If you want to run a great digital marketing agency, your number one job is to keep clients happy and coming back. Sadly, this can be a very hard thing to do.

Some of your digital marketing services, like paid search, make it easy to show early on how valuable you are. During the first couple of months, it’s usually clear to clients that they’re getting their money’s worth, whether it’s from all the hard work that goes into an account buildout or from all the cleaning up that comes with an account takeover.

But then you hit a scary peak that account managers know all too well. Once an account is up and running, it’s hard to keep improving at the same rate you did at the beginning.

PPCers know that this is nothing to worry about, but customers don’t usually feel the same way. So, how do marketing firms keep their customers for a long time? The trick is to work on keeping clients long before you run your first ad and to keep doing that as long as you have a relationship with them.

These 10 tips will help you keep your clients for longer so that you don’t have to keep making new sales just to stay even.

What does it mean to keep a client, and how do I measure it?

The steps you take to keep a client happy and working with your agency can be called “client retention.”

What is Client Retention and How Do I Measure It?

To figure out customer retention, divide the total number of customers at the end of the chosen period by the total number of customers at the beginning of the chosen period. Don’t forget to take into account any new customers you get during the time period. We don’t want to make a list of them.

The steps you take to keep a client happy and working with your agency can be called “client retention.”

Customer retention is another business metric that looks at how many people your agency keeps over a certain amount of time.

To figure out customer retention, divide the total number of customers at the end of the chosen period by the total number of customers at the beginning of the chosen period. Don’t forget to take into account any new customers you get during the time period. We don’t want to make a list of them.

Client retention rate is a good measure to look at once a month or once every three months. Some customers will leave, but if your retention rate goes down, you need to figure out why.

Why is Client Retention So Important for Your Agency?

If you think of money as water, churn is the water that leaks out of the holes in the bucket, and retention is what you do to stop the water from leaking. If your efforts to keep customers fail, you’ll have to keep adding new sales to keep the bucket from running dry. And it will be hard for the service to grow.

Not only does losing clients hurt your sales, but it also hurts your image. Unhappy customers often go out into the world and write bad reviews or talk about how unhappy they are. Any customer you lose can cost you a lot of new ones in the future.

And finally, if you don’t keep your customers, your prices can go through the roof. Why? Because getting a new client and getting them started is a lot more work than keeping an old one. So, even if you close enough new deals to keep your top line the same, your bottom line will still go down.

10 Tips to Boost Client Retention

Keeping clients is a full-cycle process. It begins before you sign a client and goes on for as long as they work with your business.

Tip 1: Qualify New Clients Thoroughly

Not every deal is worth finishing, especially if the client is hard to work with or leaves quickly. So, the first tip for keeping clients is to qualify leads and get rid of the ones that aren’t likely to work.

To qualify prospects, you’ll make a list of traits that describe the ideal client for your business. Among the things to think about are:

• Industry
• Company size
• Previous experience with paid ads
• Advertising budget

You can add to this list by looking at people who haven’t done well in the past and figuring out what they all had in common. You might find out that a certain type of B2C client has a high rate of failure and should be sent to other companies in the future.

Tip 2: Set Proper Expectations

If you’ve been in charge of PPC marketing for a while, you know that exponential growth can’t last forever. Make sure your next customer knows that results from paid advertising tend to go up and down.

One way to do this is to make a graph that hides your clients’ names and shows how their normal results change over time. Point out the parts of the graph that show the predicted bump in growth at the beginning, followed by the more stable growth over time.

You can also set standards for things like how often you will communicate, what your ads will be about, and how much they will cost. What you think surprised a client in the past could be something you describe to a new client.

Tip 3: Provide an Excellent Onboarding Experience

During the onboarding process, you set the tone for the rest of your connection with the client. If you set the right tone right away, your client will be happy and eager to work with you. If something goes wrong in the future, you’ll also be able to handle it.

The kickoff call is a key part of a good onboarding process. Here are some things you should do on that call:

• Introduce the client to the person(s) that will manage their ads and communication
• Confirm the expectations set during the sales process
• Gather or confirm access to accounts, contact details, and communication channels
• Review the process or workflow

A quiz for new employees is also a good idea. That will give you something to look back on when you start the work.

Tip 4: Understand Your Client’s Business Goals

You can’t give your clients great results if you don’t fully understand their business and company goals. That will help you not only get better results but also answer questions in a more useful way.

Also, if you know more about your client’s business, you’ll be able to put digital marketing results in the context of their larger business goals. Your work will be more important to their team, and you’ll be able to keep the client better.

You can learn in a formal way, like by filling out a survey, or in a casual way, by having regular chats. Ask about their competitors, their growth, their past, and who has led them. Then, follow them on social media to find out what they talk about.

Tip 5: Get to Know Your Clients Personally

People who do digital marketing for a job are a bit like chameleons. When it comes to bidding strategy, we’re like mathematicians. When it comes to ad writing, we’re like creative writers. And when it comes to setting up tracking codes, we’re like developers.

