What is client onboarding and why is it so important?

Over the years we have observed that investing greater energy in the early stages of a new client partnership leads to significantly better results down the line. Indeed, a number of surveys show that making it past the first 90 days of a client life cycle depends on the true effectiveness of your onboarding strategy. 

After landing a new client, the onboarding stage is your opportunity to build a solid relationship right from the outset with the goal of maintaining it over time. At Relevance, we consider client onboarding to be a game changer. It can significantly boost client experience, maximize productivity and set the groundwork for a long and ambitious business relationship.  

Our Approach 

With onboarding quickly becoming digital due to the challenges posed by Covid-19, we have designed a number of steps for smoothing the client transition. The design of our onboarding process reflects our business philosophy. We focus on improving our client’s key competences, setting attainable benchmarks, incorporating data into our client strategy and continuously refining our approach. It is the result of carrying out hundreds of transformational performance marketing campaigns and strategic consultations with our clients. 

We always commence a new client relationship by holding a few kickoff meetings between the company’s CEO/CMO/executives and our agency’s senior executives with deep knowledge and expertise in the client’s line of business.  

We strive to foster transparency and set realistic expectations by following a number of key steps: 

• Fully understanding the challenges of our client's business, processes and the main revenue/profit generators. 

• Evaluating our client's digital maturity (based on the BCG’s Digital Maturity Framework).  

• Precisely determining our client’s target audience. 

• Defining our client’s hard and soft target KPI’s. 

• Determining the report tools and processes we will use.

• Identifying potential areas of growth and strategy for increasing the lifetime value of client's customers. 

Pairing our clients with our team's appropriate experts

We pair our clients with our team’s appropriate technical & industry experts who are responsible for developing the client relationship and tracking its progress. These initial meetings conclude with us setting a north star for both our mid and long-term collaboration goals giving both parties a clear direction and strategy to follow. 

Incorporating data into our client strategy

We begin each project by incorporating data into our client strategy. We reduce our client’s risk by achieving proof of concept before eventually scaling things up. 

For example, when creating a Google ads campaign for a new client, we start by: 

• Deep diving into our client’s business model and profitability indicators. 

• Producing campaigns using best practices, beta tools and seasoned experience in order to secure perfect targeting and an impeccable performance.  

• Ensuring through attribution and automation that all added value deriving from digital campaigns and targeting is accredited fairly and that our working hours and energy are well allocated. 

Optimizing results for our clients

Upon establishing a clear strategy and defining our client’s KPIs, our main goal is to deliver and optimize results for our clients. We find this works better than a direct implementation of performance marketing best practices. 

In order to optimize our client’s results, we start by: 

• Training our client’s team on the range of digital products we use. 

• Customizing some of the tools for optimized suitability to campaign objectives. 

• Achieving proof of concept and strategy (ROAS, ROI) before scaling things up. 

• Setting internal deadlines for the implementation of all our goals and constantly cross checking them using Google’s Agency Skill Score and Optiscore and our client’s hard and soft KPIs. 

• Conducting three-way progress meetings with our agency’s account managers of our vendors (Google, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest) in order to unlock good investment opportunities.  

Scheduling regular check ups and refining our approach

Performance marketing strategy has to constantly be re-evaluated. For this reason, it is important to schedule regular progress check ups with C-level stakeholders, which gives us the chance to re-engineer our approach in order for it to remain relevant and up to date.