Whether you started out as a freelance web designer or a small design team, nearly all small digital agencies hit a similar struggle: Scaling up.
As the demand for your agency increases, keeping up with all the processes of running a lean business while also reducing customer churn is something even the big names in business have a hard time mastering.
But we have a few suggestions to make the whole thing easier.
All website builders are the same, right? Wrong.
While most website builders do their best to make building a website simpler and faster than traditional coding, Duda’s responsive website builder was created with a very specific customer in mind:
All web pros who want to scale.
This means that everything in our platform was built so that you can easily and effectively go from 3 sites per month to 3,000+ sites. Obviously, making a large jump like this in a short period of time may be considered unlikely, it’s nice to know you can do it if the need arises.
Scaling a web services business also means that development time is a big impediment to growth.
When choosing a platform, many of our customers originally started with WordPress. However, the popular CMS isn’t always the best choice, especially for agencies working with SMBs, as it has a way of creating some major scope creep issues.
We have many DudaPros and case studies of pros who switched from WordPress to our platform in order to scale better and faster.
WebAct, a Colorado-based digital marketing agency, switched to Duda and saved over $200k per year in expenses related to web design.
Canadian agency, Conscious Commerce, switched and brought their website costs down from $3000 to just $300 per site.
And both companies managed to cut development time by 50% or more. Ultimately, this lead to more room for clients and thus, more revenue.
These marketing agencies and many others have moved to us because we make it easier for them to grow and scale. If you’re looking to do the same, here’s how we can help you do it.
You’ve probably heard it before, but we’re here to say it again. If you want to make scaling easier, than picking a niche or two for your agency is something to consider.
In the long run, it makes everything from marketing materials, website copy, outbound and inbound marketing, and even sales easier.
In our Templates section, you’ll find many options for various SMB industries like law firms, restaurants or dentists to name a few. So while you could start from scratch with your design, you don’t have to.
That being said, if you do need to design something other than what is in our template library, you can use Duda’s drag-and-drop template builder to design and save templates of your own creation.
Yet another way to cut back on development time when working in a specific niche is by using our site duplication tool.
Just a few clicks of your mouse and you can create a copy of another site so that you don’t need to start from the ground floor.
Upsells are the backbone of just about every thriving business. Time and time again, we see studies that make it clear that selling to current customers is easier than selling to new ones.
How much easier?
Generally speaking, the success rate for selling to a current customer is a 60%-70% while acquiring a new one is only 5%-20%. (Source)
So there you have it. In order to get better rates when upselling to current customers, companies need to establish better relationships with them.
So there you have it. In order to get better rates when upselling to current customers, companies need to establish better relationships with them.
But after you’ve nailed down your customer retention, you need to master the upsell, and our platform has a few features you can upsell that you should be familiar with.
One of the key tools built into our platform is personalization. This tool allows you to create change to a site based on parameters you set in place.
For instance, if you work with restaurants, one upsell you could offer is adding a personalization feature like a banner with a CTA to reserve a table that shows during a specific time of day or for certain dates.
One restaurant did just this and received a 70% increase in conversion during the week they ran the special for. This added more than $9k in revenue to their business that week that would have been otherwise lost.
This is just a single example of how you could use personalization as a great feature to upsell because your customer’s ROI is easy to prove.
If you have a customer on the fence with this upsell, you don’t need to let that interest die.
Within the Duda dashboard, you can look at the stats of your client’s sites to find more opportunities to sell. You can then email them the data from the dashboard, let them know that they’re missing out on income, and then offer your upsell.
Security has become important in the eyes of both customers and Google. Knowing this, we’ve made it easy for everyone on our platform to switch to a more secure web presence with our one-click SSL integration.
Since SSL is good for SEO and helps add to the trust of visitors on a site, upselling this feature isn’t too difficult. And since all you have to do is click your mouse, it’s not hard to execute either.
These are by no means the only additional features you can offer with our platform.
If you’d like to know more about all the features you can sell to your customers, sign up for a free trial today and schedule a time for a demo.
We all cringe when we hear the term “scope creep” and yet, it happens more often than not and eats up a lot of time that could be better spent driving more business. One way to help alleviate the pain of this is to give your clients limited access to their site so they can make small changes as needed.
You can do this through the Users & Permissions portal in your Duda Dashboard.
However, simply giving this access to a customer isn’t the end of the game. Most of them need some training on how to work their site; otherwise, you’ll be sucked back into more time spent on unnecessary emails.
That’s why it’s important to have a client onboarding process in place. There’s more than one way to do this, but you’ll certainly want to consider including it.
As a DudaPro, you’ll also have access to a lot of white label sales collateral including product demo videos for onboarding new customers.
Accessing it is simple.
Log into your dashboard → Resource Tab → Sales Collateral → White Label Tutorials
When scaling up a web design or digital marketing business, having a sales process in place can make or break even the best business. If you’ve been in the business for a while now, then you likely know what works for turning leads into customers.
However, documenting this procedure and having sales collateral ready to hand off to a new hire or virtual assistant is another thing entirely.
Tools like Process Street can be great for putting together a sales process.
And as a DudaPro, you have an entire resource page stocked with sales collateral to help you land more clients.
Sometimes, scaling your business can be hindered because of a lack of time to get to all the tasks that need to be handled. And let’s face it, burn out can affect a business more than most situations that arise.
In part, that was the reason we created our the Duda Experts program. This program allows you to get in touch with a skilled partner who can take a few things off your plate, like:
While a Duda Expert will charge a fee for their service, the ability to free up your time so you can focus on the parts of your business you enjoy or need to handle is well worth it.
Scaling your business from just a few sites a month up to hundreds or even thousands requires a lot of time and effort. But, as you can see from this article, we’ve built our platform to make the entire process faster and easier to execute.
Sign up today for a free trial and see how Duda can help you scale.
