we've emailed them, we've touched them, we've requested the meeting, and we've either met or we haven't. And then at the end of the month, the ones that you haven't met with, at a minimum, send a quick Loom video recapping. Hey, sorry, I know you're busy this month. I wanted to show you this is the outcomes. This is what we're working on. This is what we need for you. This is where we're going next. If you do that, the client's gonna understand what you're doing. They're gonna see that you're trying and that you're bringing value to the table every single month. And then, at the end of the meeting, be sure they're clear, like, here's where we're going next. Here's the plan for the next 30, 60, 90 days. And schedule that next meeting. I'm always surprised how many agency owners, they're like, well, I met with them, but then We said we meet again next month. Well, at the end of every call, you should schedule the next call because you're gonna get busy, they're gonna get busy. Just go ahead and schedule it, and that way it's in the calendar. Maybe even just make it a repeated meeting that's every third Thursday of every month at 4 o'clock, and you guys just move that if you need to when the time comes up. So some KPIs from a client account management perspective that you want to focus on: what percentage of your clients did you meet with this month? If you've got 10 clients and you met with 10, that's 100%. If you got 100 clients and you met with 90, right, you need to know for you and your account managers what percent did you meet with. And there's a great monthly touches tracking mechanism that we use that help us see all our clients, how many we touched, what percentage did our meeting, and what percentage we sent the monthly recap to. That makes it easy to track these KPIs. I think the client should be touched at least twice per month. Right? They should get an email, they should get another email or text message. Um, that way they know you're reaching out and they can never be like, "Oh, you guys just ghosted me," or, "You went radio silent." That's in addition to the automatic report. So if you've got an automatic report that goes out, that doesn't count as a touch. That's an automatic mechanism. Uh, percentage of clients that we sent the monthly recap to or had a meaningful meeting with. Um, and then what percentage of clients are net promoters that would say, I would, I would happily refer you to somebody else on a scale from 9 to 10. If you're tracking these KPIs, these are the actual things that are going to drive the improved retention where you can get to that 97%+ monthly retention. I also recommend from a client relation management perspective, having some type of tracking mechanism where you can see all the clients on a dashboard and see which ones are green, These are our happy clients. Which ones are yellow, like maybe there's something a little bit off? Which ones are red, like we think they're gonna cancel, like they're red zone clients? And then have a meeting rhythm where you and/or your team or your account management director is looking at all the accounts and kind of shuffling them based on where they sit so that you can prioritize. Hey, these red clients, what can we do? Like, what can, can we reach out? Can we send them something? Should we do something differently on their strategy and show them what we're up to? What can we do to get ahead of that red situation and turn it green. Simple concept, but has big ramifications on how you manage your clients and how you're going to retain over time. So hopefully this has been helpful. So the key strategies you need to put in place to, to be world-class with your client retention and your client communication and account management processes. I've got a great checklist that I put together that walks you through the key things you can do to maximize your client retention You can access that by going to 7figureagency.com/retention-workbook. That's 7figureagency.com/retention-workbook. If you've got follow-up questions, post them in the comments. If you got value, hit the like button and be sure to subscribe for future videos. Cannot wait to see how you implement this in your agency, elevate your client relations, elevate your account management process, and ultimately improve your retention.