Retention Strategies to Keep Clients Coming Back

Running your own graphic design business — either as an individual freelancer or as a business owner running a team — offers incredible opportunities to be creative. Indeed, in a highly visual digital society, professionals who build eye-catching assets are in demand, which can make your career quite lucrative.

Still, chasing multiple single-use clients doesn’t tend to be as profitable as maintaining a solid group of repeat customers.

While you’ll always look for new clients, part of your focus should be on retention. The less time and money you have to spend on seeking leads, the better.

Keeping brands coming back to your services isn’t just good for maximizing the value of each prospect, though.

Customer loyalty can also increase brand recognition and allow you to connect with other potential clients.

Adopting retention strategies can help you succeed in multiple ways. Let’s look at some of them below.

Communicate Clearly and Openly

Maintaining good communication standards as part of your business operations should be part of your retention strategy.

Because it helps you maintain positive client relationships. It also makes it easy to address challenges.

Not to mention that your client representatives will usually be accountable to senior figures in their company, so your communication skills enable them to pass on pertinent information that bolsters your relationships.

So, what areas of communication should you focus on?

• Establishing convenient channels: Ensure you have a range of communication tools and methods set up for your client’s convenience. These may include dedicated email accounts, scope for in-person meetings, video call software, and perhaps direct messaging platforms like Slack. Be sure to confirm with each client what their preferred methods are and set up notifications for these so you can respond swiftly.
• Confirming project objectives: With any graphic design project, it’s normal for you to receive a brief from the client outlining the scope of work. However, it’s also important for you to initiate clear communication about the project objectives. Knowing what your client wants to achieve with these assets helps you make more informed creative decisions. It also demonstrates that you pay attention to their needs.

Another priority for communication is checking in occasionally after projects have been completed. Seek their feedback on the outcomes and show an interest in their business.

This gives you useful information about how effective your assets were. It also keeps your relationships with clients fresh, communicates genuine care for their brand, and can open the door to new projects.

Maintain Efficiency

It’s not just your graphic skills that retain clients. How efficiently you run your operations also makes a difference to the sustainability and growth of your business.

Efficiency allows you to finish projects on time and get paid promptly. You can therefore focus on the creative and strategic aspects of the business rather than being hampered by disorganization.

This sends a clear message to clients that you work well and use your time wisely.

Some of the practices that can help you maintain efficiency include the following.

Time management

Being a graphic design professional involves a range of different tasks. There are the creative elements of ideation, design, and implementation, but also administrative aspects of running your business.

You might even be juggling various client projects at once. Being able to manage your time is key to efficiency.

You might consider adopting time-blocking techniques. This involves assessing your workload to identify similar types of tasks, and then assigning blocks of time to tackle each task type.

Blocking prevents you from having to jump between software platforms and activities, boosting efficiency.

You can also consider automating some of your repetitive tasks, such as data entry, bookkeeping, and invoice chasing.

Document management

In professional graphic design, you’ll need to use various types of documents. These include client briefs, ideation notes, design files, invoices, and feedback emails, among others.

Being able to quickly and easily access these when you need them is essential for efficiency.

As a result, your business can benefit from adopting some solid document management processes. Scanning and digitizing documents enables you to store them electronically, making for easier searching.

Investing in cloud-based document management software gives you a centralized space to keep your documents and access them wherever you are working.

It’s vital, though, to ensure that any platforms you use have strong security measures, such as encryption for cloud storage.

Prioritize Quality

Your operational and communication efficiency is essential, but it won’t retain clients if the quality of your work isn’t stellar.

Brands need to have the confidence that you can provide solid design concepts, contribute interesting ideas, and produce results with the minimum of refinement.

Consequently, finding ways to maintain and level up the quality of your work is vital.

Consider implementing quality control checks and measures into your workflow. This isn’t something that you just do once you’ve created the final project assets for submission to the client.

At milestones of the project — following ideation, initial thumbnails, and concept choices, among others — schedule time to review quality standards.

This may seem as though it takes up more time, but it prevents errors that both lead to redoing your work and risk disappointing the client.

