Agency client onboarding best practices: 6 secrets from marketing agencies

Landed a new client? Great news! The next steps are routine—you already have a tried-and-tested onboarding process in place. 

But at some point, client onboarding becomes a bottleneck. Going from 2 to 10 new clients a week will put any onboarding SOPs to the test.

Have you searched for best practices and thought, “We are already doing all these”? Forget about that generic advice.

We spoke to ten marketing agencies to discover client onboarding best practices that can’t be found on other top-10 lists. And we’re sharing them with you to help you turn your client onboarding process into a competitive advantage and a sales tool. 

Let’s hear it from the experts…

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#1: Set targets for onboarding

✅ Benefits: Positive impact on billing cycles and revenue.

Most agencies want to onboard new clients in the least possible time if given a choice. In reality, onboarding processes can vary quite a bit across agencies, clients, and projects. 

We asked our top agencies what targets they set. 40% onboard new agency clients within 3 days, while the remaining 60% aim for completion within 1-2 weeks. 

In many cases, the time to onboard does affect billing cycles and revenue:

• Shorter onboarding cycles equate to a revenue increase of 31%.
• Investing in better onboarding experiences increases CLV by 60%.
• Improving client onboarding can improve retention rates by 70%.

For digital and marketing agencies whose services are asset or access-dependent, any delay is too long:

“A client pays us their official billing cycle the day their ads go live. So the longer we take to go live, the longer it takes to get our second billing. 
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This really hurts if we sign a client up in the third week of the month and things lag, meaning the client goes live in the first week of the next month… which creates fluctuations in MRR.”
_{-Dave Pancham, CEO, Go Pancham}

Why bother speeding client onboarding up, you ask? Because there is still a chance that you can lose a client between signing contracts and onboarding!

“Onboarding gives us a good opportunity to reset expectations with clientele, and doing it as soon as possible takes them off the market of looking for digital agencies to work with, in such a busy marketplace.” 
_{-Jarrod Harman, Director, Business Warriors}

If that seems too soon for you (“But what if they don’t push through?”), consider how Dave and their agency views it:

“The second the client pays us, we immediately start treating them as if they are a client and start onboarding, even if they haven't signed their service agreement yet. It removes the chances of buyer’s remorse because they immediately feel like a client and are already communicating with their Client Success Manager. 
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We also schedule their onboarding call with their CSM right on the sales call.” 

💡 Hint: The best practices here all help in turning your client onboarding process into a well-oiled machine!

🔗 Related article: How the Best Marketing Agencies Onboard Clients

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#2: Remove friction for your client

✅ Benefits: Reduced client frustration and shorter onboarding cycles.

Most onboarding processes include a client onboarding questionnaire or an online form, as well as a long set of instructions. Sometimes, it’s a 15-page PDF that you’re hoping someone in the client’s team bothers to read.

How else will you get the information you need to start work properly? You’ll need their basic business info and marketing goals to get a clear picture of what you’re working with. But you’ll also need to get access to their website, social media accounts, marketing tracking/analytics, CMS, and more.

“Usually, the biggest delay for us is to get information from a client, so the more we can reduce that time, the better we are poised to get things done.” 
_{-Kim Barrett, CEO, Your Social Voice}

Your clients have hired you to do the job—and we know that most of them are non-tech-savvy business owners who barely touch the settings page of their social accounts.

For example, clients might not know:

• Their own logins
• Who’s the admin who can give you access
• How to navigate Meta Business Suite and its multiple layers of access

… The list goes on.

🔗 Related article: How to See Who Has Access to Facebook Business Page

Is there a way to speed up onboarding? Yes, by making it easier for your new clients to give you the information you need to start work.

“We automate it as much as possible to maintain consistent, repeatable processes”
_{-Bradley Martin, CEO, Client Connection Group}

Here are other ideas to help new clients along and impress them at the same time:

• Collect information along the way and from multiple sources. Take down notes during calls, sales meetings, and onboarding sessions. Then, use these to prompt them for in-depth answers when they stall or are slow to respond.
• Waiting around for clients to give you access to their accounts? Automate access requests by sending them a secure, custom link that gets your agency the access you need in just a few clicks from your client.

🔗 Related article: The 14 best agency onboarding tools (2025)

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#3: Establish your agency as the trusted expert

✅ Benefits: Stronger relationships and loyalty; less second-guessing from clients.

Clients are increasingly difficult to retain over long periods of time, with competitors enticing them with promises of bigger ROI and cheaper retainers. While losing clients is part and parcel of the industry, your reputation stays in their minds. No matter your current standing in their eyes, these are some ways to increase your authority (in a good way) as the marketing expert:

• Discuss the data you get from the marketing audits, especially with clients unfamiliar with online marketing and paid social.
• Use data specific to the client’s industry to create campaigns and set KPIs.

Some agencies go one step further with profitability calculators and marketing efficiency spreadsheets 📊

Pariss Roiniotis, Marketing Head of Accounts at Megaphone, told us that getting business and marketing numbers [from clients] to set accurate KPIs is one of the toughest challenges for their agency. Why? Because clients are almost never clear on the numbers themselves. So, they’ll swoop in and dig for data with an in-house template.

Business Warriors has a similar approach, tailored for their salon and spa clients, whose businesses run on an hourly service charge model: 

“We have a financial calculator we get clients to fill in which shows the business’s break-even point and profit target per hour, as well per day and month, so we know how to price their offers better to get them a profitable outcome for each sale they make.” 

With diligent data gathering, what happens is that you end up revealing to the client things they never even knew about their business or marketing potential 📋

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#4: Have a dedicated client onboarding manager

✅ Benefits: Consistency, efficiency, and personalized attention to new clients.

