Today’s episode is for my consultants, strategists and service providers. Because when talking to y’all about some of your biggest struggles, the main thing I hear is that you want to keep clients on longer. For obvious reasons, it guarantees more income, allows you to grow with the brand, and it can turn into a bunch of other opportunities.

In today’s episode, I’m gonna dish out six strategies you can start implementing in your business today to start ensuring not only client retention, but signing on clients for a longer term from the start. With that being said, we’re gonna go ahead and dive in. So grab a pen, a piece of paper, open your notes app, and let’s get going. If there’s one thing I believe strongly in, in business, it’s that your current and past clients are your biggest source of future sales, and this is twofold.

So one side of the coin is keeping them on as clients and the other side would be using them as referral business. Today, we’re gonna talk about the first one, which is keeping them on as clients and maximizing their lifetime value as a customer, as a client with you, as a consultant, as a strategist, or as a service provider. So we’re gonna start with strategy.

Number one, to keep clients on for the long term, ready for it. Are you ready? You have to have a journey for them to follow – it’s as simple as that. So strategy number one is mapping out the client journey. The most simple way I can explain mapping out the client journey is this at the end of their time with you, no matter what it is they buy into, if it’s a contract, if it’s a session, it’s a long-term retainer, what is next for them?

You should have an idea of where they could go next when they sign on with your services. If you don’t, this is what the online space calls a service suite or a value ladder. I never knew ’em as those terms, I just knew you needed to have something for them. So what my point is here is there needs to be somewhere else for them to go. They need to graduate onto something. That could look like an extension of the services you just provided. That’s fine, but you need to have something for them to go, a place for them to go. So that’s strategy number one.

 

Have Touchpoints Outside The Contract

Strategy number two is having continual touch points. What do I mean by that? Okay, so they are paying you, and that alone should keep you top of mind, especially if they see that they’ll hit their account or they’ve paid you that one time. But, oftentimes it does not keep you top of mind – as someone who is not in-house, you are technically a third party. It can be easy to be on the chopping block when it’s time for them to do budget cuts or trim the fat.

Never get into a place of being the fat. The best way to do this, is to go above and beyond and have continual touchpoints that exist outside of contractual, scope of work communications. The best way I’ve done this is by just being such like a good resource for my clients. We’re gonna actually talk about being a resource later on, as a different strategy, but just to be top of mind always with my clients, to the point where they have told me, you are family to us. That is the best place to be – that is the place you wanna be with your clients, where they feel like you are truly in-house and you become the last person on the chopping block because they really feel like they can’t live or operate without you.

So some ways to do that, is take note of birthdays, take note of holidays, major events, and do something for them. Send flowers, a gift card, take them to dinner, something like that. Think of it this way – that’s a write off anything you spend on your clients money-wise. I’m not sure if this is state to state any different, I’m not an accountant or a tax professional. I really can’t say definitively, but where I live, it’s up to $50 – so I can spend $50 on a client. That is a write off as a part of a gift. So think of like a congratulatory something – when something big happens in business, just constantly staying top of mind, it’s gonna make them feel like you care.

I mean, you do care. That’s why you’re doing this, but it’s really to touch them and make them feel all warm and fuzzy. Something I do with one of my clients every other month is I take him to lunch, kind of just to shoot the sh*t. Like whether we end up talking about business or personal life, it’s a nice way to get him out of his environment and just get us somewhere else and talk about business or personal life, just getting to know each other better. It has paid off in so many ways. This client has upped their retainer twice with us, just staying top of mind with them being present as much as possible. I can’t stress enough, like how important this is.

 

Reporting, Reporting, Reporting

So our number three strategy is gonna be reporting. I love this one. I’m a data junkie. If you don’t know this about me, hi, I’m Lauren and data and analytics are my best friend. I am that person who will go make a spreadsheet when I’m stressed out about something like financially – like the other day, I was like, I need to visualize this when looking for a nanny for my child.

So I went and made like a nanny chart of all the different babysitters I had for the month, while I was trying to find nanny coverage and like what the cost per week was gonna be and who gets paid how much? It was it’s excessive. I make a lot of spreadsheets, sorry to my husband, he’s probably like this girl’s crazy. So a way you can do this in business would be case studies or work in reports as part of the service you offer to the client.

