9-Step Agency Client Onboarding Checklist for Long-Term Success

Owning and running a business is great! Your agency keeps growing, and clients are coming in large numbers. Life couldn't get better—it is all rosy—until you have to onboard clients.

Many agency owners consider client onboarding the bane of their existence. The good news is that it gets easier after you have streamlined your customer onboarding process and built lasting relationships.

Doing so will greatly increase your customer experience, giving them the confidence to choose the best team.

Before discussing all the complex details, let's understand the meaning of the term/process "Agency client onboarding."

What Is Agency Client Onboarding?

Joining a new team can be daunting for many people. It's like being the new kid at school in the middle of a school year. Everyone except you has friends and knows where to find whatever they need.

As the agency here, you are the sweet little kid who walks right up to them before they get overwhelmed. This isn't your first rodeo, so you have a cute scrapbook guide of the entire school that every new kid loves and has even signed on its back cover.

You don't stop there; you also introduce them to classmates, teachers, and everything else they need to start this new journey at your school. This is precisely what most of the client onboarding process is about. It ensures a smooth transition for each new client who trusts and chooses your agency.

It is welcoming and caters to client expectations, dispelling any fear or doubt they had about your company. Simply put, it is the first step towards ensuring a satisfied client.

Why Is Onboarding Important for Digital Marketing Agencies and Clients Alike?

A 2020 study by Wyzowl found that 86% of people were more likely to remain loyal to a business that invests in providing onboarding content after purchase. This shows how onboarding is one of the crucial steps to client retention.

Consider the consequences of skipping such an important step. The impact could be significant. If you're fortunate, clients who are dissatisfied may leave quietly. However, in many cases, they will not only go but also share their negative experiences with potential clients they know. This can result in a low client retention rate, leading to losing trust and credibility in your agency within the industry.

9 Key Steps Client Onboarding Checklist for Agencies

At this point, we believe we have proven the importance of initial onboarding for your clients. Let us now examine the main steps of an effective onboarding process.

This client onboarding template is the first step in this journey and serves as a roadmap that outlines the steps you need to onboard each client fully. It is a comprehensive guide for every new client, detailing everything they need to get acquainted with when working with you.

Finalize Legal Payment Requirements

This step of the agency onboarding checklist is more for you than for clients. Ensure that:

• Both parties have clarity and mutual agreement on the financial and legal terms of agency-client relationship.
• There are clear payment details with schedules, methods, penalties, and invoicing details clearly defined.
• You collect client information and any custom requests for legal or payment terms or preferences.
• You have regulatory compliance and get final approval and signatures on legal documents.
• You've set up internal processes for invoicing and tracking payments and payment terms.

Assign Roles and Build the Team

A great agency team is one of the precursors to a successful client onboarding process. In this step, determine the internal team members who manage the client accounts and deliver onboarding services. Key roles such as account and project manager should be assigned based on client needs, the scope of the work, and the skill set of the staff in your agency.

Then, you can introduce this team to the client, highlighting their roles and expertise. This is also the time to set up communication tools and channels for seamless collaboration. With this step, you can rest assured that your client has an entire team ready to manage their onboarding and ongoing relationships effectively.

Understand Client Goals and Objectives

To establish a good client onboarding experience, you must first understand your client, who they are, and their goals. This requires good client communication, particularly during the initial consultation, where trust is still being built.

You can start with a simple client onboarding questionnaire to obtain vital client information, such as sales process information, business goals, client lifecycle, and primary point of contact details.

Once you have the client questionnaire response, you can create a client brief to note vital information. This document details the project guidance for client goals, timeline, and scope.

Create a Resource and Project Management Plan

As you are now aware of the client's goals and needs, you can finally work on the last step of the planning phase of the marketing agency onboarding process. This is where you create a plan on how your digital marketing agency can manage.

This resource and project management plan helps to:

• Effectively match onboarding tasks to the right resource.
• Budget and schedule according to resource availability and project needs.
• Leave room for adjustment, as situations can impact the project timeline. This isn't to say you shouldn't set clear expectations or prevent scope creep. However, it is better to have some buffer time if deadlines are missed.
• Perform a post-project analysis/retrospective to enhance the client onboarding process.

Integrate Clients into Agency Tools and CRM

There are several tools clients have to familiarize themselves with during the digital marketing onboarding process at an agency. These include but are not limited to:

• Project management tools like Asana and Jira
• Slack – a communication and collaboration tool
• CRM tools like HubSpot and Salesforce

This is an ideal time to familiarise clients with their dashboards and how to access/use them.

Scheduling Kickoff Meetings

This is a marketing client onboarding meeting that you can use to lay a strong foundation for your walk with this client. We suggest you take a personalized approach from client to client using different client interview questions, introducing them to different internal teams like the customer success team, marketing, and sales team through in-person or video calls.

