Boost Client Engagement with Email Marketing for Accountants

Email marketing serves as a powerful tool for businesses to interact with clients, build brands, create trust, and thus pave the way for growth. The tool is useful for many professionals, including accountants. Whether you wish to lure new clients, retain past clients, or keep your existing clients engaged, email marketing for accountants cater to your multiple needs.

The right email marketing effort is necessary for nurturing customer relationships and also yielding outcomes with the target audience. As per the recent stats, there are more than 4.37 billion day-to-day email users across the world and over 60% of the opening rate. It reflects the effectiveness of email marketing. It’s considered to be a proven method for communicating information regarding your brand in the accounting industry.

Meanwhile, you can avail of many actual advantages of email marketing for your accounting firm only with the effective email marketing strategy. In this post, we will discuss the proven email marketing strategies you can try to take your accounting firm to the next level.

What is Email Marketing for Accountants?

Email marketing works as a strategic approach for accountants to strengthen and maintain client relationships with the help of targeted email campaigns. It combines different practices such as tax updates, sending newsletters, financial tips, service promotions, and more to many potential or even existing clients.

By leveraging this method effectively, accountants can keep themselves on the top-of-mind. It reflects their full expertise and thus creates trust by offering relevant and valuable information.

Other reasons why accountants perform email marketing include nurturing leads, encouraging repeat business, and promoting additional services like payroll, bookkeeping, tax planning, etc. The biggest advantage of email marketing is it’s cost-effective to boost engagement, client retention, and thus improve your accounting practice.

Importance of Email Marketing for Accountants

When you do it with the proper strategy, email marketing has vast potential to add value to your accounting firm in several ways. We have covered here various advantages of email marketing that accountants can avail of.

Increase Brand Awareness

Any business can’t become successful without focusing on brand awareness. It helps them stand apart in the heavily crowded marketplace. You can perform email marketing with consistency to put your brand in front of your existing clients and also generate many potential leads.

Accountants can make their business more memorable among clients in myriad ways like sending regular newsletters, tax tips, financial updates, industry valuable insights, and more. After some time, consistent visibility is useful to create trust and also familiarity, which leads prospects to consider your firm, when they need accounting services.

Generate Huge Traffic

Another advantage of performing email marketing is it works effectively, when it comes to generating traffic. With the help of strategy-driven email marketing, you can increase traffic to your websites.

Using email marketing helps you share informative content including blog topics related to tax-saving strategies, webinars on financial planning, updates on regulatory changes, and more. You can make your email campaign more effective by including bold calls-to-action (CTAs) within your emails. It helps you attract your recipients directly to your website.

Engage with New Leads

Accountants always need to focus on capturing new leads to grow their accounting firms. The most important thing about email marketing is it helps you in doing so for your business. With email marketing, accountants can engage with those of many potential clients who have a keen interest in their accounting services but have not opted yet.

Accountants can leverage the potential of informative drip campaigns or tailored onboarding email sequences to share knowledge about their firms with prospective clients in terms of service offerings, expertise, unique value propositions, and more. This approach is not helpful only for firms who engage with potential clients but also helps them move leads further.

Improve Long-Term Relationship with Clients

For the accounting business, client retention is something equally important as client acquisition. Email marketing is a good option to strengthen and maintain client retention with time.

You can share industry trends, personalized updates, reminders related to tax deadlines, or thank you notes to show your great commitment to client success. Valuable and consistent communication is essential to boost loyalty and thus increases the chances of client referrals and also repeat business.

Build Brand Credibility

Brand building matters a lot, when it comes to the accounting industry. It reflects professionalism and trust, which are indeed non-negotiable. You can use email marketing to portray yourself as a thought leader by showcasing your unmatched talent and expertise.

Email marketing gives you a wonderful opportunity to showcase yourself as a reputed and trusted advisor by sharing client success stories, case studies, insightful financial advice, and more.

A perfectly created email also indicates your accounting firm’s attention to professionalism and detail. It improves its retention in the eyes of prospects and clients.

Proven Email Marketing Strategies for Accountants

As we already mentioned, only the right strategy helps you make your email campaign successful, you need to focus on the same. We have discussed here some of the top strategies you can consider to implement to do email marketing successfully.

Create an Eye-Catchy Email Content

It’s one of the most important email marketing strategies you need to apply. You need to understand that content is one of the major aspects of your email campaign. You can improve the quality of your content in the following ways;

Include Valuable Information

It’s advisable to send a variety of content, including ebooks, whitepapers, blog articles, and more. These help you resolve problems with your subscribers. Make sure your content is tailored to match the specific requirements of your clients to increase engagement.

