Repeat customers are the most important thing a company can have to ensure long-term success. With the economy recovering ever so slowly, retaining customers as an agency should be high on the list of priorities for a company’s growth.
Sadly, many companies don’t have a clear strategy for keeping clients. The lack of long-term insight could lead to a potentially disastrous fallout, especially if the business starts losing its short-term clientele.
To aid companies that are looking at building and maintaining a customer base, 10 members of Forbes Agency Council share some of the methods they use to ensure that clients keep coming back.
Members explain how to effectively retain your agency’s clients.
Photos courtesy of the individual members
1. Check In Regularly
One of the most important ways to keep a customer is to reach out to them on a regular basis and check in. This means that you are using a mixture of actual personal messages, as well as machine reach-outs to know that your client is doing well and is happy with the service they are receiving. In addition, adding in gifts is a great way to ensure they subscribe. – Jon James, Ignited Results
2. Be More Engaging
A big reason for client churn is lack of engagement. Clients often suffer from buyer’s remorse once their initial excitement has worn off. We try to keep our client engagement high by proactively scheduling brief but frequent video chats to discuss results, strategy and our plans moving forward. This helps keep our clients informed and playing an active role in our team’s progress. – Adam Binder, Creative Click Media
3. Build Partnerships
I think what has helped our agency retain clients is our goal to create a partnership with them. We are consistent with communication, with regular scheduled monthly meetings and in-person meetings. We are more than marketing partners; we are also accountability partners for our clients. They see the growth our other partners have and they, too, want a piece of that pie. – Alex Valencia, We Do Web Content
4. Look Inward
We know retaining clients requires less investment than gaining a new one. So, we continue to show up with fresh thinking to create new value by keeping a close pulse on the market and developing new capabilities to match client needs. – Camille Nicita, Gongos, Inc.
5. Don’t Wait For A Client’s Brief
Being proactive is a key retention strategy. Rather than wait for a client’s brief, we like to move ahead with opportunity-oriented ideas. “Walls Are Meant for Climbing,” which we created for The North Face, is a good example of this. There was no client request — the campaign’s success lay in our eagerness, our profound understanding of the brand, its authenticity and its cultural relevance. – Nicolas Van Erum, Sid Lee
6. Set Clear Expectations
To be perfectly honest, this has always been a hard key to crack but through careful iteration (which is still happening) we’ve been able to increase our retention for clients to 95% over the past year. This can generally be attributed to setting very clear expectations at the outset, reporting against those expectations, and being very simple and clear with our data in our reporting. – Sean Smith, SimpleTiger LLC
7. Provide Discounts And Other Perks
Retaining clients is tough now, mainly because of the rise in competition, as many people are looking forward to digital media as a career and business opportunity. I have retained most of my clients by providing good discounts to the ones who have been long-time customers and providing free add-on services to new clients so they know when they work with us they always get more than what they pay for. – Vishal Jain, Sunshy Group Of Companies
8. Diversify Your Services
I learned a long time ago that strictly being a public relations or marketing firm alone wasn’t enough to grow and keep clients around for the long term. Our agency has diversified tremendously over the past 10 years to include a range of services that help clients at every stage of their business — and allow them to flow between service options, depending on their immediate business needs. – Meredith Xavier, The Ligné Group
9. Be Flexible About The Scope Of Work
We remain flexible about the scope of work and make it easy for the client to add or change scope with a simple, one-page contract addendum. We have found this to be really helpful for retention. – Jim Caruso, M1PR, Inc. d/b/a MediaFirst PR – Atlanta
10. Make Clients Part Of The Process
We make our clients feel that they are part of the process — because they are. Generally, the more we include the client in the process (within reason), the better our retention. This human contact reaffirms that we’re real and not some “plug-and-play” operation. We know that every interaction is an opportunity to build the relationship even stronger — and we are committed to building. – Bernard May, National Positions
