Retain Your Coaching Clients Like a Pro with These 3 Strategies
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Half Cost & Half Time
Referral Programs
Loyalty Rewards
With coaches spending so much time and effort trying to find new clients, an overlooked skill has emerged: client retention. Coaches today are wise to reflect on the importance of retaining their coaching clients. In this article, we’ll explain why and give you some actionable ideas for leveling up your retention game.
The Importance of Retaining Your Clients
Perhaps the most compelling case for the importance of retaining your coaching clients comes from comparing client acquisition vs. retention costs. In other words, how expensive is it to find new clients vs. keep existing ones?
Here’s the quick answer: According to Harvard Business Review, estimates range from 5x to 25x when calculating how much more expensive it is to acquire new clients. Those numbers are no joke. For a sole practitioner coach trying to get their business off the ground, prioritizing retention can make all the difference.
Despite this data, the overwhelming pain point among the coaching community is the need for new business. That’s a topic for another article on how to get coaching clients. But if you’ve found yourself here, consider yourself ahead of the pack. Retention is the quiet needle-mover that coaches far too commonly miss or overlook.
General Best Practices for Retention
Before unpacking some actionable and creative retention strategies, let’s discuss general best practices for how to operate your practice with retention in mind.
Set clear expectations from the jump
It may sound counterintuitive, but a retention mindset starts during the client acquisition process. As you land new clients, you should comprehensively walk them through the key elements of your practice—pricing, packages, time commitment, and more.
As a coach, you’re only doing yourself a disservice by skipping over any key information. If you allow for unpleasant surprises on your client’s end, they’ll eventually churn. This is where poor retention gets secretly costly. Think about all the time and energy you spend onboarding new clients! Losing someone early in the process is a quiet killer.
Deception always catches up to you
If you’re providing plenty of value to your clients, you should never have a reason or need to be deceptive. Transparency always wins. Be clear about contract renewals, invoices, payments, etc. If you find yourself getting nervous about these topics, turn the focus inward. What would you need to change about your practice to have more confidence that a payment notice isn’t going to scare off a client?
Don’t avoid the touchy conversations
Coaching is an intimate experience. For coaches, that creates plenty of room for candidness. Unsure if a certain client is getting enough value? Worried someone is on the verge of leaving? Simple. Face the problem directly and ask the client about their experience.
Clients will appreciate your attention and care around maintaining the engagement in ways that feel good for both parties. Sometimes the key here is simply for the coach to create a safe space for clients to give candid feedback. It’s a win-win. For the coach, it’s better to learn about shortcomings before it’s too late. Always give yourself the chance to course correct with your hard-earned clients.
3 Retention Strategies that Work for Coaches
At their core, retention strategies are a form of risk aversion. Just like purchasing insurance before something happens, retention strategies help reduce (or eliminate) future liabilities. For coaches, this means you should focus on retention before it’s needed. These strategies should be in place before the problem (a client wants to pause or quit) emerges.
1. Half Cost & Half Time
Some clients will gladly continue if they’re able to pay half price—even if it means receiving half the amount of coaching. Plus, some may scale back up to your full offering once their situation allows for it.
Considering the immense difference in cost of replacing vs. retaining clients, most coaches should float this “going half-time” option when a client is on their way out. You’re much better off keeping clients in the fold of your business than letting them walk—especially if your coaching services aren’t the problem (i.e. a client is churning because they got laid off and want to scale back expenses).
2. Referral Programs
Referral programs can be extremely powerful for any business aiming to both acquire and retain clients. For example, offer 3 free months of coaching to any existing client who successfully refers a new client.
With a program like this, your clients gain a way to earn free coaching while also serving as a brand advocate and earning you more business.
💡 Pro tip: Equip your clients with a dedicated landing page that can be easily sent around to their contacts. Add a form to the page so interested referrals can request more info or a meeting with you. The more legitimate and established you can make the referral program, the more successful it is likely to be.
3. Loyalty Rewards
Offer a discount, free month, or access to a premium offering for clients who stay with you for a certain period of time. For example, any clients who stick around for six months gain access to a slightly discounted rate and access to your private Slack group where you share additional content and ideas with your most loyal clients.
With an attractive enough offer, clients on the fence may see additional reason to continue with new perks on the horizon. Once again, having these systems set up (branded documents, landing pages, demo videos) can help establish credibility around the offering—instead of appearing as if you just “made up” a new idea in a last-ditch retention effort.
Retention-Centered Marketing & Sales
To conclude, think about your marketing and sales processes and whether they set you up for retention success.
For example, does your website do a good job explaining your coaching packages and what’s included? Again, transparency and clear communication (retention-friendly qualities) start before the sales process and are reinforced once someone enters your sales funnel.
There’s no shortage of ways to build out your coaching practice to improve retention. Some tactical examples include:
Create dedicated landing pages on your website for objection handling (FAQs) and to support your strategies, like referral programs and loyalty rewards.
Build branded documents and decks that can be shared with clients to explain retention-oriented perks.
Create Google forms or surveys to collect candid client feedback to better understand if you need to tweak your services before it’s too late.
With some tangible marketing and sales assets at your disposal, your entire coaching practice will elevate to new heights. Not only will you appear more established, the strategies themselves will start to pay dividends. And remember the value? You’ll be saving anywhere from 5x-25x for each client you can retain vs. replace. What more motivation do you need?!