Include Video

As we are familiar with the fact that video has enormous potential to surge engagement. You can use several preview images that take visitors to the video landing page when clicked. According to many studies, including videos have a significant impact on the click-through rate and thus can increase it by 200 to 300%.

Build a Top-Quality Email List

A poor-quality email list can make your email campaign futile and thus deprive you of getting results. So, you need to put the right effort into creating a quality email list, apart from leveraging the advanced CRM technology and attractive email content. Though you can consider exporting from a practice management system, it will not always deliver outstanding results.

Factors to Consider Building a Quality Email List

You can consider the following important factors that help you make the top-quality email list to boost your email campaign in the right direction.

Your Contact should be familiar with Prospects

This is indeed the major aspect for legal reasons and also in terms of ensuring you communicate with many prospects who seek to hear from you and read your emails.

Accuracy of Email Address

The next thing you can focus on is using clean data. Using any incomplete information or a larger amount of outdated data, it increases bounce rate and thus impacts adversely on both bounce rate and deliverability.

Include the Right People on your List

Make sure your practice management includes billing contact on record. But, there’s the possibility that it may not have a decision maker or business owner. Once you go through the list, it’s important to get the right contact details.

Indeed, creating an email contact list is a stringent and time-consuming task. Therefore, you should always focus on your list according to every category. It’s advisable to always start with your current clients.

You should always think about adding several referral sources and many active prospects. It’s a good idea to start with your important contact first. You should never confuse a ‘quality list’ and a ‘perfect list’.

One thing you need to keep in mind is that your email list can’t be perfect but always be in progress. You need to put a continuous effort into refining your email list with time.

Leverage Social Media

Social media is the best option to increase your business visibility and thus connect with clients. Many leading social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and others are apt for professional networking.

You can also use these platforms for sharing news, engaging with your community, and more. The most effective way of engaging with clients using these platforms is to share many informational posts, company updates, client testimonials, and more.

To gain the attention of target audiences, you can use visuals and short videos. For instance, you can use LinkedIn to share quick tip videos related to various common tax deductions for many freelancers. This topic is indeed useful for many freelancers seeking guidance that leads to more traffic and influx.

Apart from the above, you can also use social media for email marketing in the following ways;

You can develop and grow your email list with the use of social media.
You can retarget your email audience on social media.
You can cross-promote email content
Share success stories, testimonials, case studies, etc.
Conduct polls and surveys to engage followers
Create reels or stories with email previews
Use Facebook Groups and LinkedIn Groups

Optimize your Email for Mobile

With the increasing number of smartphone users, it’s highly important to optimize your email for mobile. The majority of recipients of late use their smartphones to access new emails, which reflect your email marketing, and require to be tailored to mobile viewing.

You can use the following ways to optimize your email for mobile;

Make the subject line short and clear
Use images, bullet points
Make sure the font is readable, which should be 20px and 14px for heading and body text respectively.
The CTA button should be large
Test across multiple devices

Even if you don’t have enough knowledge about formatting skills or email design, you can select the right email marketing software that comes with these built-in features. With email marketing software, email templates and many other features let you create and test various new emails to ensure your mobile readers access content most easily.

Schedules Emails Properly

Consistency is something that matters most irrespective of the rate you send your new emails. Accounting professionals who deliver predictable and regular messages to recipient’s inboxes are indeed most effective compared to those who send out communication sporadically or rarely.

Besides, if your firm doesn’t have full-time marketing staff, then the tasks of making several new emails tend to fall to one person. You should always devote your energy and time to creating top-notch emails you can distribute quite often, but on a predictable schedule.

To schedule your email better, you can consider the following important tips and tricks;

Know the time your clients check their inbox
Align perfectly with financial deadlines
You can segment your clients by services
Don’t send your emails on weekends or late at night
Go for pre-schedule follow up
Schedule according to local time zone
Automate recurring emails

Showcase Client Testimonials

Client testimonials serve as robust tools to create both trust and credibility. You can contact your satisfied clients to offer testimonials and display reviews on social media, websites, marketing materials, and more.

Client testimonials showcase the way your firm helps businesses improve their accounting process as a great endorsement of your service. It also works effectively to convert your leads into target audience.

You can consider the following tips and tricks to show the client testimonials for successful email marketing campaign;

You can choose the best testimonials that present numerous advantages. The best practice you can follow is to combine short quotes with case-study-style testimonials.
You can implement the right strategy to place the testimonials. For instance, use the powerful quotes in the header section. You can use up to 3 short testimonials in the body section.
Never forget to use visual elements such as company logos, client images, star-rating visuals, and more.
Use video testimonials

Create an Enticing Subject Lines

The next strategy you can implement to make your email marketing campaign more effective for your accounting firm is to use eye-catching subject lines. It lures your prospects or existing clients and thus encourages them to open your emails.

