Why you want repeat clients.

Repeat clients are extremely valuable. My own business is formed around a core of repeat clients for whom I do projects on a weekly, monthly or intermittent basis. Repeat clients require far less marketing, if any, and they provide a steady core of income and workload around which you can build the rest of your business. Some of my repeat clients have standing projects with me, while others send me requests for articles or work on a variable basis. All of this is work that I don’t have to go look for in outside channels, which is a very good thing for a self-employed professional.

How to effectively market to repeat clients.

It costs significantly less in terms of time and effort to market to repeat clients. Personally, I send holiday cards to my core clients every year, follow up every project with an invitation to contact me if they need any additional work, and check in periodically to see how they’re doing. Providing valuable blog content also helps retain repeat clients in that your clients may follow your blog, and then think of you when they have a particular project that needs attention.

Different ways in which repeat clients can benefit you.

I’ll use my personal business to illustrate the different ways in which repeat clients provide untapped value:

• I do several monthly newsletters for different businesses, that fall during different weeks of the month. I’ve been doing these newsletters for years. They are a steady, guaranteed source of business.
• I write articles on a weekly basis for one client, ranging from 10 to 40 articles, depending on the client’s needs. I’ve been working with this client for going on three years. This is an invaluable source of steady work that I don’t have to go seek elsewhere.
• I complete monthly blog projects for a few clients. I can write these entire projects at once, or I can do them on a weekly basis, depending on my workload. This gives me the flexibility to plan around other large projects while simultaneously having steady sources of income via these monthly projects.
• I have clients who contact me on an as-needed basis for additional work. These clients may go 6 months without needing a project, or they might contact me every 2-3 months for a new project. These clients come to me – I don’t need to go hunting them down or sourcing additional work to fill that workload.

Compare repeat clients to traditional marketing.

To really see the value that repeat clients add, let’s take a look at my traditional marketing for new clients and projects:

• I spend anywhere from 2 to 10 hours every week looking for new clients and projects;
• I bid on anywhere from 10 to 30 projects every month, and each of these bids takes from 10 to 40 minutes to draft, which costs me anywhere from 2 to 20 hours per month writing bids;
• I typically get anywhere from 2 to 5 ‘additional’ projects per month; roughly a 16% to 20% success rate.

This means that in a given month, I might spend 60 hours on direct marketing – looking for work and bidding on projects (not counting my other indirect marketing efforts) with only a 16% to 20% success rate. This means that maybe 9 of those hours actually result in paying work.

With repeat clients, I spend anywhere from 0 to 30 minutes per month on marketing efforts. Either I do nothing, or I spend a few minutes sending out emails. I spend a couple of hours during the holidays writing cards. And each and every minute I spend results in a direct response – continued work from these repeat clients. I spend absolutely 0 time on wasted marketing with repeat clients.

In a client-driven business, that return on investment for marketing efforts is HUGE.

Make an effort to retain repeat clients.

Because repeat clients form such a strong core of my business, I make an effort to build relationships with repeat clients. When I bid on projects, I spend more time bidding on projects for people who need ongoing work than on one-off projects. I make sure I provide quality work, on time, so that clients will want to use me again. And I communicate proactively with those clients to ensure that they’re satisfied, meed their needs and find out if they have other untapped needs that I can help fill.

These are all relatively simple efforts that go a long way toward building lasting relationships with repeat clients. I would do these things anyway because I’m a professional and I pride myself in delivering quality work, but the added incentive of retaining new repeat clients is huge. Any writer or small business professional can utilize these philosophies to build business and drastically increase the ROI of repeat-client-related marketing dollars.