How To Reduce Churn in Your Marketing Agency

You put a lot of effort into onboarding and signing a client. You set up a website, created content, and drove traffic to their site to generate results. So it can hurt when a client cancels and moves on.

Client retention is a critical aspect of your agency’s success. Balancing results and exceptional service is key to avoiding client departures. I’ve made it my mission to understand why clients leave to come up with strategies to retain clients at the highest level.

To combat this, businesses should engage in effective ongoing conversations, utilize strategic reporting and KPIs, focus on what clients care about, and make them feel special.

In this video, I break down these strategies that demonstrate a genuine partnership and commitment to client success, fostering strong relationships that go beyond mere transactions.

By implementing these retention strategies, your digital marketing agency can reduce client cancellations and ensure long-term growth and prosperity.

Learn more by watching the video now below:

Outline of This Episode

• [1:06] The #1 reason clients leave
• [3:45] Engage in effective ongoing communication
• [5:46] Utilize strategic reporting and KPIs
• [7:33] What do they really care about?
• [11:42] Great results don’t ensure retention

The #1 reason clients leave

The #1 reason clients leave is perceived indifference. They feel like they’ve become just another number. When they begin to feel that way, it’s game over. But because we know this, we can prioritize different strategies to prevent churn from happening.

You have to balance achieving results and providing great service. When we start our agencies, we’re focused on generating results for the client. If you deliver amazing results but they don’t think you’re responsive or providing great service, they’ll cancel.

Conversely, if you provide amazing service and send your clients gifts but don’t deliver results, they’ll inevitably cancel. You have to deliver both service and results. So what can you do?

Engage in effective ongoing communication

We have to be proactive with our communication process. You can’t get so busy working on delivering results that you forget to communicate what’s happening.

Make sure that your process includes letting the client know what you’re working on and the results that you’re seeing. It should be one-on-one interaction with the client (preferably on Zoom). This can massively reduce perceived indifference.

You have to get them great results and make it clear what the results are while making them feel loved, pursued, and cared for. They’re getting dozens of phone calls, emails, and direct mail daily from people trying to snag them. Your voice needs to stand out.

Strategic reporting and KPIs

You need to report your results consistently and engage with your clients. Your account managers can’t just walk through the report. You can’t just share what they spent, the leads they generated, and their results. If that’s all you talk about, the client will disengage.

You need to make sure your monthly meetings are a time to connect, understand their goals and challenges, get feedback, and collaborate on ongoing changes and strategies. The client will feel like it’s a partnership and will be more likely to stick around long-term.

What do they really care about?

We created a simplified reporting mechanism that covers:

• How much they spent
• How many leads they generated (and average cost per lead)
• What there return on investment (ROI) is

You need to take this information and generate a business conversation about how you’ll work to continue to move them toward their goals and objectives. If you can cover the key KPIs concisely, it will be far more effective than long ranking reports and pages of data.

I suggest leading with the key performance data and providing them with other data that they can review if they’d like to. Larger clients have marketing directors involved to look at this data. You have to work differently with each individual.

Learn more about our world-class reporting in this video.

Resources & People Mentioned

• Check out our Client Retention Workbook to unpack this in detail!

Connect With Josh Nelson

• Josh’s Coaching Page on Facebook
• The Agency Success Facebook Group
• www.SevenFigureAgency.com
• Seven Figure Agency on YouTube
• Josh on Twitter: @joshnelsonimc
• Josh on LinkedIn

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