Yet, how often do we see ourselves as people who help customers? This part of the job is overlooked by far too many people, which is a dangerous mistake.

It can help a lot if you take the time to get to know your clients well. Instead of fearing check-in calls, they’ll be excited to talk to you and tell you what’s going on with their business. Even more important, these human connections can make it more likely that clients will stay with you even if their accounts don’t do well. They’ll be more likely to be patient with you as you try to fix things and more likely to let you off the hook when things go wrong with your account.

Begin small. Learn your clients’ birthdays and what they like to do for fun. Other easy things to talk about are favorite sports teams and foods. Add this to their file and look at it before you call.

Tip 6: Communicate Proactively

Opening up a line of contact with clients right from the start pays off.

Ask account managers to meet with clients regularly, not just to give progress updates but also to find out what’s going on in the client’s business. By talking to them, you’ll find out what’s important to them, which will let you change your plan to meet their needs.

These talks are also a great time to tell your clients about new strategies and experiments. If you can build trust with the client before you give them new ideas, they are more likely to be willing to give them a try. When you have their support, even if the new method doesn’t produce the results you wanted, they’ll be patient while you work to get performance back on track.

When you can, try to share information ahead of time. Even more so if things like reports or processes are changed. Or if you think the results might be a brief blip, like a dip during the winter. A little fair warning will stop a bad surprise in its tracks.

Tip 7: Open the Black Box and Educate Your Clients

Now, most of the people who hire you don’t need or want to be experts in digital marketing. If they did, they wouldn’t need you. But there is plenty of room to explain in easy terms how a keyword auction works.

Why take the time to show your customers what goes on behind the scenes of your advertising? For one thing, it will make analytics easy to explain. With some background information, your clients will be more accepting when the leads from January don’t match the ones from July.

When you are clear about how you do things, you also build trust and add value. They’ll get a taste of how much PPC or marketing understanding your job requires. If they think about doing it themselves, that will make it easier for you to keep them as a client.

Tip 8: Collect Client Feedback

Instead of worrying about whether or not your clients are happy with your services, just ask them straight out. This is a great chance to find out what they think about how your company is doing, and it also shows that you care about giving them a good experience.

Whether they are happy or not, they will be glad to be heard. If they are happy kids, which is great, you can be sure that they are stable for now. If they’re unhappy with your services, they need to let you know. Once you know there’s a problem, you can talk to them about why they’re upset and figure out how to fix things.

There are many ways to get this information. Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys are often used to find out how happy clients are. NPS is a measure of customer loyalty in which customers are asked a single question: “How likely is it that you would recommend [Your Agency] to a friend or colleague?” Their answer is on a range from 1 to 10.

Many people find that these numbers are directly related to the lifetime value of a customer. If a customer gives a score of 9 or 10, they are called a promoter. 7s and 8s are neutral, which means they don’t have a high risk of leaving, but they do need extra care to get them into the “safe” zone. If a customer scores less than a 7, they are a detractor, and you need to make a plan right away to get them back on the right track.

Even though it’s helpful to collect this information, the best thing about these polls is that they get people talking about how they feel and what you can do to better serve them.

Tip 9: Prove Your Success With Regular Reporting

One of the best ways to keep a client is to show them how far you’ve come with hard numbers.

Reporting is, of course, a regular way for agencies to keep clients. In fact, this is probably part of the deal you have with the person who wants to hire you. The trouble is that far too many of them don’t get it right.

Making papers that are focused on the client is hard. Most of your clients won’t know a lot about the terms used in digital marketing. Even if they understand the basic terms, they might not know how each measure affects the others. So, your papers should help them see how everything fits together.

A good report should be easy for the client to understand and important to them. Find out what KPIs are important to them first. Then you should connect the data in your reports to their goals.

Tip 10: Know Your Competitors

There are a lot of companies that do internet marketing. You can’t memorize them all. But you can look at a few ads, websites, and products regularly to see how you compare.

Let’s say there’s a new trend to bill clients in your niche market in a different way. If you don’t handle it in your own client plans, you could lose new clients.

A simple Google search is a quick way to find out what your clients are up to.

You’ll quickly see how your rivals describe their services and if they’re offering a special price. Then look at a few of their websites and maybe even use Ahrefs, Spyfu, or SEMRush to figure out their keyword plan.

Client Retention Should Be a Constant

When you get a new client, you feel a certain amount of joy. This is why so many companies put a lot of effort into getting new customers, even though it takes a lot of time and money.

Even though keeping a customer may not give you the same rush, it does give your business a huge boost. Especially when you think about how cheap it is to use strategies to keep clients.

Here are 10 easy ways to keep customers that you can start using right away:

• Qualify new clients thoroughly
• Set proper expectations
• Create an excellent onboarding experience
• Understand your client’s business goals
• Get to know your clients personally
• Communicate proactively
• Educate your clients
• Get your clients’ feedback
• Prove your success with regular reporting
• Know your competitors

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