How do you increase the customer lifetime value? For service providers, this can seem tricky and/or daunting unless you have an agency with multiple service offerings. Tune in to learn how you can make small tweaks (and even just get flat out creative) in your service suite to increase the lifetime value of your clients as done-for-you service provider. 

 

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Hey, hi. Hello. Welcome back to another episode. Today’s episode is dedicated to the entrepreneurs and done-for- you service providers who feel capped, but feel called for more at the same time. Increasing the lifetime value of your clients not only gets you more bag, but it further creates the loyalty you want and need with your clients in your inner circle. This topic is near and dear to me, because over the years I found that it is 10 times easier to retain clients and grow with them as opposed to spending time searching for new clients.

Two of my biggest clients to date have been with me for about three years and more. I’ve grown with them through this process. So it really all comes down to listening to the needs of your current clients. And in today’s episode, I’m going to break out different ways you can increase the lifetime value of your clients as a done-for-you service provider. So I have three major, major things I want you to look out for when you are looking to increase the lifetime value of your clients. We’re just gonna start from the top.

 

Make What You Do Crystal Clear

So number one is gonna be to make sure it’s crystal clear what you are doing for your clients. This starts with how you market your business and it continues on through the onboarding process. This doesn’t need to be overly complicated – for all of my clients I make this super clear on my scope of work and our contracts, and I make a point to review this with my clients. So I take that scope, I write it out, I review it with my clients. We’re all on the same page because ultimately the better that they understand, the more that you can manage expectations in your working relationship, and the more confident they will be and what you’re doing for them.

This is because you’re including the value of what you’re doing from the start, which leaves them no room to question why they hired you to begin with. And I just wanna make something very clear here. Your onboarding processes are still considered marketing, number one, and number two, extremely crucial to extending the lifetime value of your clients. Because if you make them feel really good about working from you from the start, and you’re really, really, really clear on those expectations you outline in your scope, those warm and fuzzy feelings are gonna continue.

They’re always gonna go back and remember how amazing that was when they first started with you. Of course, you have to continue with this. You have to make sure the experience continues on from the marketing to the closing, to the onboarding all the way through your relationship with them.But this is a huge, huge way to extend the lifetime value of your clients because they liked the way you made them feel.

 

Keep Them Engaged

Number two is to keep them engaged. So you may be working behind the scenes on all the magic, right? But they don’t see that. They literally do not see that you are typing up blogs. Like they’re not there watching that because you’re not sitting in their office 24/7. So how would they even begin to know?

I recommend doing things like Friday email updates, biweekly newsletters, monthly check-ins sharing educational information a few times a month. This all keeps you top of mind for them. And knowing that you’re continuing to do work to push them forward. So communication is really everything here. Consider your scope of work in this. That’s also really important.

Keeping your clients engaged, increases your lifetime value for a similar point to point number one. It shows them that you’re capable of not just doing the work, but innovating and continuing to keep them apprised to what is going on. So they’re going to want to continue to work with you. There’s a couple examples I have here. So number one, if you’re a consultant of any measure, send educational newsletters that will piggyback off of any strategies you’ve written, keeping your client on top of trends or happenings in their industry. Number two, if you’re a social media manager send monthly or weekly reports that explain the metrics for the content produced or published, highlighting the wins and doing your best to connect them with efforts by your doing. Number three. If you are a web specialist, like a designer, an SEO specialist, et cetera, send your client site traffic update stemming from your efforts and do your best to connect them to that.

 

Collect All The Feedback

So the third way to increase the lifetime value of your clients is probably the most important one, because this one is really going to open up the doors to new opportunities for your working relationships with your clients. So it is collecting feedback and letting that feedback drive how you grow your service offerings with them. It can be really easy to set and forget what the services you offer to your clients. As a done for you service provider, it’s crucial to collect that feedback along the way and constantly be asking them, what else do you need? Or what goals are you looking to achieve? If you use that feedback, you can then use feedback to create a plan of how else you, as a service provider can fit in with their goals, how your business can fit in with their goals.

