When you spend months focusing on starting your digital marketing agency, the concept of an agency onboarding process can take the back seat. But once you gain your first client, it’s important to have a solid agency onboarding process in place to ensure you are providing your client with a top notch experience that will lead to referrals and retention.
Agency onboarding is the structured process of welcoming new clients and setting up everything required for effective project collaboration. It involves establishing clear goals, assigning tasks, and maintaining regular communication with clients.
If you’re looking for a clear, efficient path for agency onboarding, this tactical guide is for you. This guide delivers ten direct, actionable steps to seamlessly integrate new clients into your agency, establishing a solid foundation for ongoing success.
A streamlined agency onboarding process involves these 10 repeatable steps:
- Establishing clear communication channels
- Gathering essential client details
- Setting expectations and defining success metrics
- A successful initial onboarding meeting
- Aligning teams with project management tools
- Personalizing the welcome experience
- Transitioning new clients
- Monitoring client satisfaction
- Refining the agency onboarding process
- Tools and technologies to enhance onboarding
Before we get into the nitty-gritty, let us introduce ourselves. We're Slam Media Lab, a top digital marketing and design agency in San Francisco. We've meticulously documented the strategies and templates that helped us grow fast, from our start in 2020, to acquiring 30+ clients in just 3 short years.
If you’re looking for a one-stop-shop resource to save you from hours of research, our How to Start an Agency masterclass provides a comprehensive deep dive on topics like legal and money matters, to getting your first clients, to the agency onboarding process.
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In the course, we'll walk you through how we crush agency onboarding to give our clients the best impression. We will use Slam's agency onboarding templates, to walk you through it step by step.
If you aren't ready to start the course, that's okay! This article will give you a preview on how we run it!
Establishing Clear Communication Channels
Just like any successful relationship, effective communication is central to the client-agency relationship. Clear communication during agency client onboarding is crucial to:
- Prevent miscommunication, mistakes, and misalignment between the agency and the client
- Set the stage for managing customer expectations
- Reduce confusion or frustration during the onboarding process
Establishing communication channels that match both your agency’s workflow and client preferences is crucial for fostering effective collaboration. Providing multiple communication options allows clients to choose their preferred method of contact – whether that be email, phone, chat, or social media – increasing the likelihood of engagement and participation.
In today’s tech-driven world, there are countless tools available to streamline communication. Tools such as Slack provide a platform for instant communication and real-time decision-making. You can create a shared slack channel with your clients and internal team to stay up to date on deliverables and the project timeline.
We also recommend setting up a Google Workspace for each client. Google Workspace provides a custom email for your agency so that your clients don’t have to remember who to email. Within your workspace, you can create a group name for each client and add the client as an external user, in addition to all necessary internal team members. This way, a client can email any person within the group and everyone will receive the email. This keeps communication consolidated and can save you time trying to relay important client information from that one email thread from weeks ago – we’ve all been there.
Gathering Essential Client Details
Understanding your client is the cornerstone of a successful client-agency relationship. Understanding their challenges, expectations, and brand guidelines is pivotal for aligning the onboarding process with their needs. This is where a client onboarding questionnaire can be a helpful tool.
An effective onboarding questionnaire should ideally contain 15 to 20 questions that build a comprehensive picture of how the agency can best assist the client and address their priorities. Here are some questions you can ask:
- What are your short term and long term goals for this campaign?
- Who are your top competitors?
- Can you describe your target audience?
- What are your company’s core values?
- What does success look like? What does failure look like?
A client questionnaire can be easily created through Google Forms, which can also stay in your client's Google workspace as a helpful reference point.
When distributing the questionnaire, the agency should set a proposed deadline for returning the completed questionnaire to ensure the onboarding process stays on track. For context, Slam’s typical agency onboarding process can take one week, but it can vary depending on the complexity of the project and how quickly the client gets back to the agency. Regardless, setting timeline expectations can help a project or campaign stay on schedule.
In addition to a client onboarding questionnaire, during the preliminary onboarding discussions, agencies should compile essential information, such as the point of contact, budget, and deliverable timelines. This information should all be collected in one easy-to-access place, such as a client Google Drive Folder or a Notion project.
