Agencies put a lot of effort into attracting clients through marketing, social media, and brand initiatives. Gaining your clients' trust has taken time, effort, and money. It is only natural for you to want to keep them. A significant focus on client retention is essential in this situation.
Sadly, a lot of agencies lack a defined plan for retaining clients. A lack of long-term perspective could have serious repercussions, especially if the agency starts to lose its recurring clients.
One element that can influence a client's relationship with a brand is handling the support tickets regarding the queries. You will retain more clients by designing a seamless experience that satisfies your clients at every stage of the journey. But if your agency doesn't live up to expectations, you risk losing those clients before you have an opportunity to put things right.
One of the most successful ways to increase your rate of return is to concentrate more on your client retention strategies. This blog has mentioned the seven most effective methods for your agency's client retention.
Here's an overview of the contents of this article:
- What Is Client Retention?
- Why Should You Focus On Client Retention?
- How To Calculate Client Retention Rate? [Formula]
- 7 Proven Client Retention Strategies For Your Agency
- How To Create A Client Retention Plan?
- Improve Your Client Retention With Statusbrew
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What Is Client Retention?
Client retention is an agency's capacity to keep its current clients by developing close bonds with them. This is because keeping current clients needs more active participation and networking than finding new ones.
A strong agency-client relationship will maximize your client's lifetime value. Building strong relationships with your clients is the key to increasing brand loyalty.
Why Should You Focus On Client Retention?
Retention is the new acquisition!
Retention is the secret to sustaining profitability and ensuring that your business gets the most return on all of its efforts in clients. When done correctly, customer retention strategies foster client loyalty that manifests itself in additional services and recommendations and prevent customer churn.
According to a survey, committed clients will likely generate 1.7 times more revenue than unengaged ones. An engaged workforce and client base can generate up to 3.4 times the typical income. They also operate as a shield against rising market rivalry.
Some of the significant reasons to concentrate on client retention strategies are:
Increased Profits: On average, regular clients account for 65 percent of a company's revenue. Additionally, loyal clients become your brand ambassadors!
Lower Business Expenses: Retention techniques for existing clients are seven times less expensive than those for acquiring new ones. The first deal you make with a new client is the most expensive one you'll ever make.
High Client Acquisition: You want to use your happy clients as a source of referrals from other people. Up to 86 percent of your valued clients will tell others about your company.
Remember that many employees in your agency put in a lot of work to turn prospects into clients. Additionally, your company incurs high financial costs as a result. Your agency will be more successful in the long run if you focus that effort on keeping current clients.
How To Calculate Client Retention Rate? [Formula]
You must know how many clients you lose to know how many you retain. Your turnover rate can be determined using the client retention rate (CRR), which determines the rate at which you lose clients over time.
You only need three numbers to calculate the client retention rate :
- Clients at the beginning of a specified time period
- Clients at the end of the specified time period
- New clients throughout that time
If your client retention rate is 100%, you haven't lost a single client. You lost them all if your retention rate was 0%. Using customer-centric best practices, you can increase any number you start with.
7 Proven Client Retention Strategies For Your Agency
80% of people agree that a company's experience is just as crucial as its products and services. This gives you a chance to assess the current client experience and discover fresh approaches to meet and outperform expectations.
The most effective approach to accomplish these objectives is to combine tried-and-true customer retention tactics. Here are the top 7 strategies for retaining clients.
Understand And Set Clear Expectations
Without establishing a company culture that prioritizes interactions with clients, you cannot successfully run your business.
Decide what is required of you and what you want from the client. As you start working together, do this upfront, and then go through these expectations frequently. It is particularly crucial when handling social media. You may find it difficult to describe the worth of anything when there isn't always a quick, obvious, and palpable return on investment.
However, when setting reasonable social media objectives and anticipation, clients are more inclined to persevere and give it enough time to produce their targeted ROI. Outlining what you need from your clients to help your team execute the work is equally important.
Always Come Up With New Strategies
Those of you who run agencies should be well aware that accomplishing the bare minimum is totally insufficient. It would help if you went above and beyond to set yourself apart from your rivals. It demonstrates your concern and delight in a successful task. People also tend to remember it, particularly when a contract needs to be renewed or a referral opportunity presents itself.
Creating a social media strategy may appear complicated, but there is no need to worry; here are ten steps to making the best social media plan. You'll be well on accomplishing your goals if you know how to create an efficient social media strategy.
- Establish a cornerstone.
- Identify your target audience.
- Examine your rivals' social media strategies.
- Define the goals.
- Choose the best communication methods.
- Select the appropriate social media management software.
- Put your stuff in the correct order.
- Maximize your reach
- Analyze the outcomes and keep improving your social media marketing plan.
- Set established KPIs for your client's social media marketing.