This is the time to establish a positive client experience by setting clear expectations. In this meeting, ask questions to:

• Get a deeper understanding of what the sales team promised/the client's perception of it.
• Define any special considerations for the client or project.
• Work out the expected turnaround time for different project milestones and how project updates will be reported.

Finally, the project kickoff meeting is a great place to understand your client's communication style, so pay attention to that. This will become relevant information on keeping clients happy and maintaining client loyalty, thus reducing the client churn rate, which is one of the key indicators in building long-lasting relationships.

Welcome and Familiarize the Client with the Processes

Your client is mostly up to speed now. They have access to the tools, know the team members to contact during a hitch, and can navigate the system on a basic level. However, they have yet to get a deep understanding of your day-to-day processes at the agency.

If you have a physical office, invite them to tour the space, showing them the different departments and their processes. Any documentation you have on what they need to work successfully with you will be perfect to share now.

Set Up Client Reporting and Communication Plans

This can happen simultaneously with familiarizing clients with your processes. Set up an internal meeting with your members. While some key team members work on building trust by providing a client welcome packet, the rest can focus on reviewing documentation and deciding the best way to report to and communicate to handle the volume of clients you have efficiently.

As much as possible, try to align these reporting and communication plans with the tools you already use. This will help you avoid the cost of introducing a new tool and prevent the extra context switching that comes with it.

Follow-up and Check-in (Post Kickoff)

At this point, you have introduced the client to every aspect of the project they need to know. You have now completed your primary goals.

What you need to do next is ask for client feedback. Give them time to assimilate the information you shared with them, but don't forget to check in with them for client responses on their experience so far and areas they need help.

Try not to overwhelm them as you do this. Instead, simply ensure an open communication line if they need to get in touch, send a follow-up email, and then check in every few days if they don't contact you to establish long-term relationships with your clients.

How You Can Ensure a Smooth, Stress-free Client Onboarding Experience

The client onboarding process can either make or break your business. A smooth, stress-free experience is one step towards retaining newly acquired clients — and that means continued business.

So, the big question is how to create a smooth and stress-free onboarding experience, both for your clients and for your team.

Here are 3 tips to help you achieve that.

Evaluate your existing client onboarding system

Take a good look at your existing branding guidelines for onboarding clients and see what's relevant, working, and needs changing.

Then, based on your new client's needs and key goals, you can adjust your existing system to align with a specific client. This ensures a smooth experience and helps build trust as clients will see that you're addressing their specific needs.

Choose the correct tools

Thanks to technology, there are various, affordable tools on the market that can help you complete almost every dull onboarding task with ease — leaving you to focus on the exciting work of making your client's vision a reality!

Additionally, these tools minimize human errors that can make your digital marketing agency look unprofessional. To get started, determine which tools are ideal for every stage of the process.

Testing

Before launching the system, test your marketing agency client onboarding system to discover areas that need improvement.

The goal is to create a first impression for your clients that will erase any fears or doubts and make them want to do business with you.

Once you launch, invite client feedback to successfully launch an effective client onboarding process.

Important Tools and Resources to Support the Client Onboarding Process

Project Management Software

These are tools that help with project timeline, planning, execution, and completion. They help track, prioritize, and organize tasks, schedules, and resources. Most project management tools also have communication features that allow key team members and clients to comment on tasks and receive updates on their progress.

CRM Tools

Customer relationship management CRM tools are great for managing customer data. They will help you to:

• Manage sales and marketing
• Organize and record client data
• Track client throughout their onboarding journey and lifetime with your agency
• Merge different clients and company data to draw insights from or manage their relationships with each other.

Collaboration and Communication Tools

You need an avenue to communicate and collaborate with clients, and there are many. Common ones include email and phone. However, mail threads can become long, and messages eventually get harder to track. Fortunately, other tools like Slack, Google Chat, and even your project management tools exist, making it easier to track conversations.

Building Trust and Rapport with Clients

Trust is crucial in gaining client confidence in you as a business owner and your agency's ability to deliver. So start now to establish strong relationships built on trust and rapport with your clients, as they are the key to enhancing client satisfaction and thus promoting lasting relationships

To complete your checklist, keep in mind these nine key steps:

• Finalize legal and payment requirements.
• Assign roles and build the team.
• Understand client goals and objectives.
• Create a resource and project management plan.
• Integrate your client into agency tools and CRM.
• Schedule a kickoff meeting.
• Welcome and familiarize your client with processes.
• Set up client reporting and communication plans.
• Follow-up and check-in (post-kickoff).

Digital marketing client onboarding is no easy feat. We know it because we've lived it. That is why we decided to cut some of that stress and save you the time to create a customer onboarding checklist from scratch with our Client Onboarding Checklist.