Changes in the business environment force accountants to become entrepreneurs, continually looking for growth opportunities.
And those who don’t cope with the market changes get crushed by competitors.
Today, email marketing for accountants became a necessity to grow your practice and engage clients.
Introducing email marketing to your accounting firm helps you:
- Build trust between your practice and your clients’
- Increase clients’ lifetime value
- Grow your practice
By reading this article, you’ll learn:
- Does email marketing work for accountants?
- 5 strategies to grow an email list for your accounting firm
- 7 tips for an effective email marketing for accountants
- 9 accounting email marketing newsletter ideas and examples
Let’s get it started!
Does email marketing work for accountants?
Effective communication is essential for building customer relationships. As a CPA (Certified Public Accountant) or accounting firm, effective communication with current and potential clients is fundamental to staying ahead of the curve.
The right way to do that is to implement CPA email marketing. Why is that so? Well, here comes the answer.
Email marketing for accounting firms is the ultimate marketing channel to:
- Cut costs on postage, printing, and labels
- Increase brand awareness
- Reach a broader range of clients
- Attract new clients
- Boost trust and client loyalty
- Increase your accounting firm notoriety
As an accountant, you know how crucial return on investment is. In fact, every one dollar you spend on email marketing, $44, is earned in return.
First, you’ll need an email list to whom you’ll send email campaigns. Let’s see the 5 best strategies to grow an email list for accounting firms.
5 Strategies to Grow an Email List for Your Accounting Firm
Lead generation is necessary for a better performance of your accounting email marketing campaigns. It determines its efficiency.
This is why you have to pay attention to your lead generation strategies and grow your contact list.
But don’t worry, we are determined to make it all easier for you. We have selected the 5 best strategies that suit the accounting industry.
1. Offer free consultations
Free financial consultations with experts are not very prominent among accounting marketing strategies.
It’s a strategy that makes you stand out from the crowd and stay ahead of the competition by providing a clear added value.
Your audience wants to make sure you are worth the investment. Hence, they base their decision on the quality of your free content and how you communicate.
These free tips on tax savings, financial diagnosis, and other relevant events with experts will generate new leads and build loyalty.
2.Launch accounting webinars
By hosting a free webinar where you share tips and advice regarding a specific financial topic, you tend to grow your audience base.
Webinars work both ways. You’ll grow your contact list with people who are interested in what you’ll be talking about.
And your audience will be satisfied with your presentation and find value in your practice.
A webinar helps you grow an engaged contact list that you can convert to paying clients with your email marketing efforts.
Set up a webinar email sequence to nurture your registrants and maximize your webinar attendees.
3.Offer online services
With a total workforce of approximately 3.5 billion people, there are about 1.1 billion freelancers in the world.
These millions of self-employed people need ways to manage their money or someone to advise them.
Most of them only need simple accounting services. This is where you should step in.
The online services you can provide could be
- Record and store receipts
- Categorize transactions
- Calculate estimated taxes
- Bookkeeping
- Track income and expenses
By making these services available online to people to book or request quotes, you’ll grow your contact list with qualified leads that are ready to convert.
With your services available online, you have the opportunity to reach more customers. That can help you grow your business and succeed in a competitive marketplace.
4.Make your appointment booking online
Fast and simple. Online booking is an efficient and easy way to allow your customers to book your financial services. Besides the advantage of being accessible, customers will willingly provide you with their contacts.
Make appointment booking available on your website with apps such as Calendly, which you can connect to Automizy via Zapier and automatically send confirmation emails and more.
5.Use opt-in forms
Email marketing is convenient to generate leads from your website. If you have a blog or use digital advertising to attract new people to your site, generating leads will be easy.
You can hit this goal by integrating lead magnets, forms, pop-ups using your accounting email software.
However, accounting content is very delicate. Explain sophisticated financial matters with simple words.
So make sure your blog contains
- Creative articles and presentations
- Financial case studies
- Simple explanatory videos
- Engaging infographics
Hence, your content will be very appealing to your target audience. Your visitors will be glad to provide you with their emails.
7 Tips for an Effective Email Marketing for Accountants
1. Take the boring out of accounting
Emails are a great playground to be creative. If you pay enough attention, any subject can be fun to discover. Yes, even accounting!
To upscale your emails, you can:
- Tell a story
- Keep your Calls-to-Action attractive
- Have fun with animation
- Keep it simple and
- Include videos in emails
Register to Automizy to add videos to your CPA email campaign and increase your contacts’ engagement.
2. Grab attention with catchy email subject lines
Email subject lines determine your open rate.
A catchy subject line like “This might be the best way to fix your finances” can grab your lead’s attention immediately.
Use Automizy’s free subject line tester to score your subject lines and compare different ones.
On average, a decent email subject should be around 30-50 characters long.
You can spice it up by adding an emoji to your email subject lines when suitable.
3. Clean and update your email list
Your CPA email marketing strategies should mainly focus on engaged contacts. That is how you get to generate leads.
You don’t want your emails to end up in the spam folder or get ignored. So, consider re-engagement email campaigns to win-back inactive contacts.
You can take this a step further and use email verification services like ClearOut or other services.
That can also ensure that you get an up-to-date list.
4. Set automated campaigns to stay in touch
Email automation makes the whole process much more straightforward.
