4 Ways to Use Marketing Dashboards to Ethically Upsell Clients

Every successful marketing agency knows that upsells are an essential part of a sustainable business strategy. It’s not just about upselling your services to improve your bottom line: it’s really about helping your clients reach their goals and retaining them in the long run too. 

However strong your agency's marketing performance may be, upselling your clients can seem daunting and pushy– unless you use marketing analytics and a strong web analytics dashboard to back up your recommendations with data. With data-driven marketing tools and an analytics dashboard to highlight your clients’ campaign performance, your agency should identify key areas of improvement and offer services to address which of their goals are not being met. 

The best marketing dashboards are powerful tools to highlight clients' key performance indicators and digital marketing analytics in real-time.

Data visualization with intuitive graphs will provide full transparency and help get your agency and clients on the same page. 

After all, marketing reports with clear channel performance indicators will ultimately help your clients with their decision-making process when it comes to adding on new agency services. 

Read More: 15 Marketing Dashboards To Help Your Marketing Agency Scale

Here’s how to use your marketing dashboard to ethically upsell your clients:

1. Set Up Clear Goal Tracking in Your Clients’ Marketing Dashboard 

First, you’ll need to clearly understand your clients’ unique needs. Setting goals together with your clients will better define what success looks like to them in the short and long term. After all, a marketing agency’s job is to help clients’ businesses grow, and use their vision to get them there. 

Understanding what your clients prioritize from the get-go will help your agency plan a course of action, and prepare an initial proposal. Your agency can then assess its clients’ key areas of need and achieve those goals before moving on to lower-priority items that clients might not be willing to pay for.

For example, if the client isn't quite reaching their traffic goals, use the data you are already collecting alongside our free SEO proposal template to show them how your agency's SEO team can help them reach those elusive top rankings and achieve other key SEO KPIs. The key to a winning SEO proposal is understanding what the client needs, and your agency will already be miles ahead in that aspect.

The goal tracking tool in your marketing dashboard allows agencies to clearly demonstrate their clients’ progress, giving clients a clear idea of how they’re doing without the confusion of too much data. 

Want bonus points for additional agency-client transparency? Give your clients a login so they can access this information in their dashboard on their own time. 

2. Keep Track of Your Clients That Need Additional Services

It’s a lot easier to sell a service to an existing client than to someone new. As an agency, you may have a retainer to which you can add ongoing services. For example, you might have landed the client with a smaller PPC project, but see an opportunity to expand traffic and revenue with their content strategy. 

Perhaps your clients have set big goals but aren’t getting enough marketing support to reach them. Review your clients’ goals and search for discrepancies between your marketing services and where they want to go. Do they have big website traffic goals for the next year but no PPC campaigns, maybe their existing Google Ads campaigns need work, or their website needs an upgrade. These are an add-on right there. 

Try our free PPC dashboard template with 8 KPIs here

Do their marketing efforts rely on email marketing? Check on their open rates, bounce rates, clickthrough rates and propose to improve their email campaigns, conversion funnel, or help them set up a CRM. Present them all in an intuitive digital marketing dashboard that collects all their email marketing data in one place to boost their marketing activities.

Keep in mind, not every one of your clients needs an upsell. But with results-based conversations, it makes sense to upsell a client when there’s a clear positive impact on their bottom line. 

Even if you have automated your client reporting to scale your agency, check in with them once a month to keep the conversation going. This initiative gives your clients the personalized service they appreciate. Your agency-client relationship will be strengthened by keeping an open line of communication, and upsells will feel more like leveling up on their goals than being overly salesy. 

3. Select Complementary Services

Digital marketing is interdependent on various channels, devices, landing pages, and more, so naturally there is a lot of overlap. So what are complementary services anyway? Let’s say all of your social media KPIs are pointing to paid campaign success -- but the landing page is not converting as it should. Your agency can propose to optimize that page to better reach their goals and measure conversion rates on their e-commerce page to ensure more sales using the Google Analytics integration. 

Some of the best marketing dashboards include SEO metrics as part of key marketing KPIs. No matter what marketing channels your clients rely on, landing page optimization is key, while SEO will bring in more page views for free. 

Using logical, data-driven, and goal-oriented motives is key to upselling: clients need to know that you’re taking care of their business from the beginning to the end. Also, try delivering quick wins to your clients from the get-go. This could be something like auditing their content strategy, recommending off-page SEO campaigns, performing an SEO site audit, or identifying places where their website needs to be optimized for conversions. This shows them that you’re fully committed to their success and have a global vision to get them there. 

With dozens of marketing dashboard templates to choose from, including a customizable SEO dashboard, use the AgencyAnalytics platform to easily add on services to your clients’ existing campaigns fast. 

4. Let the Marketing Dashboard Speak for Itself

The best way to demonstrate your agency’s value is with data. If your agency has delivered proven results on smaller projects, then there is a good chance your agency has gained your clients’ trust.

The key to upselling a client is to have the data to back it up. With a clear marketing dashboard, your clients’ metrics will almost speak for themselves. Customize your marketing dashboards to highlight what matters most. 

When you want to upsell, focus on your clients’ ROI to justify any additional spending that will help them grow their business. Use the data to display how you can help them achieve the goals that they are aiming for and use benchmarks for comparison. Wondering what to showcase on their social media dashboard? Here are 12 Key Metrics to Track the ROI of Social Media Marketing Campaigns.

Summary: How to Use Reporting to Upsell Your Clients

Online marketing includes countless marketing metrics driven by a marketing strategy that is in line with your agency clients' goals. A proper marketing dashboard is a powerful client reporting tool that replaces spreadsheets from various data sources by having specific KPI dashboards at their fingertips so they get everything at a glance. It allows your agency's marketing team to show off your agency’s performance, increases client retention, and upsell services they clients will be thankful for.

Upsell rates are an important client retention metric for marketing agencies, as it helps foster growth and create additional stickiness with existing clients.

Agencies need to demonstrate clear goal tracking with a visual marketing dashboard to highlight their clients’ areas of need and prove that it is capable of bringing clients to success.