Marketing and relationships still come down to some basic truths: more than ever, your clients and prospects crave recognition, validation and respect. And YOU can provide that to them.
When your online marketing isn’t getting results, it usually boils down to one of these five possible factors:
If you are spinning your wheels going after NEW clients, it may be that you need to take another look at the acres of diamonds under your feet. In fact, there are simple, easy & often-overlooked steps you can take to stimulate referrals, win back former clients and increase revenue from your existing client base.
And it’s never too late to put them into place.
1) Existing Client Retention
As you no doubt have realized, you CANNOT “assume” that your existing clients will come back to you every quarter. That’s especially true if you don’t have any system in place to build, seal and develop relationships.
Yes, you can send the monthly reports. But that is a bare minimum – akin to the simple performance of your role.
Every year, it is a good idea to send about five mail pieces to your clients, saying thank you and encouraging them to refer their family and friends. These can range from full letters (conversational, friendly), to postcards, to simple handwritten notes. Schedule this out as a task in your personal reminder system or CRM, and include it in your normal workflow.
The point is — making every effort to remind your clients about the care you put into their business … and to continuously remind them of the relational value you bring to their business, and your care. This will tend to explode referrals (business owners like to chat about their solutions to one another) … but even more so, it engenders a loyalty upon which you cannot put a price tag.
Don’t miss this stuff – however “optional” it might sound.
But on top of these offline methods, by far the most powerful existing client retention system is relational email marketing.
And when I say “relational”, that means that it should feel like it is coming from YOU, and not that you subscribed to some marketing service who is spitting out some kind of re-heated leftovers of generic business and financial articles.
I’ll address this topic more deeply in future articles on the Woodard Report about exactly what this should look like. But the big picture is this: write broadcast notes to your existing clients like they are real people, with real needs and wants, and you can make client retention magic happen with email.
2) “Lost” Client Win-Back
Did you know that the most common reason you had clients NOT renew services with you at quarter or year-end is not that you did something wrong with the actual work?
Because there is this place inside of each one of us that just assumes that clients who “move on” and off of our current client list did so because we screwed up somehow, we take these departures personally.
But it’s a false construct.
How does my team and I know this?
Simple. Each year, our most successful CPA clients will pull the list of non-returning clients (stretching back over the last three tax years), and send them some simple direct mail pieces that asks for the client to come back and try their services again. That’s it.
These “lost” client campaigns are consistently the MOST responsive direct mail campaigns for clients who try it.
But you have to do it properly.
The key ingredients are that you;
A) acknowledge that they are no longer a client
B) give them an incentive to try your services again
The style should be conversational and warm.
Adding these two components (existing and lost client campaigns) will go a long way towards fixing some of what ails your existing marketing.
And these are sources that are the most often neglected within CPA and bookkeeping practices.