In the highly dynamic world of financial services, certified public accountants (CPAs), accounting firms, and other finance professionals have a lot on their plate.
Aside from their daily duties, they also have to focus on client acquisition, retention, and standing out from the competition in an already saturated market.
Email marketing is emerging as a solution for building and maintaining strong customer relationships and crafting compelling marketing content.
This article will go over the advantages and best practices of email marketing for accountants and how to leverage technology to create an effective email marketing strategy.
What Are The Advantages Of Email Marketing For CPAs?
Even with the proliferation of mobile devices, social media, video campaigns, and webinars, email remains one of the most efficient digital marketing tools available to accountants.
The average email marketing ROI as of 2020 is $36 per $1 spent:
This makes it among the most profitable marketing efforts worth investing in.
There are plenty of other advantages accountants can look forward to when building and implementing an effective email marketing strategy.
Let’s see them.
Personalized content
Email marketing provides a direct and personalized approach to communication.
It lets accounting professionals keep their clients informed about various regulatory changes, upcoming deadlines, updates, or promotions.
Email marketing software solutions like Moosend and Mailchimp offer a variety of personalization and segmentation features that allow users to tailor content based on customer needs.
For example, you can collect customer data through subscription forms, segment your audience, and target each group with specific content.
Lead generation and nurturing
Targeted email campaigns also help finance and accounting professionals reach out to potential clients more easily.
Specialized services, industry insights, and newsletters can attract new leads and inquiries. Email campaigns can also guide and nurture those leads throughout the buyer’s journey.
In fact, 46% of marketers consider email marketing an effective tool for lead generation. Moreover, 47% consider it great for lead nurturing.
Brand awareness
High-quality and consistent email content has the potential to build and maintain your brand image.
You can position yourself among the finance and accounting industry leaders by sharing valuable insights, expertise, and success stories.
Client retention
By providing valuable content, such as regular newsletters and important updates, accounting firms can foster better engagement and client retention.
You can also build long-term relationships through email marketing for accountants by keeping yourself top-of-mind with customers. Customer retention is necessary to ensure a thriving business.
If you want to find out more about your CR, how to calculate it, and what other metrics you need to monitor, make sure to check our comprehensive guide.
Cost-effectiveness
Email marketing offers a more cost-efficient method for accounting professionals to interact with their target audience. This is in comparison to more traditional marketing strategies like print or advertising.
By taking advantage of these benefits, accounting professionals can improve their client relationships, come in contact with more prospective clients, and establish a reputable presence in the finance sector.
Promoting events
Accounting professionals can also use email marketing to promote services and events like seminars, webinars, or workshops.
These help CPAs and other professionals position themselves as thought leaders.
Let’s now look at how to make these benefits into reality.
How Email Marketing For Accounting Firms Works
When it comes to putting email marketing into action, there are several critical steps that financial and accounting firms should take into account.
Let’s see them.
1. Build a quality email list
Email lists are repositories for your contact list of people interested in interacting with your business.
Knowing how to manage them properly is essential.
A high-quality email list acts as the foundation for a successful email marketing campaign.
Building an organic contact list from scratch is generally the best way to go. There are various strategies to use to build an email list from scratch. Below, you’ll find three simple ways to begin yours.
The first one is lead magnets, such as eBooks, case studies, coupons, templates, worksheets, webinar registrations, etc. These will entice people to sign up to your subscriber list in exchange for free content. Here’s an example by The Sales Evangelist:
Another great tactic is to use well-timed website pop-ups, usually after the reader spends some time scrolling and interacting with the page. Pop-ups work great in combination with discounts, coupons, or other similar incentives.
Lastly, creating high-converting landing pages, complete with a strong headline, attention-grabbing copy, and a complementary background image, has a far better chance of converting visitors than the homepage.
How to keep your email list clean
If you already have an existing email list or are building one, you should consider cleaning it.
Also known as email scrubbing, the process of cleaning your list of email contacts is about removing any outdated addresses, disengaged or spam accounts.
Among the main benefits of scrubbing your email list include things like:
- Improving your Internet Service Provider (ISP) score
- Higher click-through rates
- Better lead generation
- Lower bounce and unsubscribe rates
Email list cleaning best practices include things like double opt-in, where the new subscriber has to confirm their subscription.
Choosing the right email list management software will help you maintain good hygiene, offering features to organize your lists and keep them clean.
Now let’s see a few more important email marketing for accountants things you need to keep in mind.
Should you buy an email list?
There’s also the option of buying an email list, but we’d advise against it. Bought or rented lists are oftentimes more trouble than they’re worth.
