They Won, Then They Left | How to Keep Clients Invested

What happens if one of your clients leaves, even if they’re winning?

And what do you do when getting great results for your customers isn’t quite enough?

Fairly recently, one of Codebreak’s clients left – just as we were getting them an 18x return on their ad spend.

I ruminated on this in the Borneo jungle.

I’d gone on holiday with my wife Hannah, but I came down with a cold so I stayed put in our eco lodge while she went hiking.

From that bed, feeling a bit sorry for myself, I started wondering if it was all my fault.

From a marketing perspective, even when you’re getting 18x your investment, if you’ve only spent £100 on it, the most you’ll get back is £1,800.

For most businesses, that would barely cover a few office expenses.

What should we have done after that campaign?

Explained that they needed to massively scale it up. It might have drop their return to 16x, but if they were spending £10k a month and getting £1.6m back, they’d have been thrilled.

But we didn’t do that. Because we wrongly assumed that they already understood that. And I think that’s where we – and many other service-based businesses – sometimes get it wrong.

If you’re an accountant, for example, and you assume your clients all know the deadline for their end-of-year accounts, so you don’t remind them – then they’re all late.

Unless you tell them, they probably won’t know.

But if you’re proactive about it and send out reminders and ask if there’s anything they need you to walk them through, you’re already providing a better service than most other accountants.

It’s hard to tell clients things sometimes because you don’t want to come across as icky, but you’ve got to keep marketing yourself – even when they’ve become a customer.

If you don’t tell them what a great job you’re doing for them, or that they need to scale, or that you can help them with other things too?

Well, you may end up losing them.

And this comes back to having an understanding of where your customers are at, and not taking for granted what you’re doing for them – just because you do it every day.

Some people who are new to paid ads might think a 1 per cent click-through rate is awful, but in fact it’s the average rate. So if a client’s getting a 1.5 click-through rate which is generating a million hits a day, it’s actually huge.

But we have to tell them that, otherwise they might not realise it’s a big deal.

You have to frame what success looks like.

Whatever industry you’re in, it’s not just about delivering results but creating a compelling vision of what’s next. Clients need to see how you’re going to improve things for them. They need to see what’s coming up next and what’s exciting.

Another thing to consider is that people want outcomes, but they’re not loyal to those outcomes.

They’re loyal to the journey, to the trajectory.

Everyone thinks they want to be rich – and then they get rich and they’re not happy.

They enjoy the journey to becoming rich, not necessarily being rich. So you’ve got to make the trajectory compelling and exciting.

And if it isn’t, they’ll lose interest.

So what do people need to do keep their clients engaged – even when they’re getting great results?

Report back to them – regularly. Tell them what’s happening and give them context by comparing their results to what everybody else is doing.

Make it all fully visible and crystal clear.

Then tell them about what happens when things start working, and what can be done next. But keep it succinct; nobody wants to read a 10-page report.

The mistake businesses make is they don’t re-enroll their clients in the vision of why they started doing what they’re doing in the first place.

So, mic drop moment to wrap us up; people don’t leave because they’re losing.

They leave because they can’t see what winning leads to.

Don’t miss the next episode of Stay Hungry – we’ll dive into straight-talking insights on business marketing, growth mindset, and the realities of running a business. And if you want to take the hassle out of your marketing, we’ve got you covered with our done-for-you service.