Small and medium design agencies are always looking for ways to grow business - for themselves and for their clients. Selling additional work to existing customers is a simple, but effective strategy for growth. Checking in regularly with clients, discussing the issues they are facing and proposing solutions allows you to keep in touch without constantly selling. Providing monthly (or even weekly) web analytics reports to all your clients is a highly effective approach.
Provide Free Web Analytics Reports
Providing clients with free web analytics reports positions you as a value-added problem solver, not just a design agency. Even if the client hires you primarily for site design, chances are they will be interested in seeing their monthly web analytics report. This is a way to create opportunity for engagement with the client once a month, by discussing issues beyond the project you were hired to complete. Yes, it will cost you some time and effort to prepare the report - but far less than costs to cold call for new business.
Focus on Opportunities for Improvement
Use the monthly analytics report to highlight areas where you can help the client to improve. For example, include a table that shows the performance of their site's landing pages, allowing you to point out pages with a high bounce rate and offer to redesign them.
You may also want to include a break-down of site traffic by source. If organic traffic is weak, you can offer to run a search engine marketing (SEM) campaign, or start blogging on their behalf. Use your analysis of site traffic to start a conversation about what types of traffic the client wants and if there are particular times of the year (e.g., during holiday promotions) when more traffic can be particularly profitable. Based on this conversation, you may offer to start a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign around particular promotions.
Cultivate Trusted Partners
If you run a small design agency, you may not have all the skills in-house to deliver value-added services like SEM, PPC and blogging. To solve this problem, cultivate trusted partnerships with other firms that can provide these services. When clients need services you don't provide, you can offer to bring in your partner.
Your client will appreciate the help and you can make money by marking-up the partner's fee. Your partner may even offer you a discounted fee for this kind of work since it required no sales effort on their part. As a result, even with the mark-up, your client will end up paying the standard rate and you will earn additional revenue.
Implementing Monthly Analytics Reporting
Even if nobody in your firm is an analytics guru, you can still provide valuable monthly web analytics reports to your clients. Begin by simply installing Google Analytics on each of your clients' sites. Instructions are here.
Next, create a Megalytic account, where you can easily create monthly reports for all of your clients and manage them in one place. You can create individual reports from scratch (or customize our templates), to provide exactly the report that each client will benefit from the most.
Always Add Value Beyond the Current Project
The key to growth is happy customers who continue to hire your firm for more work. If your clients view you as only a design agency, it is difficult for them to give you more work - even if they like and trust you.
To solve that problem, don't just be the firm that designs the website, be the customer's primary source for information about how the site is performing and how it can be improved. Monthly analytics reporting is a great way to position your company as a source for trusted information. This adds value beyond your current project and keeps your firm in mind when they need additional work.
See How You Can Benefit from Megalytic
Sign up for a free Megalytic trial and see how your web design business can benefit from our reporting engine.
For introductory guidelines to creating good client reports, see our three part series on Web Analytics Reporting.
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