For starters, these types of lists can get you flagged as spam. Bought or rented lists are also non-compliant with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the CAN-SPAM Act of 2013.
What’s more, most reputable email service providers (ESPs) won’t even let you send emails to these addresses. And not to mention that these lists won’t generate qualified leads or improve your conversion rates.
2. Segment your audience
As mentioned before, email segmentation and personalization also play an important role. You can divide your email list into different groups based on shared characteristics like age, gender, behavior, location, etc.
Statistics show that segmented email marketing campaigns see, on average, 100.95% higher click-through rates and a 760% increase in email revenue.
After you segment your subscribers, you can personalize your email content specifically for these email segments with service recommendations, celebrations, or milestones. You can also include the sender’s name to be someone they regularly interact with.
This is a very useful email marketing for accountants tactic that you need to implement as soon as you start collecting leads for better results.
3. Create compelling content
Good quality content helps accounting and CPA firms reach new customers and keep current clients engaged with their email marketing campaigns.
While there is no one-size-fits-all approach to email copywriting, you need to include the basic building blocks, such as:
- subject line
- body copy
- call-to-action (CTA)
- email sign-off
When it comes to CPA email content marketing, in particular, you should consider mixing informative insights and practical advice.
You can create newsletters in such a way as to highlight tax-saving strategies and best practices while also including industry news, trends, and regulatory updates.
For example, here’s a newsletter that guides how accounting clients can stay on top of their taxes.
A bit further down in that same newsletter, there are also a couple of related industry news and updates the readers might be interested in.
Also, similar to the example here, you can include a FAQ section addressing common financial queries.
Depending on the type of newsletter and what you want to communicate, you can also include:
- Success stories highlighting your firm’s expertise.
- Visual elements like infographics provide clarity on complex topics.
- Invitations to exclusive webinars on relevant topics.
Just remember to tailor your content to address specific client segments.
Whether it’s small businesses, large organizations, or individual taxpayers, segmentation, email targeting, and personalization show recipients that you understand their unique needs.
By delivering educational and relevant content in the form of financial planning tips, you’ll position yourself as a trusted financial advisor.
It will help you foster customer loyalty and position yourself as an authoritative source of information.
4. Design a responsive email template
When it comes to email newsletter design for accountants, you need to design and implement a responsive template.
For starters, a mobile responsive design ensures that clients can view your newsletters correctly on any device. This is particularly essential since the majority of today’s internet users (over 60%) are browsing over mobile devices.
Good email marketing service providers like Moosend have extensive email libraries with numerous responsive templates that work equally well on desktop and mobile.
Here’s one such email template:
Certified public accountants and other finance professionals should also incorporate consistent branding elements into their email templates.
This includes things like brand logos, color schemes, or text fonts. These help reinforce the brand identity and make it easier for customers to recognize.
Other email design best practices include things like:
- clear fonts
- image alt text
- contrasting colors
- inclusive language
- simple fonts
Pro tip: Avoid writing in italics, as it can hinder readability.
By embracing accessibility and brand consistency, accounting firms can enhance engagement and deliver a professional and user-friendly experience.
5. Test and optimize
By its very nature, effective email marketing is an iterative process. It’s not a set-and-forget activity. Regular testing and optimizing email campaigns are key to achieving success and fulfilling your content marketing goals.
These practices ensure that accounting professionals always deliver the right type of content capable of resonating with their intended audience.
A/B testing is an effective methodology for experimenting with different email elements such as subject lines, sender names, CTAs, content, send times, or design.
You should pick a small sample among your subscribers as a test group. Divide it into two and send different email versions to each group. You’ll then analyze the different key metrics, such as click-through or open rates, to determine which version (A or B) performs better based on those metrics.
Make sure to only change one thing at a time (i.e. subject line, CTA, content, sender name, etc.) and keep the rest of the email the same in each of the two versions. This ensures you’re testing for a single variable at a time.
It’s generally good practice to start experimenting with subject lines and see what prompts your audience to open your emails more often.
The next step would be to determine the content lengths and messaging tone to determine the engagement level. With enough trial and error, you’ll be able to refine and optimize your email templates to suit your client preferences.
With email marketing tools like Moosend, you can streamline your A/B testing process.
The continuous iteration of the testing and optimization process will help you improve your client communications and ensure that it will remain customer-focused.
6. Deploy your campaigns
When you’re ready to deploy your email marketing campaign for your accounting services, you should consider the following steps.
First of all, it’s a good idea to schedule your email to align with your clients’ peak engagement times. Depending on the exact type of your email campaign, this could include certain times of day or the week.