The best example I have of this is one of my clients today. Their immediate issue at hand was engaging their team to do their job and sell themselves. They were sick of the doing the day to day, and on top of that babysitting their team. They thought they needed a team manager, liaison, when really they needed someone to come in and act as a marketing consultant for their team, relaying information back to the owners and ultimately keeping their team in line with marketing strategy and efforts of their own.

This has resulted in a lot of growth for the company. It’s done a couple things: it’s opened their eyes to weak links, strengthened and enhanced some of the team members who just needed that extra push, and it’s really elevated the marketing efforts of the overall team. So I was able to identify that opportunity and create more of a role for myself, increase my monthly retainer with them and be an asset to their team.

Another way to do this is to further your offering as a brand. A lot of done-for-you service providers, such as graphic designers, web designers, social media managers – you guys are so good at performing your acts of service. But you’re also so much bigger than that. So what if you provided a strategy alongside what you did? I’ve helped quite a few done-for-you service providers move from their craft, to also developing strategies for their clients when they’re done with them which is a huge way to increase that lifetime value.

So basically what I’ve done is created this marketing template of sorts, where you come in and you help your client build out a marketing strategy for their business. That’s accompanied by a 90 day plan. What’s so great about that 90 day plan is you can help them put some of their goals into bite size 90 day strategies, as well as help them develop more of like an evergreen plan for their business, so that they know what they’re doing on a weekly basis using some of this is like using what you’ve felt for them.

So here’s some examples of ways it can be used – if you are a social media manager, you can use it to tie in all your efforts that social media compliments. So you can use that to help them update their website, start their email newsletter, things that are really just ultimately going to help you as the social media manager. Another example is a marketing strategist. Doing this for your clients can help them have a well-rounded plan that starts with a robust marketing funnel. This is really good for marketing strategists if you’re looking for like a framework to help clients kind of achieve some 30 and 90 day goals with a framework. A web designer could use this to tie in efforts that drive traffic to the website and make it a more powerful tool that it is from other channels.

I have found so many times with clients that were working on their websites and they’re not driving traffic there from social media, or they’re not using it as the powerful tool that it should be used as, through other marketing efforts, and writing a strategy could help them do that and help them get their website to be a powerful tool for them. Another example in that is if you started, if you took this marketing strategy template and had your clients start blogging as part of their marketing strategy that lives on your website, you can show them how to SEO optimize content and drive traffic there. And your website design and development does a huge service for them.

My final example here is a graphic designer. This is really great because as a graphic designer, you should understand brand strategy really well, and having that brand strategy, you can marry that with a marketing strategy that compliments their new branding. This can help them with social media, email, et cetera. So I have a special offer on this since you guys have tuned in it’s $50 off right now, you can grab the code and the link in the show notes, go take a look at all of the inclusions.

The cool thing about buying this template at any point that you’re listening to this is that it’s only going to get more and more better. That’s not even grammatically correct, but whatever, basically, meaning if you purchase this template, anything I do to it, any updates I make, any inclusions I have as the price increases over time, since you’ve already bought it, you will get access to those inclusions and those updates, because you’ve already purchased it. So that’s a really cool thing.

So right now I’m actually working before I raise the price or, well, I will be raising the price when I add in these prompts and templates for like blog post templates and PR pitch templates. So when those are added in, the price will go up. So if you grab it now at the price that it is now, when that comes out, you’ll get access to that. So I think that’s pretty cool. But anyways, I wanna recap this entire podcast episode, those three ways that you could increase the lifetime value of your clients.

Number one is make what you’re doing crystal clear to your clients. Number two is keeping your clients engaged. And number three is collecting feedback that drives your growth as a service provider in the things that you can offer. All right, y’all this is Lauren Loreto, and you just listened to another episode of She’s Busy AF. We drop new episodes every Wednesday, and it would mean the world to me if you could screenshot this episode, share it on Instagram, be sure to tag me at She’s Busy AF. Thank you so much for being a part of the she’s busy community, and we would love to thank you by resharing those tags, so don’t forget. And with that being said, I will see you on the next episode.