Using Email to Successfully Market Your Accounting Firm   by Brian O'Connell

in Marketing    (submitted 2010-11-30)

Like a lot of business people these days I'm becoming mistrustful about "best practices". The designation locks us into trite rules and methods. This point of view can obstruct innovation.

I think it was marketing Guru Mark Brownlow who first suggested that it would be better to change the term to "profit practices". He's trying to change the way we think about these practices. Rather than simply following the status quo this new term leads us, hopefully, to making sure our efforts are actually generating revenue.

So what can you do to ensure your e-mail marketing campaign is ahering to profit practice? Well the changes are subtle from the old "best practices" model, but the impact on your efforts will likely be considerable. Read on...

A common buzzword in e-mail marketing circles is transactional e-mails. For CPAs these can be real life savers. This is an e-mail sent in response to a visitor's actions on the site. One place where transactional e-mails can benefit a CPA is on your website's service pages. At the very least put an e-mail form at the bottom of all your service pages, or better yet make a special offer. You could offer a short report on the subject. Prospects that read that far and respond on that form are very hot leads. Follow up on these inquiries immediately with a transactional e-mail.

Transactional e-mails bring in revenues between three and six times higher than bulk mailings from the same clients, states a report from Experian. Transactional e-mails are a key profit opportunity.

Respect the permission of e-mail subscribers by not bombarding them with e-mail or sending irrelevant messages. When you do this, you risk losing subscribers and the amount of revenue they bring in to your company - which can be very high.

A recent study from Epsilon put the value of an e-mail address at $23.

Fans of your Facebook page may not feel they have given you permission to market to them through Facebook - so use Facebook and other social media platforms to gain e-mail subscribers.

Don't spam. Sending e-mails to people who have never heard of you is pointless. Confine your marketing efforts to prospects who choose to hear from you and are interested in your services. Buying lists of strangers is a waste of time and money.

Exercise restraint. If you send too many e-mails people will start to ignore them. Eventually they will unsubscribe. Bombarding your subscribers with e-mail just won't work. If you annoy people with constant e-mails they will eventually get annoyed. Down the road when they actually need a CPA it's unlikely they'll even consider you.

Occasional e-mails about a product or a special promotion is okay; force-feeding offers to your customers, though, will turn them off quickly.

Treat e-mail marketing like the revenue stream that it is instead of just another number in the marketing budget. This means you should:

* Hire the right team
* Invest in the right partner and technology
* Apply metrics to your efforts to get a clear sense of the benefits

The biggest challenge of e-mail marketing is to meet marketing objectives while offering compelling and relevant content in your e-mails. To do this, pay attention to what content customers click on within the e-mails. What prompts them to take action?

Will these profit practices change? Like the "best practices" that preceded them they very likely will change as technology and attitudes do. The "profit practice" concept is here to stay, however, for the clear cut reason that it allows for this.

About the Author

Jim Tourville is the Operations Manager of CPA Site Solutions, one of the country's leading edge web design firms dedicated exclusively to CPA sites. His firm currently provides websites for more than 4000 CPA, accounting, and bookkeeping firms.