Five reasons why clients are leaving your agency

There’s an age-old saying that acquiring a new client costs 5X more than retaining an existing one. If you’re focusing solely on growth, you may not be seeing the huge impact that customer churn has on your agency. Having helped over a thousand agencies with their systems and processes, we’ve seen this first hand. Here’s what you might want to keep an eye out for in case you see your clients jumping ship:

Content created in partnership with Service Provider Pro.

1. You’re reinventing the wheel with each client

Handling a project that involves other people’s time and work is not easy, and doing it with an unclear workflow, just hoping for the best each time, makes it that much harder. 

If your workflow is inefficient, some tasks might be eating up your workday, inching you closer to your deadlines and taking away the focus from where it should be: building your client relationships. 

For you, your team, and your clients to be on the same page, you need a set of repeatable processes that don’t vary greatly from client to client. 

That’s where productized services come in: simplifying access and workflow for everyone involved. Get acquainted with the main benefits here.

Productized services = selling services as products. And yes, productized services do work.

Clients like to sign up for a known service at an agreed-upon price. It’s clear for everyone what the deliverables are, what inputs are needed from their side, and what your team will do for them.

Productized services aren’t always results-based. In fact, most of the time they’re based around specific deliverables. In order to get these deliverables out to your clients in the smoothest (and fastest) way, it’s key that each decision-maker can locate the resources needed for the project’s goals, track its progress, and communicate it. Not only does this set a clear path and accountability for your team, but lets your clients know what to expect. There’s no place for doubt as to what is going on with their website.

2. You’re not demonstrating value effectively

And it’s not because it’s not there.

Your clients are investing in your services to see measurable results and a positive return on investment. If they don’t see ROI they’ll want to look for it someplace else. The results of your strategy may be there but if you fail to communicate them in an objective, meaningful way to your client, they might as well not exist.

A good way to help yourself with this is by creating consistent metrics that your clients can keep track of and look back on overtime. Data-driven dashboards are an easy way to put these metrics into focus without too much extra work on your end.

You really want to keep it clean and not overwhelm your reports and clients with too much data, keep it to the relevant metrics to your client’s goal. Loads of data that don’t necessarily resonate with the project can backfire and make it seem like you didn’t get what your client’s objective was, to begin with.

3. Your communication is not the best

Clients do business with people they trust. This sense of trust needs to be maintained, not just during the sales process, but throughout the project delivery as well.

If your clients cannot reach you or see the status or their project live, you’re leaving them to suspect the worst.

Vital information gets lost in messy email threads, scattered messaging across the team, and can get tricky to keep a neat channel of communication open.

Centralizing your communication and providing the means for your clients to access their project’s progress at any time can keep them in the loop and confident that you’re both moving in the same direction.

4. You make it easy to leave after the test run

Keeping your clients after their first project can be tricky. Some people are adamant that an SEO project is a one-time thing and they can work on their own after. If you want your clients to keep coming back to you, you have to ensure that not only are the results there but that getting them was a breeze.

If your payments and invoicing are in one place, your client communication in another, project management in another, and so on, not only does this make it hard to keep track of your progress to you and your team, but it’s a nuisance to your clients. 

With so many competitors out there, you should be using every tool in your arsenal to make the journey, from audit to implementation, a seamless process that will differentiate your agency.

5. You’re not clamping down on involuntary churn

You’ve taken all the steps to make sure your services are top-notch and keep your clients coming back and they stay with you until the unspoken enemy of your bottom line shows up: payment failure. 

Your client’s payment method fails and, since the ball is in their court, it’s easy to think that they should notice and correct it. But it doesn’t always happen. That’s leaving money on the table that most businesses can’t afford to pass up. You wouldn’t want to lose clients just because their card expired. 

Preventing this can be as easy as sending renewal reminders and following up when their payment fails. Do make sure to keep your emails inbox-friendly to avoid your notifications ending in the spam folder.

Ensure that updating information is as easy as possible for your clients. Your subscription recovery page shouldn’t be locked behind a login process or having your clients jump through hoops to the point where it’s easier to just ditch. 

If you can notify clients when their payment fails and give them a simple one-click link where they can update their billing info it’s gonna be a game-changer. Better yet, it should show right away whether the new payment method has failed or succeeded.

Keeping your clients happy doesn’t have to be hard

There are so many pieces to the puzzle that it definitely can seem daunting. Using all the tools in your arsenal, letting software pick up the slack for you, and giving your clients some self-service options can really be a game-changer for your client’s retention and their happiness. That’s what makes it all worth it, right?

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