Having a comprehensive inbound marketing plan for your accounting firm means incorporating numerous tactics and strategies. This process helps you discover which methods resonate best with your audience and potential clients. 

Tax professionals and accounting firms have the benefit of marketing to niche audiences that are in need of specific financial services. Email marketing efforts can be highly effective for nurturing these customer relationships and generating results with a target audience.

With over four billion daily email users worldwide, email marketing continues to be a proven and effective method for communicating information about your brand in the accounting industry. In fact, as businesses and brands increase email marketing budgets, the effects and benefits of email connections increase.

Here, we’ll break down how to use email marketing successfully in your tax or accounting firm. Take a look at practical steps and mistakes to avoid in order to generate the greatest return on your investment.

Why is Email Marketing for Accounting Firms Important?

Email marketing isn’t limited to any particular industry, although you might feel personally familiar with the use of email in retail and eCommerce. Fortunately, email campaigns aren’t just limited to product-based businesses but are also useful for creating client conversions in service-based businesses as well.

Email marketing is beneficial for accounting firms and tax professionals because it expands opportunities to connect with leads, share content, and nurture long-term relationships.

Connect with New Leads

If you have a basic inquiry or contact form on your website, you need a way to follow-up with the person requesting more information about accounting services. Sending an email confirmation is a best practice that lets the individual know you’ve received their request.

During this step, you may also choose to offer a helpful piece of content, special promotion (such as a discount for services), or reminder about the next steps to take in the working relationship.

Share Original and Branded Content to Stay Top of Mind

Once you have a contact’s email address, you can deliver helpful or educational content. Email marketing provides an easy avenue for sharing published pieces like blogs, case studies, free downloads, and other resources. If you have practical content that’s designed to help your audience, share it!

Foster Long-Term Relationships with Clients

Life gets busy, and sometimes tax and accounting clients need specific reminders about their financial needs. Accounting firms can use email marketing to re-engage segments of their audience that have been inactive since the last season or paid service. 

This is a helpful way to serve your audience, build client loyalty, and simultaneously encourage new or repeat business with existing clients.

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Top 5 Tips for Email Marketing for Accounting Firms

Even if you’ve never previously leveraged the power of email marketing in your tax or accounting firm, don’t stress. Your audience is ready and waiting to receive new messages. Email research shows that up to 99% of email users check their inbox every single day, which means that the chances are high that you’ll hit the mark by serving up high quality content.

Building a strong email foundation starts with a few basic steps. We’ve rounded up the top tips and suggestions so that you can create a simple yet effective email marketing plan for your firm or financial business.

1. Build a reliable email list.

An email marketing list is the complete directory of contacts that your financial firm has access to. Most often, the subscribers on your list have opted in, which means that they have agreed to receive ongoing communications from your firm in some form. (Although this is the case, most of your email messages must also offer the option to opt-out at any time.)

You can start to build an email list by collecting basic contact information through a simple inquiry form on your website. Use clear language that lets site visitors know that by sharing their contact information, they will be added to your email marketing campaign or contact list.

Once you have your list, you can experiment, segment, and test different messages to different groups of contacts. Even though such testing comes with time, the saying, “the money is in the list,” often proves true. How you take advantage is up to you.

2. Use audience-friendly subject lines and quality content.

Every now and then, financial and accounting lingo can come across dry. While you want your emails to be helpful and informational, they should also capture the receiver’s interest in simple words. This involves an engaging use of verbiage, copy, and directions to deliver real value. 

As you build new email messaging or campaigns, think about things like:

• The effectiveness of your subject lines
• The use of catchy headers and copy to entertain the reader 
• Clear and effective calls to action (CTAs)
• Engaging visual elements or easy-to-click buttons

Although you’ll likely get into metrics (like open rates and click-through-rates) at a later point in the journey, always consider how email copywriting has a major impact on overall success.

3. Schedule emails consistently.

Pinpointing your email frequency can be challenging at first, but it’s a process that will likely evolve over time. 

Regardless of the rate at which you send new emails, the key factor is consistency. Accounting firms that deliver regular and predictable messages to inboxes will be more effective than those who send out communications rarely or sporadically. 

If your firm doesn’t have full-time marketing staff, the task of creating new emails may fall to one person. Instead of spreading those resources too thin, devote time and energy to creating top-notch emails that you can distribute less often, but on a predictable schedule. Your audience may even come to look forward to receiving your content and reminders!

4. Optimize emails for mobile.

How many times do you open an email while you’re on the go or on your smartphone? Recipients often use mobile devices to access new emails, which means that your email marketing needs to be tailored to mobile viewing. 

Fortunately, you don’t need to be a high-end developer to get mobile optimization right. If email design and formatting skills aren’t in your wheelhouse, choose email marketing software or an email service provider that has these features built-in. Email templates and other features should allow you to build and test new emails to make sure that your mobile readers can access the content easily. 

5. Develop a plan for growth.

Email marketing can clearly be a pivotal tool that helps you attract new clients and retain old ones. But your efforts to keep up are only as good as your long-term strategy for effectiveness. As you create new emails, always keep your end goals in mind.

In some scenarios, this looks like developing a plan to grow your email list with new subscribers. There are a number of proven tactics for doing this, including lead magnets (usually downloadable content) to entice new customers to sign up for your email list. 

Growth might also look like becoming more efficient in your sending process or in your content creation. As you grow, define several key performance indicators (KPIs) that you can accurately measure over time. 

Mistakes to Avoid with Email Marketing

If you want to make email marketing work for your accounting or tax firm, it will likely be a trial and error process to discover the best results that work for your unique audience. That being said, there are some mistakes that you should always avoid. Email marketers can fall into a few different traps, which end up undermining the best laid plans.

• Never testing different components. (A/B)  A/B testing is the process by which you can send and test alternating versions of your emails and subject lines. These tests can help you gauge performance and help you know how to make better decisions for the future.
  
  
• Never segmenting your audience.  Audience segmentation allows you to target specific parts of your list for different reasons. For example, you may not want to send sales-related emails to current customers. Segmenting a full list can help you avoid sending mistakes and provide more timely marketing messages to the right people.
  
  
• Never providing next steps to readers.  Even loyal customers (and prospective clients) want to know which steps to take next. Don’t make the mistake of sending new email campaigns without providing instructions or expectations, even if it’s as simple as a basic CTA button. Clear language improves click-through and in turn, increases the results you’d like to see from your email marketing campaigns.

See More Impact (and Generate Leads) with Email Marketing

Achieving a return on investment for your email marketing efforts involves a level or pre-planning and strategy. Seeing more impact implies that you have a thorough understanding of who your current and potential clients are, which messages are most helpful, and what you must do to reach them.

With CountingWorks PRO, you can automate many of the tasks on your marketing to-do list (like consistent email newsletters) so that you can better connect with your clients and customers. Get started today with user-friendly, automated solutions for accountants.

Want to learn more about CountingWorks PRO? Contact us or get a 14 day trial, free.