Acquiring new clients is an ongoing activity that must continue as long as you do business. However, if you do not focus enough on client retention, you are putting your brand image, health and growth of your business at stake.
A loyal clientele that always sticks to your offerings not only assures you recurring business, it also speaks for your business and helps bring in more new clients. If your client retention rate is comfortably high, you will not need to waste your time, energy and resources towards marketing efforts. Instead, you can focus on growing your business and providing value to your loyal customers.
Client retention is a decisive factor in achieving sustainability, which in turn will secure your revenue flow. Business scenarios are often unpredictable. Sometimes, you may happen to lose your clients despite your best efforts. However, good degree of client retention is vital to decide your success in your industry.
Client retention has become an important topic over the recent years. In today’s competitive business climate, agencies are finding it a big challenge to get new clients. So, if you do not succeed in client retention, you are left to fight a tough battle by having to depend more on client acquisition.
Given the challenges you will have to face on your way, there are a few ways to improve your business’s client retention rate. Here I have discussed three proven tips to retain your clients.
Grab the lion’s share of the market
You can never do business in vacuum. If your clients are hiring you only to boost up traffic to their site or to boost up lead generation, you must always take the broad picture into account and find ways to bridge the gaps in their overall marketing requirements and not just confining to the primary reason of why they hired you.
For instance, more than just feeding the leads of your clients, find ways to assume ownership of the full marketing spectrum. In this way, you will gain a better view of what can benefit them and so be able to boost up the value you provide your clients. You must be able to augment the impact of your services and ensure that your passive leads get converted into paying customers.
Though it might seem difficult to own more of the funnel, you can achieve it by investing in a software that provides access to everyone to contribute to the workflows. It will also assist the agency’s account managers and the client’s staff to act in a coordinated fashion on optimization.
This is a viable way to perceive the performance of their nurture funnel, locate the bottlenecks and find out the disconnected areas that are adversely impacting the KPIs of the client. You need to search for opportunities through more types of services to boost up conversions. By helping your clients close more number of deals, you will be in a position to make them appreciate your services and consequently, your retention rate will increase.
By adding your branding in the app in a prominent way, it is possible to make your clients connect this appreciation to your agency.
You can make your clients discover how to nurture their leads independently in order to improve their own capabilities and marketing skills. Only by empowering your clients to manage their own marketing efforts, you can make them trust you more for even more complex and lucrative marketing activities.
Expand your offerings
To make your agency sound attractive, it is necessary that you have a broad portfolio of offerings to your clients. This will benefit small and medium level enterprise clients who look forward to such marketing support services, but can’t pay for it in-house.
Though it is possible to partner with other agencies, there is always the risk of those agencies poaching your hard earned clients. Therefore, only by enhancing your capability to deliver all those services your clients will want, you can retain your clients who might otherwise switch over to your rivals that will fulfill all their needs in one place.
Nevertheless, diversification is not easy as it sounds. While attempting for differentiation, you might end up muddying your waters. Taking more work than what is possible for you to fulfill or committing to produce results in a domain that lies far beyond your core competencies can turn detrimental to your brand image.
The advent of white label technologies and services has come as a boon to those agencies that look forward to diversifying into the segments of content marketing and SEO without having to overexert inadvertently. Partnering with white label firms for tasks like managing onsite SEO, offset link building, enhancing visibility on local search, keyword research, SEO content, SEO analysis and others, you can focus on your key deliverables while still adding a few more services to your list of offerings.
Enhance your data related capabilities
Small businesses find data marketing a blind spot as they are already battling with attribution proving, KPI tracking and ROI calculating. Data visibility is a big challenge in attribution. Those who use live chat, form submissions, and phone calls for conversion experience this while tracking attribution.
Therefore, clients eagerly look forward to dependable and meaningful insights into data. A smart reporting mechanism is the need of the hour to prove your clients that your marketing efforts are producing results. Regular updates and tracking of results will help them monitor the progress you show on their behalf. This is important for them to understand the impact of your work. If this is done, you can improve their loyalty and retain them easily.
The more reports you provide them, the brighter is the light you throw on them to understand that marketing maze. With better data, you can also help them better. When you can understand each of your clients’ needs, you can deliver them personalized services to help them attain their specific objectives and goals.
With regard to performance metrics, setting up custom triggers will be of immense help. This will help get quick warnings when lead generation fails or the level of abandonment rises and help decide on the right kind of interventions in the lines of taking proactive measures.
Take home
Improving client retention is not a simple thing in today’s market scenario. However, it is not impossible to achieve. The proven strategies that can get you there are grabbing the lion’s share of the market, expanding your offerings and enhancing your data related capabilities. If you work in these lines, you will be able to keep your clients happy and highly satisfied in a way staying with your agency for longer.