Setting Expectations and Defining Success Metrics
Managing expectations is a fundamental aspect of the client onboarding process. It starts with discussing the client’s big-picture ideas for the first campaign or project and translating this understanding into defined deliverables through a service level agreement.
Setting clear expectations early in the client relationship regarding goals, timelines, and deliverables is key to avoid misunderstandings and ensure alignment between the agency and the client. It’s about creating a shared vision of success and defining the steps to achieve it.
Success metrics should include:
- Tangible benchmarks, such as the time to complete the new client onboarding process
- Setting action items for both parties to facilitate successful project management
- Regularly demonstrating progress with agency reporting
- Establishing feedback mechanisms
These are vital for maintaining transparency with the client and keeping them informed, which ultimately contributes to client satisfaction and retention.
The Initial Marketing Agency Onboarding Meeting: Kickoff to Success
The initial onboarding meeting, or kickoff meeting, serves as the springboard for the client-agency relationship. It sets the tone for the new relationship, discusses an agency’s work approach and methodologies, and clarifies the project requirements and goals.
The kickoff meeting is essential for fostering a strong client-agency relationship as it encourages interaction, uncovers insights, and can help to quickly establish rapport and trust. Make sure to invite all key team members to this meeting, including higher level folks that might not be the main point of contact for the rest of the campaign. It’s the first opportunity to bring all stakeholders to the same table and align their vision for the project.
Establishing a clear project timeline and introducing team members during the kickoff meeting can help manage client expectations and contribute to a positive experience. To ensure every agency team member is prepared for a strategic meeting ideating on the client’s needs, expectations, and budget, an internal pre-kickoff meeting can be beneficial. Your kickoff meeting should set a positive tone for the client so they can know what to expect for future meetings.
Unsure how to conduct your kickoff meeting? Slam's How to Start an Agency Course includes a dedicated module on this topic! With downloadable resources and templates such as our Notion Meeting Notes Template, you can be confident that your client meetings are productive and organized
Aligning Teams with Project Management Tools
Project management tools are crucial for streamlining the client onboarding process, ensuring its success, and helping you create client accounts efficiently. Having good project management tools in place serves as the anchor for a successful client onboarding process. Some key benefits of project management tools include:
- Creating a clear picture of project goals, essential for defining project roadmaps and directing team efforts
- Enhancing effective teamwork and ensuring clarity of individual responsibilities through project communication plans
- Providing features for document sharing and progress tracking
- Facilitating time management and the establishment of a task hierarchy
- Managing short-term and long-term objectives while considering time-sensitive goals
Additionally, project management tools can help your agency streamline and refine its onboarding process because they can aid in tracking the time it takes to complete steps in the onboarding process, which can help identify internal areas of improvement.
Take our How to Start an Agency Course so you can improve your agency onboarding process, plus get access to 20+ templates we use at Slam
Personalizing the Welcome Experience
A personalized client welcome experience offers a distinctive approach to foster trust, promote transparency and boost client satisfaction. One way to do this is by creating a client welcome packet or a client welcome deck as a tangible expression of your agency’s commitment to the client, leading to higher loyalty and business growth.
This client welcome packet/deck can include visually engaging elements that reflect the agency's brand identity using brand colors, fonts, and images. You can use one of our favorite graphic design tools, Canva, to help create your agency’s brand colors and creative assets for a welcome packet. Consider including an introduction letter to make clients feel valued, while you create a friendly and professional tone. Overall, your client welcome experience should include:
- Concise and clear information
- Avoidance of industry jargon and overly technical language
- Clarification of terms of engagement, including responsibilities, timelines, and payment details
From Sales to Service: Transitioning New Clients
The client onboarding process includes a pivotal phase that should not be overlooked, which is the shift from sales to service.
Aligning sales and service teams with shared goals and open communication is essential to optimize the handoff process and ensure customer satisfaction.
Onboarding is an extension of the sales process, so the handoff sets the tone for the ongoing relationship. Maintaining customer confidence and an upbeat tone during the transition, as well as documenting and confirming details, is key to a positive customer experience.
Key account managers and consultants should review the client’s purchasing history, payment terms, previous interactions, and client accounts before initiating contact. This knowledge helps to personalize the customer service experience and sets the stage for a smooth transition.