If your agency doesn’t have a client success or accounts manager who exclusively handles client onboarding, now is the time to consider it. One issue that came up a lot in our interviews was how to delegate onboarding roles. 

Marketing leaders widely agree that it can’t be left entirely to junior employees because onboarding is too technical—and too critical—for non-experts to navigate:

“Because we have many clients onboarded every month and there are often issues (wrong Google account, Facebook assets not connected, no GTM, etc.) that mean that clients get stuck.”
_{-Hayley Crandell, Head of Data & Analytics, Online Marketing Gurus}

So, someone more senior on your team ends up hopping on a call (or two) with the client to screenshare and walk them through the steps to giving you access to their accounts, one by one. But is that the best use of time? By then, your clients are frustrated and struggling with technology, which they hoped you would sort out for them.

Online Marketing Gurus has a dedicated Access & Onboarding Manager, whose role is to make sure new clients are “onboarded quickly and completely as soon as the deal is closed so that nothing delays campaign setups or tracking requirements.” 

And that frees up time for other teammates to focus solely on creative work and delivering results. Another benefit? The onboarding expert naturally builds rapport with the client right from the beginning. 

“We try to gather some personal (but not too personal) data like hobbies, birthdays, pets, etc., so that we can start to make a personal connection with our point of contact.” 
_{-Dane Kragness, Director of Paid Media, Taktical Digital}

There’s no better opportunity to set a solid foundation of trust which makes client churn less likely. Who knows, it could also help the next time you (or your client) raise a conversation to expand their scope of marketing services 🤝.

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#5: Design your onboarding process with scalability in mind

✅ Benefits: Overcome agency scaling issues due to limited resources.

Agencies spend hours on calls, emails, and screen sharing to get their new clients to give them the access they need to their CMS, analytics, social media, and ad accounts. At some point, this becomes unscalable—the chasing and following up takes too many man-hours.

🔗 Case study: How Problem Solvers Consultants Save 100s Of Hours Onboarding Small US Businesses

It’s a huge time-sink trying when you have to guide non-technical clients through Meta Business Suite (we know the pain 😅). For example, with paid ads, you simply cannot proceed until you get client account access.

Even small increases in new clients each month can strain the resources of leaner agencies. There’s a sweet spot, as shared by the pros; they automate getting access to accounts and free up time for building rapport:

“We used to take a very hands-on approach to onboarding, even hosting Zoom calls with clients to guide them through sharing their screens and granting us access. Now, with Leadsie, the process is effortless—we send a link, they click it, and it’s done! It saves a ton of time and makes onboarding much more efficient.” 
_{-Courtney Murdoch, Google Gal & Marketing Strategist, Pixel Fire Marketing}

SOPs can make or break an agency, but if your onboarding processes require all hands on deck, you’ll find it difficult to take on new work as you grow. Then, it’s time to consider client onboarding automation software that doesn’t take away the personal touch of human relationships.

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#6: Use key e-commerce dates or retail holidays as a sales tool

✅ Benefits: Deliver more value upfront for new clients.

Depending on your client’s industry, seasonality may play a huge role in reaching sales targets. Even for businesses that aren’t e-commerce or retail, the major holidays (like Christmas and New Year’s) can somewhat sway business operations. So, why not bake seasonal campaign planning into your sales and onboarding process?

“We use onboarding as a sales tool because, with things like the end of the financial year, Easter, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, etc., we need to prepare them for these sales periods as soon as possible… to maximize the opportunity their business has.
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Time to first value from our team is always a number 1 priority with no matter what we are doing.”
_{-Jarrod Harman (Business Warriors)}

This lets you take advantage of a longer runway to achieve better client results during peak periods and is a great way of building trust by showing you’ve thought ahead…

Not to mention, clients are less likely to leave an agency they’ve already got long-term plans with. 😉

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Not just an administrative process…

If you think onboarding is just a box to be ticked on the way to service delivery, you’re missing out on the best chance you’ll have to make a great first impression. 

“The most vital aspect of a good onboarding process is good communication. Communicate clearly, set good expectations, and try to under-promise and over-deliver.
The onboarding process is our opportunity to show our clients that they made the right choice by hiring StubGroup.” 
_{-John Horn, CEO, StubGroup}

When you do this–gather complete client information and translate it into results at lightning speed–you’re removing any doubts from the buyer’s mind.

And you’re also setting your team up for success, which is what client onboarding is all about. 👌

🔗 Related article: Local Splash Said Bye to Their 15-Step Onboarding Process Thanks to Leadsie: Here's How

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Speed to onboard = faster turnaround times ⚡

We’re grateful to be able to share these best practices with you. You can implement these insider tips almost immediately to see shorter time to value, start billing cycles earlier, and deliver quick wins for your new client.

“Speed to lead, speed to onboard, faster turnaround times is everything in this business. Not needing my clients to jump through all the hoops in their Business Manager/ad account allows us to have time and efficiency.”
_{-Nate Tilley, CEO, Shift Social}

Before you go, add the secret sauce to your onboarding process by automating access requests. All you need to do is create a custom Leadsie request and send that secure link to your client (via email, direct message, or even embed it on your website). 

On your client’s side, they check their inbox and confirm your request in 2-clicks. That’s it. No need for lengthy PDFs and emails to teach them how to navigate granting access.

Try Leadsie for free—no credit card needed—and you get to keep the access after the trial.

Once you’ve signed up, go onboard your next client so fast they won’t even have time to consider another agency. 

Gotta love a happy client! 😇