We all know that growing our monthly recurring revenue is a good way to increase the predictability of your agency’s revenue and to retain your existing customers. If they are paying you on a monthly basis already for one service – it just makes sense to go back to you if they need anything new. A great way to ease your clients into monthly revenue is through a managed hosting service. Your clients already have to pay someone monthly to host their website, make it easy for them to just sign up with you for their hosting. Below are some tips to sell your managed hosting plans:
1. Sell MANAGED Hosting Plans
Most hosting companies are just somewhere for you to store the files for your client’s site. They don’t really do any on-going maintenance, they leave that to the site owner. This is where a managed hosting plan comes in. I’m going to speak from a WordPress perspective but some level of maintenance is needed no matter what platform you use. With WordPress it is very important to stay on top of your theme and plugin updates as well as your backups. I try to do this at least on a monthly basis for all my clients. More often if they update their content often or are an ecommerce store.
Let your clients know that if they host elsewhere, much of this will fall on them and if they get hacked they will need to pay someone to fix it. However, if they host with you, you will take care of all updates and backups on a monthly basis. I let my clients know that if they ever get hacked, I fix their site no questions asked. This alone is often enough to get my clients to sign up with me and give them some peace of mind about their website.
2. Offer an hour of content updates each month
One other way to get your clients to sign up for your managed hosting plan is to offer an hour of website content updates each month. You can keep these to just text and image updates or adding a blog post; but many times this extra feature will be enough for your client to decide that it is worth spending a little more just to stay with your agency and let you take care of everything.
3. Set up reporting for your clients
Another add-on that’s pretty easy to add to your managed hosting is monthly reporting for your clients. Many clients will appreciate a PDF you can email to them at the end of the month letting them know any updates you made to the site, anything you fixed or a vulnerability you patched. You can also include their analytics and any other data that is relevant to them. Many times this is easy to automate as well so it’s something you can offer them with little effort on your part.
If you go through these items with your clients, they will often decide it’s worth spending a little extra with you to gain peace of mind about their website. Next month I’ll walk you through the technical aspects of setting all this up to manage your client’s sites.
If you don’t want to take care of this yourself but want to still offer managed hosting to your clients, reach out and let me know. I offer white-label managed hosting for agencies so you can still offer the service but not have to worry about the details.