You can also schedule your email campaign around certain events like during tax season or when tax regulation changes take place.
Moreover, creating an email marketing calendar can help you master the art of scheduling. If you want to know how to create and organize yours, make sure you check out our email marketing calendar guide.
7. Track your performance
Most professional email marketing platforms include tracking tools that let you monitor key email metrics and KPIs.
Keep a close eye on metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, conversions, and unsubscribe rates, as these will help you gauge the overall effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns.
Open rates: Measures how many customers opened your emails. It’s a good indicator of the effectiveness of the subject line. Aim to around 20% or higher open rate. Anything lower than 16% indicates an unappealing subject line or irrelevant topic.
Click-through rate (CTR): Shows how many people are clicking on your email links. They highlight the effectiveness of your email copy and how well it directs readers to the CTA. A good CTR is between 2-5%.
Conversion rate (CR): Indicates the number of people who’ve taken a desired action, such as subscribing to an event or webinar, purchasing your services, etc.
A typical conversion rate is anywhere between 1-5%. Anything above 10% is excellent.
Bounce rate: Shows how many of your subscribers didn’t receive the campaign. This can happen for a variety of reasons, such as wrong email address, spam complaints, a full inbox, flagged email content, etc. You should aim to have a bounce rate of 2% or lower.
Unsubscribe rate: Indicates the total number of contacts who’ve unsubscribed from your email list. On average, the unsubscribe rate is around 0.2% but can be as high as 2% without being too much of an issue. Personalization and segmentation are effective ways to keep this metric at a minimum.
These email marketing metrics can help accounting and finance professionals adjust their strategies based on actionable data insights.
Let’s now look at some best practices when it comes to email campaigns for CPA firms
Email Marketing For Accountants Best Practices
There are several actionable best practices to keep in mind when it comes to certified public accounting firms and other finance professionals and their email marketing campaigns.
- Regulatory compliance: Accounting firms need to adhere to strict data protection regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) or the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).
- Inform and educate: Informative content that provides value to the reader will tend to position the sender in a position of authority on the subject matter. Useful tax tips, industry insights, or regulatory updates relevant to the email contact segment will help nurture long-term client relationships.
- Email frequency and consistency: There needs to be some consistency in terms of how frequently CPAs send emails to their contact list. Too many emails can overwhelm contacts and push them to unsubscribe. Too few, and CPA firms risk no longer being top-of-mind.
- Clear and concise CTAs: Calls-to-action guide the clients on the next steps. This can be in the form of accessing valuable resources, scheduling a consultation, subscribing to a webinar, etc. If the CTA is too vague or longwinded, the conversion rate will likely suffer.
- Mobile-friendliness: Accounting emails should also be mobile-friendly and responsive so that readers can easily access them from every device. A good mobile experience enhances both engagement and accessibility.
By implementing these best practices, CPA firms can create and deploy effective email campaigns able to foster engagement, boost conversion and other relevant metrics, and maintain industry standards.
So, what type of digital tool should accounting organizations use to streamline and optimize their email marketing campaigns?
What Is the Best Email Marketing Software for Accountants?
Email marketing software solutions like Moosend are chock-full of features and functionalities that can help CPAs and other financial professionals boost their email campaigns.
These include features such as:
- Segmentation capabilities: These allow for a high degree of personalization based on various factors like client profile, needs, and previous engagement.
- Responsive design templates: Moosend provides you with an email template library that is optimized for multiple devices including desktop and mobile. This ensures that your readers can access your emails no matter when or where they are.
- A/B testing capabilities: These will allow you to experiment with different email elements and see what best resonates with your target audience. The iterative nature of this process will help improve the overall email campaign effectiveness.
- Analytics and Reporting: Moosend also includes comprehensive analytics and reporting tools able to provide insights into key metrics like open rates, conversions, click-throughs, or unsubscribers. These help drive better and more informed decision-making for your future campaigns.
Although Moosend includes even more features, these four should be an absolute must for any tool you decide to use for your email marketing efforts.
Email Marketing For Accountants Made Easy
In the highly dynamic and competitive landscape of accounting, email marketing is an indispensable tool.
It helps nurture client relationships, deliver relevant and valuable information, and showcases your expertise. As a financial professional, you can leverage email marketing for better client engagement and business growth.
Try out Moosend and its many features and functionalities for free to see how it can help you with your email marketing strategy.
The post How To Do Email Marketing For Accountants [2024] appeared first on Email Marketing Automation Platform for Thriving Businesses.
