I run a small influencer agency in Christchurch. For two years every campaign ended with a 30-page report and a two-hour call. Clients said thanks and nothing changed. Last winter I told my account manager to stop sending decks. She sent a 4-line email instead: what we spent, what it returned, the one thing that worked, and the one thing we'd drop. Renewals went up over the next two quarters. I still don't fully trust it because we changed two other things at the same time. But the decks are gone.
We tried 40-page campaign reports. Clients never read them.
Case study
Author-reported results.
- Starting situation
- Agency of six running retainers for creator brands. Reporting had become the biggest time sink after the actual campaign work, and renewals were flat.
- What changed
- Replaced the end-of-campaign deck with a short email covering spend, return, one win, one drop. Sent within 48 hours of the campaign closing.
- Result
- Renewals improved over the following two quarters and the reporting hours dropped sharply. Not a clean test, other things moved at the same time.
- Limitations
- Small sample, no control group, and we changed account staffing in the same period, so I can't claim the format did all of it.
6 replies
Audience: Public. Replies follow this audience.
0Jose MendozaMusic Teacher · membershipPhilippines·Scaling·5d ago
Quick question before I take a view on this: were those decks being read by the person who signs the renewal, or by someone junior who then summarised them upward? Those are two different problems and the fix is different. If it's the second one, the format was never the issue, the routing was. Genuinely asking, because in my membership the 'send less' fix worked for some members and did nothing for others, and the split was always about who actually opened it.
- 0Larissa RodriguesLegal Educator · paid newsletter
Brazil·Early Revenue·5d ago
This matches what I see across the board. Long reports are a confidence problem, not an information problem. If the client trusted you they'd take the four lines. The renewal conversation is really a trust conversation, so the fix is trust, not the deck. I'd go further than you did: I'd say the format change was almost beside the point and the 48-hour turnaround was the actual variable. Speed signals you're on top of it. A deck that arrives three weeks late reads as an agency that isn't.
0Reuben HartleyMarketing Strategist · Boutique Digital AgenciesUnited Kingdom·Scaling·5d ago
Same here. Sent a weekly two-line email instead of a monthly PDF and renewals got easier. Not because clients read it, because I stopped dreading the reporting week. My capacity went up. That mattered more than the report.
0Sipho PretoriusExecutive Coach · paid newsletterSouth Africa·Scaling·5d ago
What you got right is that you stopped treating reporting as a deliverable. That is the shift most agencies don't make. If I could add one thing it would be keeping the numbers in one place the client can check whenever they want, rather than in an email they have to dig back for. The four-line version works because it's the interpretation; the raw numbers still need a home. But you can only do that if you're tracking spend and return somewhere consistent across campaigns, and most agencies your size aren't yet. Worth knowing where that boundary is before you kill the deck for a client who does want detail.
0Bram de BoerWellness Coach · retainer consultingNetherlands·Early Revenue·5d ago
Here's what I did when I was where you are. I stopped sending campaign reports entirely and set up a shared sheet that updated as the campaign ran. Then once a month I sent one message: here's what changed, here's what I'm doing next. Three clients told me they finally knew what they were paying for. None of them asked for the old reports back. It took me a weekend to build the sheet, and I used a template, not anything custom. The part that surprised me was that clients started replying with their own numbers, which made the next campaign easier to plan. I'm early, six clients, so take this as one data point not a rule.
0Róisín ByrneCommunity Manager · paid newsletterIreland·Scaling·5d ago
No need for a reminder that you don't have a control group. Nobody running an agency has one. The direction of travel is right, the four lines are the whole thing, and the 48-hour rule matters more than the format. Keep doing it.
Building a business around what you know?
The Network is free to join. Ask your own questions, answer others, and find people doing the same work.
See the Network