5 Ways to Generate Recurring Revenue

By Sarah Khogyani, Arielle Shnaidman
Jul 25 2016 read
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Selling can take up a lot of time and resources at your agency. While necessary, finding new business is not your only option when thinking of ways to generate additional revenue. Rather than focusing on selling alone, businesses can actually spend more time delivering high quality services and doing the creative work they love. How? With recurring revenue models. They not only deepen client relationships, but they'll benefit your agency too - and that's because retaining business means you're keeping customer loyalty (and satisfaction) at a high. 

To help you maximize on this, here are five things you can do to generate recurring revenue at your digital agency:

1. Marketing services

From a more consultative angle, agencies can provide services that cover an entire department. Marketing services might include crafting an overall strategy, producing content for a defined target audience, running online advertising campaigns and ensuring success with measurement.

2. SEO service

Ongoing SEO services are an easy retainer to sell and provide substantial recurring revenue for minimal effort. Some examples of SEO services include:

  • Keyword research
  • Content strategy
  • Link-building strategy
  • Blog campaigns
  • Measurement & analytics

3. Content production services

As a bite off marketing services or even on its own, agencies can produce monthly content for clients. Content services can include:

  • Blog posts
  • Infographics
  • E-books
  • Videos
  • Images

4. Hosting services

A hosting retainer is obvious for most web agencies. Web projects will typically require hosting and can be billed on an ongoing basis. On top of that, there are up-sell opportunities in the realm of backup services, software upgrades and more.

5. Implement monthly maintenance and/or support retainers

Like you've probably experienced, web projects rarely (if ever) have a fairytale ending. There are always emergency issues, bugs and other content updates that need to be addressed on an ongoing basis. Many freelancers and agencies still do this work for free.

However, setting up a pre-negotiated monthly support retainer allows clients to effectively 'reserve' services as they need it. Although maintenance & support retainers aren't as profitable as large projects, retaining clients over the long-term means not losing them to competitors the next time they need a design or web project.

The solution? Recurring revenue management

With the right tools, businesses can streamline and automate ongoing services in order to make recurring revenue possible. By using a retainer management system, businesses can:

  • Track usage, cost and allowances in real-time
  • Automate recurring tasks and business processes
  • Easily approve and invoice based on usage
  • Automate billing with rollover for subscriptions

Along with the benefits of higher revenue, businesses can effectively lower admin costs and create long-term, loyal and profitable relationship with clients

Check out how Accelo Retainers can help manage your company's ongoing services. 

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