How to Use Our Free Onboarding Checklist
When you run a digital marketing agency, a few things are non-starters. You’ve got to have a great onboarding process, and you’ve got to have great Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) in place for just about everything you do.
Naturally, we’ve got you covered in both areas! Our free client onboarding checklist is designed to make onboarding a simple and standardized process. It’s a foolproof system that you can follow again and again, with each and every new client. Personalize it as necessary, and use it to free up precious time that can be better spent scaling your business.
Snag your free checklist here, and keep reading to see how you can use it to make life soooo much easier in your agency.
An Onboarding Checklist???
Before we jump in, let’s cover the basics: what exactly is our onboarding checklist?
Simply put, it’s the tested (and retested, and retested again) workflow that we’ve used to successfully onboard more clients than we can count. It stems from our love of client management, which we turned into the world’s first agency providing full-service client account management. And through our agency, we’ve developed a foolproof client onboarding system, which we’re now sharing with you!
Ultimately, it’s a client onboarding process template. You download a simple Excel file which will show you step-by-step how we give our clients a world-class experience from the get-go.
Who Is The Onboarding Checklist For?
Our onboarding checklist is designed for digital marketers of all shapes and sizes.
If you’re the owner of an agency and you handle the onboarding process yourself, great! Your new client onboarding process is going to free up your valuable time, so you can spend it on growing your business instead.
If you rely on your Client Account Managers to onboard new clients, great! This is going to be a great resource for them. And it will give you faith that your client relationships are being nurtured effectively.
If you’re a freelance digital marketer, great! If you’d like to add a little more sanity to your life without letting clients fall through the cracks, this onboarding client checklist is going to feel like your personal windfall.
Specifically, our checklist is designed for anyone offering the following services:
Facebook Ads
SEO
Web Development
YouTube Ads
Creative
Don’t see your speciality on the list? Give downloading the checklist a whirl anyway! It offers an overarching 6-stage process that you can adjust as necessary to fit many disciplines.
Note that to make the most of our client onboarding process template, it will work best if you’re using project management software (see why we recommend Asana and how we use it here).
Again, you can certainly get lots out of the checklist without this software in place. But you’ll find it a lot more helpful if you’re using one of the following services:
Asana
Trello
Monday.com
Wrike
Details on how to incorporate our checklist into your own software below!
How To Use The Onboarding Checklist
Talk about super easy. We designed our client onboarding checklist to be incredibly adaptable and user-friendly.
Like we covered, you’re going to download an Excel file. On the first tab of the file, you’re going to find instructions on how to get info from the Excel file into your project management software of choice.
So, first up, you’ll need to pick your marketing specialty (Facebook or YouTube ads, SEO, web development, or creative). Each of these will have their own tab within the file.
Next, you’ll download that tab as a CSV file (just go to file > download > comma-separated values, i.e.: csv).
And then the last thing you’ve got to do is simply upload this CSV to your project management software. Now, this may seem more or less daunting, depending on how familiar with your software you are. Take a deep breath … we promise: it’s painless!
For Asana, you can use their CSV Importer, which lets you upload with no manual mapping. Get instructions here.
For Trello, you can use their CSV Loader to import card data. This quick video shows you how.
For Monday.Com, you just drag and drop your file in. Get instructions here.
For Wrike, you will need a professional, business, or enterprise account to import the file. Get instructions here.
And … that’s it! In a few short minutes, you’ll have a new onboarding process directly in your project management software, that you can share with anyone in your agency. And you can use it each and every time you onboard a new client.
Of course, every agency is different. That’s why we encourage you to personalize your new system as it makes sense. It’s also a good idea to review it from time to time and make adjustments as necessary.
And Don’t Forget Inspiration!
We know that our onboarding checklist can help your agency provide a better client experience. But we also hope that it will inspire you to think about all of your processes, and all of the touchpoints you have with your clients. Can you improve them?
For example, there are certain points in a client journey that can make or break the relationship. Think about where you struggle. And where can you streamline SOPs to surprise and delight your clients? For example, we like to send out Happiness Surveys regularly, so we can know how to service our clients better (get our survey template for free here!).
And if you’re new in the game, maybe you haven’t quite figured out SOPs yet. Well, now you know what one can look like!
We also cover all the ins and outs of SOPs on a fun episode of our Happy Clients Podcast. We chat with DOT & Co. Training Manager Emma Watt about all things SOP, including where to start, what should be included, and how often you should update. Take a listen!
Client Management Really Can Be Easy
We started out as digital marketers ourselves, and we love working with them. We want you all to succeed!
But just because you’re a superstar web developer or know the ins and outs of making a winning ads strategy like the back of your hand, that doesn’t mean that you automatically know how to manage clients. And that’s ok!
Our onboarding workflow is going to help you if your clients are falling through the cracks, if clients are constantly checking (and maybe complaining) because they don’t know what the next steps are, or if you want to scale more clients but don’t know how you can manage.
And of course, our team of unicorn-status Client Account Managers can always help you onboard clients, too. Please reach out if you’ve got any questions!