Not only does it cut costs, but it provides continuous and effortless lead nurturing. No wonder why about 49% of businesses today use email automation.
Email automation will help you send emails at the time and the frequency that you plan.
Typing email addresses to send email marketing for financial advisors’ campaigns manually won’t be necessary anymore.
You can automate:
- Welcome and thank-you emails to new contacts,
- Lead nurturing drip campaigns,
- Re-engagement campaigns,
- Etc.
5. Optimize your emails for mobile
Emails are now more likely to be viewed on a smartphone or mobile device than on a desktop.
That’s why you need to make your emails are mobile-friendly.
In Automizy email software, you can preview email on mobile before hitting send. Here is how it looks like.
6. Don’t use “no-reply” emails
No-reply emails distance you from your clients. It ruins your reachability, which eventually will damage your clients’ trust.
So ditch no-reply emails without ever looking back. They promote a negative approach to your accounting business image.
Instead, notify your customers that you’re reachable and ready for interactions. That will make your customer relationships more trustworthy.
Lastly, using a no-reply email address can lower your email deliverability rates in the long run.
7. AB test your email subject lines
Last but not least, it’s wise to test your email campaign before you send it. It is necessary to perform an A/B test on your email campaign and check its performance.
Use A/B testing to identify the better performing subject line.
Identifying the best performing subject line effect on your campaigns’ ROI.
A good tip to increase your email open rates is to A/B test your drip email subject line.
You send 20% of your contacts 2 different subject lines for the same email during a specific testing period.
And the better performing subject line will be sent to the remaining 80% of contacts to guarantee you reach the highest email open rate possible.
9 Accounting Email Marketing Newsletter Ideas and Examples
To show you how these tips are put into practice, we have collected 9 email templates for accounting firms.
You can recreate all these email templates in Automizy, where you can easily customize emails to match your brand.
1. Bring your email design to life with animations
Welcome emails give the first impression of your accounting firm. You don’t want that to go wrong.
In this example, Harvest did an outstanding job integrating an animated GIF. It’s fun, creative, and takes the boring out of accounting.
Harvest also nailed to showcase their willingness to help and be reachable by adding a “we are here to help” section.
2. Use catchy and distinctive slogans
Catchy slogans distinguish you from your competitors. If you manage to come up with a creative one, don’t feel shy to showcase it in your emails.
Xendo’s confirmation email includes the appealing and easy-going slogan “Delivering financial peace of mind.” sounds comforting and straightforward.
It sums up their mission in a very creative and approachable way.
3. Highlight your online services
Rolling out new services or products lets your clients know that you’re continually improving. It generally builds trust and authority if you’re into the financial services industry.
And the best way to let your clients know about what’s new is to send an announcement email.
Square sends the following email example visually demonstrating their product and listing the new features and functionalities.
4. Propose solutions to your prospects
Don’t wait around for prospects to reach you complaining about their accounting problems.
Instead, take the initiative to propose solutions to common problems that they could face.
You can take the problems faced by most of your clients and propose them to your prospects so they’d relate to them.
You might even highlight a problem they didn’t even notice. This accounting email marketing example illustrates how you can start offering help.
It’s simple yet effective and highlights why your customers need your services.
If you use narrow, long email designs, it’s best to include 2 call-to-action buttons. One at the start of the email and one at the end.
This way, you make your CTAs more accessible to your prospects while they’re scrolling through your email.
5. Make your accounting email design appealing
The content of your accounting email newsletter is important, but so is the email design.
The content conveys the essential information, but the design is the key element that allows the reader to explore the content.
So an excellent email design attracts your follower’s attention and encourages them to continue reading.
For instance, the example below is an adequate email marketing for accounting practice. The design matches well with the content.
6. Use clear CTA
CTAs generally use bright colors and thoughtful placement, but the best ones use precise, actionable verbiage to attract attention. A few examples:
- Start saving now
- Discover services
- Register now
- Schedule a call
Below is a nicely done email example with a clear and on point call to action button.
7. Make your clients feel special
Email marketing for accounting firms is about building a long-term relationship with clients.
Sending an automated birthday email is by far the easiest way to let your client know that they’re special.
In Automizy, you can easily set up an automated birthday email and send out personalized emails automatically throughout the year without repeating the work.
Here is a birthday email example sent to clients from the Mint accounting app.
8. Upsell existing clients
Your clients will appreciate the weekly online financial reports. It helps them monitor their income and expenses.
But it’s also an excellent opportunity for you to upsell existing users or clients.
This email example for accountants has hit the nail on the head. It provides a coherent financial diagnosis and offers alternative solutions to the client.
The upsell CTA doesn’t say “read more.” Instead, it says, “Lower my bills.” It clearly tackles clients’ interests.
9. Be thoughtful
Sometimes all your customers need is a little support. Support them and help them through difficult financial situations.
Sharing valuable resources and advice will benefit both parties: your accounting firm and your clients.
That’s exactly what Divvy did by providing readers with informative content and guidance.
Summary
Email marketing allows you to establish a personal bond with your clients. You’ll eventually remain in the loop and remind everyone of the financial services and expertise you provide.
This can only result in higher revenue and clients’ lifetime value.
In short, email marketing could be exactly what you need as a CPA, accounting firm, or financial advisor. If you haven’t been using accounting email strategies, this is your call.
Use the tips included in this guide to grow your accounting email marketing performance.