Some of the aspects to assess include:

• Adherence to client briefs: The most important thing to check throughout each milestone is how closely your work adheres to the client brief. Even at the early stages of the project, confirming this can prevent you from taking wrong turns that lead you away from the intentions of the project.
• Appropriateness for usage cases: Even if the concepts and messaging in your work adhere to the brief, you should check whether your designs are likely to be appropriate for the usage case. For instance, having a logo with a lot of small elaborate details might match the sophistication the client wants. Yet, if the intention is to produce these on a small scale — such as on keychains or social media profiles — these details may not read well. Testing your concepts in likely use cases helps to keep the usability quality high.
• Color consistency: You likely already know that color consistency in graphic design can vary. Different software platforms, the monitor the image is viewed on, and the color profile for printing can impact how hues and shades appear. Especially if you’re creating assets in several different forms for the client, part of your quality control measures must include confirmation that the colors you’re using are consistent across all forms. Even slight errors can affect the strength of the client’s branding and give the impression that you don’t pay attention to detail.

Your skills are another thing worth considering. The more knowledge and experience you gain, the higher quality work you are likely to produce.

Therefore, consider upskilling occasionally. This might be attending courses in specific aspects of graphic design or refreshing your knowledge of different software platforms.

Be a Problem Solver

As a graphic designer, the experiences and skills you’ve developed also make you a valuable resource for addressing clients’ challenges. Demonstrate that you can be more than a pencil for hire.

By meaningfully contributing to the overall success of the project, you highlight how valuable you can be. Importantly, it bolsters long-term relationships that lead to repeated project involvement.

Adopting visual problem-solving techniques can help you to better understand clients’ evolving needs, simplify the issues, and develop appropriate responses.

There are various methods you can use. Mind maps involve highlighting the central problem and branching off from this with ideas related to different aspects of the problem and potential ways to solve it.

Cause-and-effect diagrams, on the other hand, allow you to visualize the root causes of the problem and what can impact them, including the effects of different design ideas.

Importantly, don’t just keep these visual problem-solving assets hidden away in your office. Share them with your clients.

It shows them how much thought you’ve put into providing tailored solutions, highlighting your value to them.

It can also be wise to incorporate some of these problem-solving documents in your portfolio alongside the resulting finished designs.

The clearer you can show your graphic problem-solving skills, the better you can build a reputation as an agile and skilled professional.

Provide Incentives

Taking the time to build strong relationships with clients using the above strategies is a solid foundation for retention.

At the same time, offering incentives can be an effective garnish to sweeten the prospect of returning. It might even be the difference between clients going to a designer with similar skills and hiring you.

Some effective incentives can include:

• Loyalty discounts: Every business has strict budgets. If you can offer discounts to repeat customers, you’re helping them stay profitable. Don’t offer discounts that put you at a significant financial loss, though. Consider reasonable milestone discounts, in which you offer a percentage discount for every third or fourth project. This entices them if they’ve already had a couple of projects with you and gives them a reason to keep coming back.
• Package deals for existing customers: Package deals are good to offer to all potential clients. They show businesses they can conveniently get multiple assets from a single place, while also opening you up to higher-value single purchases. As a retention incentive, you might offer exclusive packages to repeat clients, incorporating asset types you wouldn’t usually include in packages. You might even be able to tailor packages to particularly loyal customers, once you understand their nuanced needs.

In addition, the occasional gift doesn’t hurt. Sending out an item that’s branded with your business visuals — or even theirs — can remind clients you exist.

Holiday seasons can be good times to do this, but don’t forget to personalize the messages you send with the gifts. This shows clients you’re paying attention.

Providing useful items, like cups, multitools, and tote bags, may mean clients use these and are regularly exposed to your designs.

Conclusion

Boosting customer retention can influence the sustainability and ultimate success of your graphic design business.

This requires attention in a range of areas, from maintaining high-quality standards to finding ways to be more efficient.

Alongside effective marketing tactics that help you find new business, your retention strategy enables you to create a stronger and more successful brand.