Provide Value-Added Services
Accept that modern marketers are involved in the entire client lifecycle, with knowledge crucial at every stage. Prospects want to appreciate the benefits of making a change before they become clients. To put it another way, they must be convinced that making a change is beneficial. Once they are impressed, they want to be sure they should choose your agency and your solution as the way to implement that change.
You may develop a smooth marketing funnel by basing your client's social media strategy on value-added content. With the end goal of making deals with your brand, this content assists consumers in discovering, engaging with, and developing trust.
Deliver Proper KPIs
Social media metrics provide an overview of what people say about your agency and help you evaluate how well your campaigns and overall social strategies perform. Social media platforms can be the source of limitless marketing returns as long as you know how to define your organization's KPIs and appropriately track their growth.
Some of the most basic social media KPIs are
- Followers increase
- Meta Content Engagement
- Meta Post Likes
- Meta Page Reach
- Twitter Mentions
- Twitter Retweets
- LinkedIn Post Shares
- LinkedIn Post Engagement Rate
Keep Your Promises
No matter how little the work, always follow through on your commitments. Make sure to follow through if you promise a client that you will send reports the following week. It is assumed that you will review the data the next day if you say that you will do so. There will be instances when we can't always keep our promises because life happens. In that instance, inform them that although you stated that you would have their monthly report on Thursday, the day slipped your mind; thus, it will now be Friday. Thank them for their patience and express your regret for being late.
Accept Your Mistakes
This seems easy enough, but many of us would rather blame someone else than own up to our mistakes. You can devise a strategy to address the issue and ensure that it never occurs again. Clients tend to appreciate that you were honest about the error and be assured that there was an effort made to repair it rather than trying to hide it and hoping they wouldn't notice. This straightforward action fosters trust.
Increase Productivity Using Technology
Social media's steadily rising figures demonstrate the potential of social media services. However, it is not simple to fully utilize such effective social media platforms without using technology. You must consistently be active, relevant, and accessible on social media. Social media software like Statusbrew can make your life easy!
Some of the main uses of social media software are:
- Manage and publish content to several social media profiles across various platforms.
- Organize postings across accounts on an interactive content calendar and schedule your posts and reels in advance.
- From a single dashboard inbox, reply to messages sent to all of your social profiles.
- Make analytics reports that aggregate the data from your social media accounts.
- Create approval workflows and communicate with your client quickly and efficiently.
- Add users and collaborators to your work
- Get the best analytical insights on your marketing campaigns
How To Create A Client Retention Plan?
Step 1: Benchmark your current client retention
Key objectives and success criteria will be outlined in any effective plan. But unless you know where you're starting, you can't monitor how effectively you accomplish your goals. Determine your client retention rate so that you have a starting point.
Step 2: Understand the client’s experience
You need to map out the entire client experience from beginning to end while aligning it with your standard operating procedures to find chances to improve client retention. By using this, you can identify the exact point where clients leave.
Step 3: Figure out why clients are churning
The reason you're having trouble keeping clients at those drop-off spots must then be understood. Interviewing current and former clients is the most effective technique to identify the root reason. When speaking with current and previous clients, you might be afraid to bring up unfavorable aspects. Still, more often than not, you'll discover that they appreciate your efforts to make their experience better.
Step 4: Document a client retention strategy
Create a plan to stop the pattern once you've identified the causes of your client churn. Outline fresh prospects for client interaction that you discovered throughout your study, along with realistic retention targets. Promote this plan internally, so everyone knows the objectives and their part in increasing retention.
Step 5: Equip everyone to succeed
You probably discovered process flaws or other areas that require tweaking or a total overhaul during your research. You may require new software or even new positions. The final step would be to develop a plan to retain the clients. Make sure to evaluate after a set time period.
Improve Your Client Retention With Statusbrew
In conclusion, your tactics will change as time goes on. The gear must be well-designed to access essential data and analytics that will assist you in grasping the client experience. Utilize the above information to fine-tune your strategies to keep clients interested and boost client retention.
Statusbrew is a social media management software that can amplify your potential as an agency. It helps you across various verticals, and some of them are:
Social Media Automation
You can have a significant social media effect with the help of social media automation solutions like Statusbrew.
You have more control over your social media profiles with Statusbrew. Even when you are away from the workplace, you may upload content accurately and consistently without overlooking any crucial information. Not only does Statusbrew assist with automating content scheduling, but also social media engagement and many other tasks. Watch to see how.
Automate Social Media Scheduling & Publishing
The scheduling feature of Statusbrew is a fantastic tool for posting your material to several social networking platforms. You can organize and speed up your social media publishing using Statusbrew Planner. With Statusbrew's Planner, you can control individual posts and campaigns and see a complete chronology of all your scheduled or published articles.
Streamline Basic Social Media Engagement & Customer Service
You may follow social conversations across several social networks using Statusbrew Engage and quickly answer each inquiry. Depending on the kind, status, and social channel, you can automatically assign discussions and messages to your team members and receive real-time updates about every social conversation in a single stream.
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