How much thought do you give client loyalty? When it comes to your business, everything you do and everything you don’t do tells your clients how they should feel about you and your business. Being a great designer isn’t enough to garner client loyalty. There are plenty of great designers out there. So why should someone choose you over any of them? It’s even more difficult in today's market with all the inexpensive crowdsourced or contest oriented design options available to clients these days. Not only do you need to prove you’re a good designer, but you also need to show you are worth the money you're charging for your services. You need to do everything you can to prove to your clients that their money is better spent with you. When you achieve that, you’ll be rewarded with a client that is loyal to you and your design business. So how do you accomplish this? Here are seven tips to help you build client loyalty. 1) Do What You Say You’ll Do The ability to follow through on your commitments is extremely valuable when it comes to client loyalty. When you tell a client you’re going to do something, follow through and do it. Clients hear your comments as promises. So if you don’t do what you said you would do, it’s like you broke a promise with them and they will lose trust in you. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been working with a client, or how much trust you’ve built up. Failing to follow through on something you said you would, will ruin all the goodwill and client loyalty you’ve been building up. It’s very hard to recover once someone loses trust in you. If for some reason you are not able to follow through on something you told your client you would do, give your clients ample notice. Most clients will understand if you let them know in advance that you can't hold to your word. Apologizing after the fact is too late. Remember, actions speak louder than words. Follow through on what you say you’ll do. 2) Share your discoveries. In your line of work, you get to talk to a lot of different people in various fields. Some of the conversations you have or the news you hear may not be of interest to you, but it may be of interest to your clients. Whenever you hear something you think one of your clients might be interested in, pass it along. Merely passing on information is a great way to stay in touch with your clients and it shows them that you care about them. This will go a long way towards building client loyalty. 3) Get to know your clients Building client loyalty is all about building relationships, the cornerstone of any great partnership. Designer and client included. It’s so important that I’ve talked about client relationships on over 25 episodes of the podcast. To build a client relationship you need to learn things about your client. Find out when their birthday is. Learn who their family members are and what they do. Discover what hobbies and interests your client has. Later, when talking to your client, bring up some of this information in the conversation. Ask about their daughter's recital. Inquire how a family member is doing since they had surgery. Find out how their son's team is doing. Just by discussing things that are related to your client’s personal life, you too, become part of their personal life. This shows your client that you care about them more than just on a working basis and it will make them think twice before every hiring a different designer. 4) Provide added Value Go above and beyond if you can. Tip #1 I was about keeping promises. What if you promise to deliver something by Friday and you give it to your client two days early on Wednesday? To your clients, this is an added value they will appreciate, and it didn’t cost you anything. Another thing you can do is provide little extras that other designers don’t. Create short instruction videos using software like Screenflow to show your clients how to use their newly launched website. Teach them how to log in, how to create or edit posts, h