Monitoring Client Satisfaction and Retention
Keeping tabs on client satisfaction and retention aids in the refinement and enhancement of the agency onboarding process.
Surveys like Net Promoter Score (NPS) can capture immediate customer impressions and feedback during the onboarding process, while the Client Satisfaction Score (CSAT) tracks new clients’ experiences.
Ensuring that surveys provide a clear response scale and the opportunity for additional feedback allows clients to comfortably elaborate on their experiences, which aids in assessing satisfaction. The candid insights from client satisfaction surveys can yield valuable feedback, which when acted upon, can improve the client retention rate and your agency’s reputation.
The best way to increase client retention is to always be showcasing the value your agency provides clients. One surefire way to do this is providing regular reporting on the ROI of your agency's campaign efforts. Slam's all-in-one marketing agency report template is a great resource to do so. It helps create beautiful, effective reports that are easily repeatable across all clients, including an executive summary, SEO and keyword reporting, and recommendations for next steps.
Refining Your Agency Client Onboarding Process
Your agency’s client onboarding process calls for ongoing refinement. To refine your process you should follow these steps:
- Regularly gather feedback from clients and team members
- Follow up with clients after the initial onboarding to address any concerns or questions
- Implement a feedback loop to assess client satisfaction and make necessary adjustments to the onboarding process
Another way to refine the onboarding process is to not just look at client feedback, but also your agency team. Conducting internal reviews to discuss onboarding successes and challenges, providing additional training and support where needed, and creating a culture of continuous improvement can enhance the onboarding experience. Check out our Notion Feedback Template for a great resource to safely and effectively gather internal team feedback.
A refined onboarding process contributes to:
- Preventing client-agency misunderstandings
- Avoiding scope creep
- Minimizing project delays
- Ensuring a smooth start for clients
- Building credibility and loyalty
- Improving agency efficiency and outcomes
Tools and Technologies to Enhance Your Agency Onboarding
There are an abundance of tools and technologies that can make your agency onboarding process easy. Project management softwares such as Notion, ClickUp, Asana, and Monday.com play a vital role in enhancing the onboarding experience, in addition to collaboration tools like Airtable that help clients share critical business information on one relational database.
Airtable can also get client campaigns up and running quickly, particularly when organizing content. Slam's Airtable Content Calendar (also included in our How to Start an Agency Course) is a helpful resource that builds upon 5+ years of creating content machines for clients across a wide range of industries.
Implementing AI tools like Otter AI can automate note-taking and transcription during client calls, providing clients with call transcriptions and recordings, while saving your agency time on note taking and follow up.
When taking Slam's How to Start an Agency Course, you’ll get access to the tools and technologies we use in our agency onboarding process
The Importance of a Seamless Onboarding Process for Agency Success
To recap, implementing a solid client onboarding process involves creating and executing our 10 step client onboarding checklist. At a high level, an effective client onboarding process involves:
- Welcoming new clients into your agency
- Building a strong relationship with clients and addressing their questions and concerns
- Aligning campaign expectations and setting project timelines
- Outlining the ongoing strategy
If you’ve read this far, you can see by now that the agency onboarding process is a crucial component of the client-agency relationship. It’s where the promises made during your agency pitch are aligned with the actual service delivery, and it can set the tone for a productive working relationship.
The journey of client onboarding is ongoing, and it requires regular feedback, monitoring, and refinements. But with the right strategies in place, agencies can foster long-lasting, fruitful client partnerships that contribute to their success and growth.
Take Slam’s How to Start an Agency Masterclass to Perfect Your Agency Processes
We understand how intimidating agency onboarding, operations, and processes can be, but taking our How to Start an Agency Course will help you gain the confidence you need to make these logistics much easier. Our 10 hour agency course is broken up into 12 helpful modules and 20+ agency tool templates to ace the launch of your new agency – here’s a brief snapshot of what you will learn:
- Blueprint to creating your agency
- The role of an agency CEO
- Finding your niche
- Setting up your services and pricing
- Legal and operational set up
- Operations, processes, and onboarding
- Tools and software recommendations