So if you are any sort of like strategist, or you are doing anything with like time ROI or money ROI, or you’re working with social media – to be able to show like social media, automations, digital marketing, anything like that. To be able to show numbers, and measure success, is going to be really important in keeping them on. Because if you are showing progress and it doesn’t have to be like money progress or follower progress.

But if you can like connect the dots, and draw the lines between the data that you’re given and that you’re seeing by being on top of that for your client, it’s going to show that you are proving successful in why they hired you. Really love doing this in goal meetings with my clients, like once a quarter and saying “okay, we set this goal last quarter”, or “we set this goal two quarters ago, look, we’re beyond this goal by X amount or X.”

They’re like, wow, that’s really cool. Even if it’s not like a knockout goal, or if we’re taking baby steps by meeting those goals, it’s still something. They really love to see clients love to see progress, so this is really important. Another example of this I’ve done for clients – I have one client I’ve had just since the beginning of time, and we give them a monthly social media report every single month. This is something they pay for. But what they don’t pay for is a year in review. So every year at the end of the year, we not only do a December report, and send off that December report, but we do a year in review. So January to December, we will pull together an overall report.

It’s actually pretty cool. I almost would include this, moving forward if we like changed the contract, I would say the year end review is part of the contract because it shows you things that the monthly reports won’t show, because sometimes that bird’s eye view of a long period of time can show a bigger picture you can’t see in a one month view. But the client also loves that because you’re just further showing that you care about the progress that’s being made.

In that report, we will include like strategies that we would like to implement in the next year, and the progress we want be seeing by the end of the following year. This sounds like something that should be standard, but sometimes like we’re so caught up in like month or quarter that we don’t take a step back and look at like the bigger or picture. But at the end of the day, if you are doing any sort of data metrics, whatever, anything that can be measurable for your client, you need to be delivering a report of some sort – point blank.

 

Communication is Key

So the next strategy is going to be robust communication. This is one of the things my clients love the most about us and me is that we are on top of communications. I send weekly emails on Fridays as a part of a status report on what was done. So what was done, what was needed from them, and this lets your client know you’re not gonna fall behind on tasks. If anything, you’re persistent with them to get what you need to get your work completed.

I’ve worked with people before who’ve just gone radio silent when they’re needing something from me. That is something that aggravates me more than anything, like you should be following up with me, and persistent with me. It falls back into that whole trim the fat thing. If they just feel like, you know, you can’t complete projects on time or whether it’s your fault or their fault, you’re gonna be the first to go.

 

Beta Testing

The fifth strategy is beta testing. I’m obsessed with this one for a couple of reasons. I’ve used this a couple times, not as much as the other strategies, but it’s really paid off for me when I have. So if I have an idea of a new service I want to offer, or a new type of program or strategy program, whatever it may be, this is like my favorite way to use it. So I’m obsessed with this for two reasons.

Number one, you get to try a new idea on them and get real human feedback on if it works – up to you if you want to make them pay for it or not. But, if you are beta testing on them, I would say, “Hey, I really wanna try this thing out. I’m going to eat the cost on it if there’s a program involved” or you know, like, “let me just try this out on top of everything we’re doing.”

Because number two, if you’re able to prove that it works and get results, as a result of that, this could very well turn into something that the client chooses to buy into, which guess what that does. It increases the client lifetime value. Depending on the program, your beta testing could extend the life of their services with you. So read as money, money, money, more money, more money, more impactful ways to stay on with your clients longer.

 

Be a Resource for Education

So the last strategy I’m gonna throw at you is going to be this: become the education resource. I said this earlier – this was really successful for us when COVID hit, we continued our retainer services with our clients, but then we added another layer and I didn’t charge them for it. I basically jumped in and said, where can we help?

But on top of that, we became an education resource because now not only are they trying to figure out how they can pay for marketing, but they want to also figure out how they’re gonna continue to operate as a freaking business now that COVID came around. For some of my clients, it was supply issues, for other clients they literally could not do their service because we were all in lockdown, and it required like physical and in person activity. So I became a resource. I started doing research and I started saying, “here’s some things you can try here, here, here, here.” This was not just in marketing, which is what I was hired to do. So being that resource outside of like our scope of work made them feel like, wow, I’m in the trenches with them.

