How You Can Turn ALL Your Clients Into Raving Fans
Can you really turn all your clients into raving fans who love working with you and cannot stop telling all their friends about you?
Well, in the last 2 blog posts, I talked about two important ingredients in a great client relationship - trust and communication.
This post brings us to the final ingredient - delight.
Let’s dive into how you can add an experience of delight to working with you, so that clients not only get what they hoped for, but they also get more.
Create loyalty through unexpected touchpoints
Of course, we want to meet and exceed the expectations of our clients.
We want them to not only be happy with the end result, but also overjoyed with it.
And we want them to feel that sort of appreciation for us as well and one of the ways that you can create that experience of delight is through some sort of touch point that is unexpected.
I did a great interview with Dan Gingiss, all about how we can enhance the customer experience so that these clients are our biggest raving fans and never forget us.
I’ll share some of the biggest takeaways I got from that conversation, because I think they're worth remembering.
Dan said that often business owners send gifts to clients, but we often send them with our logo, right? We send them with our branding, because we want them to remember us.
But as he pointed out, and I can attest to this as having received these kinds of gifts, a more thoughtful and authentic gift would be one that either has the client's logo on it, or doesn't have a logo at all, it just has a story behind it.
He gave a great example that one year he sent a box of spices that he and his family really love.
He sent those to all of his clients, and it didn't just come with the spices, it came with a note saying that these are particularly spices we love to cook with. We're a family that loves to cook. And so we're sharing this with you and your family.
Did it have a brand on it? No, it was just a really nice gift.
But as he put it, every time a client uses these spices, they're gonna think of him.
The head of the automations team I use, a company called The Leverage Model, who are based out of Australia, once sent me a very fancy jar of Australian honey for the holidays.
And I like honey. In fact, I use it every morning. So I actually think of this company every single morning as I use a scoop of this honey.
It was such a thoughtful gift and it reminds me of them. But I'm also getting a lot of use and joy out of it.That was a lovely delightful moment that I had from them that has paid off in spades.
Another idea that Dan shared is if you are going to give something branded, instead put their branding on it instead of yours.
Clients love things that have their logo on it and just because it has their logo and not yours doesn't mean they're not going to remember it was from you and associate it with you.
So, if you wanted to send somebody an awesome mug like a Yeti drink cup or a trackpad or something that is really useful for them and you put their logo on it, they were much more likely to keep it and use it forever.
And they're always going to remember that you're the one who gave it to them.
There are even companies that are in the business of helping you get clients gifts, like Foxbox.
I've gotten a lot of gifts from them - you can put together a box of gifts, and they've got tons of things to pick from.
I tend to send these out to people when there's something to celebrate, or maybe somebody's having a hard time, like when a client has had some sort of health issue, and I like to send them like a care package.
I've also received those when I've signed up with people, but I find those to be a little less personal.
I'll be perfectly honest with you - when it's just a nice gift that somebody sent me, but it doesn't really have any meaning, I don't feel like those land as much and I don’t even remember who I got those gifts from.
But I do think that that can be a source of delight, especially when there is a meaning behind it. So that's another option for you to surprise and delight your clients.
Branded experiences
The other way to create delight that I think costs you no money, is by giving clients a branded experience through your copy.
Here’s how you do it.
When somebody books a call with you - let's say you use something like Calendly, or Acuity - there are usually automated emails that go out from that service to remind you of the appointment.
How can you infuse all of those emails with something funny or delightful?
How can you create something fun and memorable when they have email interactions with you?
Are there ways to add little GIFs or little copy edits that make the copy more on brand?
Yes, this stuff takes more time, but the delight factor goes up significantly.
Anticipating client needs in the Lead Product
I think the best way to delight your clients is to anticipate their needs, and solve their problems before they even come up.
There are all sorts of little details that Steve and I add into the BrandUp when we're doing Intensives for our clients, that I know that clients don't think of in the beginning.
For example, a client never asks us to make them a favicon (that little image at the top of your website tab).
But every time we do it, and we make sure it's on the top of the website when we launch it, our clients, without fail, see it and they love it.
They love seeing their brand new brand with this tiny little icon at the top of the tab. There's just something about it that tickles people. It's a really simple thing, but it's something that, if we don't do it, they usually notice it later, and then say ‘Oh, can I get one of those?’
I've had that happen, so that's why it’s part of the standard package. There's nothing wrong with a client asking for it later and then doing it, but the delight factor comes in when they see it and they didn't even realise they wanted it.
So the question for you is, how can you anticipate your client's needs?
Every time you work with a client, can you think ahead to what they're going to need as soon as this project is done?
Are there ways for you to create something that you can give them ahead of time, so that when they get to that question, you already have the answer for them.
This is something that I teach already inside the No BS Agency Mastery Program, in the Lead Product process, because part of what makes our project so efficient and so effective, is that the whole process is about anticipating needs.
We don't want to ask clients what they want and then just give it to them.
We want to ask them, ‘What do you ultimately want?’ ‘What's your goal?’ ‘What's the purpose of all of this?’ Then we're going to tell them, ‘Hey, this is all the stuff you need in order to get there.’
That is the idea of anticipating needs. It's based on the idea that clients don't know all the things that it takes to get to their goal.
And if you ask clients, ‘what do you want?’, they're going to say things like ‘a logo and a website’.
And then when you go through the process, you'll both find out that actually they need all these other things.
They need help with their positioning, figuring out what their value proposition is, why they're better, who their target market is, and then something to sign people up for an email list, a lead magnet and so they need software to send emails from etc. etc.
There's so many things that clients need that they usually aren't aware of, so one way that we can delight them is by anticipating that from the very beginning.
Our whole No BS Agency process is about delighting the client through an experience where we are asking for the end result that they're looking for.
Then, we are helping them see all the things that are needed to get there.
That, in and of itself, is a delightful process.
But on top of that, there are all sorts of little micro things that you can do to add even more delight. And every time you work with a client, I would recommend that at the end of the project you think back to all the things that the client asked for, or all the things that came up that you weren't ready for, and see how you can bake them into your process moving forward.
That's really the iterative process that Steve and I went through over many, many years to develop the No BS agency Model that we teach today.
It was a process of working with clients, getting in the reps, and every time we did it, looking how to improve.
If you do that every time you work with a client, you will build a process that is so lean and targeted to the exact needs of your specific target market, that you will be able to delight clients just by doing your process.
And that's really what our No BS Agency Mastery Program is all about. It's about giving you the bones and giving you a system that you can implement.
And then you do it over and over again and look for ways to tweak and improve it until it's yours, until it's something that you can own.
And it's something that your clients will love and can't stop talking about to their friends.
All these systems will build you a profitable agency, but we also need to know how to get hot leads in the door, how to sell them efficiently into our process and then deliver that process in a way that maximises efficiency and value without maximising the amount of time that we spend.
We teach all this inside the No BS Agency Mastery Program, which is for 1 to 2 person branding agencies looking to scale to $30-$50k months without hiring a team of employees.
If you've been reading my posts for a while and you know that you want to No BS your agency at some point, go to nobsagencies.com/apply. Tell us a little bit about your business and hop on a quick call with my team to see if now is the right time for you to level up your small agency.
Here’s what you need to get…
This month has been all about how to turn your clients into your favourite clients so that every project you work on feeds you energy, and gets the best results for the clients that you work with.
We also want those projects to be super profitable, we want to be excited by them and we want to make money off of them. And that's really the balance of building a No BS agency.
P.S. You can always jump on a call with my team if you want to learn all my tools and strategies to scale up your agency - just go here to get started!