To make the subject line more effective and enticing, you can include the most important factors such as an unanswered question, intrigue, etc. For instance, you can use subject lines like ‘Boost Profits by Minimizing Taxes’

Best Practices to Make your Email Marketing Subject Line Eye-Catchy

You can consider the following advanced practices to create an enticing subject line for your email marketing campaign;

Present your Benefits Clearly

Whenever you send emails to your audience, you need to consider what you include special for them. If you already include special things in your email for your recipients, you need to highlight them properly.

Use Action-Related Language

You need to use the tone and language of your email marketing content as action-oriented. It should also create a greater sense of urgency. For instance, you can use ‘Opt for hidden cash flow opportunities now’.

Go for Personalization

Personalization is nowadays in trend to make email marketing strategy most effective and outcome-driven. You can use the name of the recipient in the subject line of your email marketing campaign. You can use it like this, ‘Hey John, are your business ready for this financial season?’

Use Stats

Using stat is indeed the right way of gaining the attention of clients and thus prompts them to read your mail entirely. For instance, you can use a subject line like ‘7 financial mistakes accountants can avoid’.

Include Newsletters

Apart from gaining new clients, email marketing allows you to deliver complete value to those of many existing clients to keep them highly engaged. Apart from this, it also lets your firm be on top of the mind of your customers for maintaining their businesses.

So, the most effective way to do this is to send newsletters on a monthly basis. You need to curate and send content on-time. Of course sending varieties of content, including financial tips, latest news, tax due dates, and more will definitely help you in this. It opens a completely new line of communication every month and thus lets your firm become a great resource.

You can simplify things hassle-free and thus save your valuable time by including packages for curated content. Make sure the content is written in a professional manner. It should offer a fully customizable newsletter that organizations send to clients easily.

Keep Eyes on Metrics

It’s also vital to analyze metrics to know the progress of your campaign and take the necessary scope to make it more targeted and result-oriented. Being an accounting firm, you need to keep information regarding click-through rates and open rates that can indeed improve your email game.

Open Rates Analysis

Analyzing open rates allows you to gather information regarding the number of people who open your emails. A higher open rate reflects your sender names and subject lines work well. The average email opening rate across multiple industries is approximately 17.92%.

Meanwhile, you can get an open rate of approximately 14.31% more by segmenting your emails. It reflects the importance of tailoring your messages to a range of client needs.

As mentioned earlier, personalized subject lines help you increase the open rate of your email by up to 50% more than without it. Therefore, you can add a personal touch to your email marketing to make a higher difference.

Ensure GDPR Compliance

It’s advisable to always follow GDPR rules while performing email marketing campaigns for your accounting business. These rules apply to you when you collect or target data, irrespective of the location of your company. When you fail to abide by GDPR rules, you will be entitled to pay heavy penalties. GDPR outlines the following important principles for email marketing;

It advocates for handling data fairly, legally, and openly.
You need to gather data for specific, clear, and legitimate reasons.
You are required to grab data only when you need it.
Make sure you ensure the accuracy of the collected data while keeping it up-to-date.
You should never keep personal data when not required.
Ensure full safety and privacy of data.
You need to be ready to reflect that you abide by these important rules.

Hire the Best Email Marketing Agency for your Accounting Firm

Hiring a professional email marketing company is necessary to achieve the core objectives of your accounting business. It can indeed increase both engagement and retention.

A specialized company has a complete understanding of various financial issues and takes several major steps to resolve them. They can assist your accounting firm in the following ways;

They create a tailored email marketing campaign.
A professional company assists you in creating trust, and reliability, nurturing leads, and converting your prospects into loyal clients.
They provide tax updates, personalized newsletters, service promotions, and more.
They help you position your firm in building industry authority.
A professional agency works with data-driven strategies, compliance, and automation with financial regulations.
They give you a complete surety that your email stands out in the crowded inboxes.
A reliable email marketing agency works effectively to boost ROI, save time, boost client relationships, and more.

Conclusion

Accounting firm marketing is indeed quite challenging mainly because many strategies you focus on to align perfectly with your message and brand. Meanwhile, finding the perfect marketing strategy for your company is indeed important. Whether it’s creating networking, a powerful online presence, or utilizing content marketing, these strategies are helpful in increasing the exposure of your firms and also attracting new clients.

The most important thing you can keep in mind is that perfection is indeed important. But, the most crucial thing you can do is to perform continual adaptation and refinement. These are indeed highly important to ensure the success of your marketing strategy.

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