I’m not just gonna leave you high and dry in the scope of services we have. I wanna be there. I wanna help you. On the flip side, you can be an education resource in a couple of other ways. So oftentimes as a service provider, you are left with doing most of the work. You’re strategizing campaigns, you’re executing on campaigns, you’re delivering some sort of service. Education was a huge core value in my first business. It’s also one I’ve carried over into this one.

So my first business was the one where COVID hit and blah, blah, blah, blah. Opening Brand Good Time, I really wanted education to be something that was like huge core value here too. So I’ve always made it a priority to make sure my clients not only knew what we were doing with strategies, but understood what we were doing.

I wasn’t just saying like, “blah, blah, blah, blah, I’m speaking of foreign language to you and you have no idea what I’m saying, but trust me, it’s gonna work.” No, no, I like to slow it down, dumb it down & really make sure my clients understand what we’re doing. I’ll show them the behind the scenes. Even if they don’t ask to see it, I’ll send them articles. I’ll do trainings with them. Even if they never had to lift a finger to, let’s just say, change the budget on a Facebook ad. They sure knew how they could. They knew how to get in there. Even if they had to text me, be like, “what’s this one thing again?” I always made sure and still to this day, that my clients know how they can do something. I never felt like that was giving away secret sauce.

That’s not really giving away strategies. It’s just showing them like how to do simple things. But a way you could do this with your own business is by providing a portal of resources when they sign on as a client – that’s another way. That way, you know, when they sign on as a client, they have all these different ways that they can look into things that are being done and know how to do them themselves.

That could be a portal of videos, that can be a portal of like specific blog posts, etc. Another thing you could do is produce a newsletter that goes directly to your client database only. So you are taking an extra step there and everyone who’s a client gets a weekly newsletter from you with certain marketing, tricks and tips and trends. Something else I learned from agency days is that you never want your client to be the one to bring a trend to you.

Be On Top Of Trends

You never want your client to say, Hey, Instagram has, let’s just say, live came out for the first time. “Instagram live just came out. What should we do with this?” No, that is like, you should be choking hardcore if that ever happens. Because as the expert, it is up to you to bring those things to their attention as soon as they happen.

So I think I had Google alerts sent on my phone for a while, and anytime something new happened, I would send an email to all my clients, “Hey, this just happened. Here’s how I think we can implement it. What are your thoughts?” Going that extra mile and being on top of it in this way, they’re gonna be like, oh my God, they really are the expert. Again, it’s another way for them to become reliant on you.

All of these strategies are ways for your clients to become reliant on you, to feel like they need you. They not only need you to succeed, but they want you. They want you around you jive, you do good work for them. That is the ultimate goal. That is how you get clients to stick around for the long haul. I hope you enjoy these six tips, but just in case, let’s recap them again.

The six strategies are: mapping out that client journey, number one. Number two, having those continual touch points. Number three, reporting plain and simple. Number four, having a robust communication strategy. Number five, beta testing. Number six, becoming the education resource for your clients. So hope you enjoy this episode. If you, in any way at all, would like to implement some of these strategies or further your strategy, your marketing strategy as a brand, your internal communication strategy or business strategy.

Work With Me

I offer a brand strategy sessions and we can cover a whole plethora of things. But the idea is that at the end of the session, you have an idea of some strategies we can implement in your business. I spend the next week writing a 90 day plan for your business based on the goals that you have for your business.

So if you are interested in learning more about that, you can apply and we can have a conversation about it and see what’s the best fit for you. So click this link here if that is something you are interested in! With that being said, I will see you on the next episode of She’s Busy AF.

We will be interviewing someone very special and the topic’s going to be on LinkedIn. Just being like as authentic as you possibly can while using LinkedIn, not feeling like you have to show up in a suit and tie to post there, and also how to get clients there, because it’s an incredible tool, especially as a coach consultant, mentor, strategist, all of the things you can absolutely find clients today.