Agency Client Retention: How to Keep Your Clients

For 10 years before starting the KAC Marketing Agency I worked for someone else’s agency as VP of Marketing & Analytics.

One of my jobs as the head of the marketing department was to focus on agency client retention.

When I was hired, I was told the average agency was lucky to retain clients for 2 years; after that you had to assume they would start looking for another agency. So my goal was to make sure our clients stayed for 2 years.

How to Use Reporting for Agency Client Retention

As a people pleaser who is very attuned to other people’s feelings and emotions I quickly realized in our reporting calls our client’s were being given too much information. The data was overwhelming and we were way too focused on what WE as the agency were doing well, and not what the client cared about (the bottom line).

At the time we were using an automated reporting tool that pulled in a bunch of data from all the marketing channels we used.

The report included metrics like:

• Impressions
• Reach
• Clicks
• Frequency
• and on and on and on

As marketers these metrics are really important to us because we use them to make adjustments to campaigns to get better results.

But they mean absolutely nothing to the client; the client is only focused on the bottom line results.

So, I told the agency owner that I wanted to stop using the automated reports, to stop sharing so much data with our clients, and to instead show them how we were moving the needle.

I created a custom reporting template that ONLY focused on Impressions (brand awareness), Clicks (intent), and Conversions (sales).

This report required my team and I to manually create it every single month.

My boss was willing to give it a try even though it required us to spend more time doing admin work.

The result?

Clients FINALLY understood their report and how the work we were doing moved the needle.

The most important metrics were not longer hidden amongst a bunch of other data that meant nothing to the business owner who had little to no background in marketing.

After making this reporting change our clients stayed with us… forever.

At the time that I left my old job to form KAC Marketing, all the clients who had been with us when I introduced that reporting style 5 years prior were still with the agency.

It was retention magic!

Of course, I now use that reporting template at my agency, too, for my bigger, more corporate-y clients. I should probably trademark it and sell it because it’s that good.

But what about smaller clients?

What about the clients who KNOW what their sales are because a win for them is to get 10 or 20 people into a group coaching program? They don’t need a report to tell them what they already know.

Those clients are also very likely to stick with an agency if they are consistently seeing the results come in the form of revenue.

How to Use a Secret Service Menu for Agency Client Retention

Every small business owner will see a dip in revenue from time to time; they may go through something personal and not be able to put as much of their focus into their business and revenue drops.

As agency owners, there’s only so much we can do; we can put fuel in the car, but the business owner needs to be the driver.

In this case we might find ourselves in a situation where a client has to end their retainer with us.

But that doesn’t mean the relationship has to be over!

I use a Secret Menu of services to retain clients that I really love working with if they find themselves in a situation where they cannot continue on with a retainer.

This secret menu includes short-term, lower-cost containers that allow me to continue working with clients while they get back in the driver seat.

Clients understand they’re unlikely to dig themselves out of the hole without a marketing person on their team who can guide them.

These shorter-term containers that are lower cost can help them bridge the cap until they can sign back on at the retainer level.

I only make these offers available on the Secret Menu for Returning Clients because I want dream clients to sign on at the retainer level; that is the only starting point with my agency.

But we’re much more flexible with clients that we love and would hate to see go.

We also offer some discounted rates on offers in the Secret Menu because the whole goal is for clients who are going through a rough patch to continue working with us so we can help them get through it. We know if we do our job they’ll be excited to sign on at the retainer level again – and we trust ourselves to make it happen for our clients (and for the agency).

I hope you found this blog post helpful – if you do I would encourage you to sign up for the Agency Life™ newsletter where I share tips like this every week!