There are many easy-to-implement marketing strategies that accountants can use to expand their reach, from webinars to blogging and beyond.
But modern communication shouldn’t distract you from using one of the oldest yet most effective marketing methods – email.
In fact, email marketing drives an impressive ROI of $36 for every dollar spent. [1]
Still not convinced about email marketing? Join us as we look into this powerful marketing channel and discover how your accounting firm can use it to boost your business.
What is Email Marketing?
It is a marketing strategy that involves sending emails to a target audience, turning prospects into buyers and on-off customers into loyal and engaged ones.
A good email marketing strategy can include sending promotional emails, weekly or monthly newsletters, and special customer deals. It allows you to foster relationships with your recipients and steadily build loyalty to your brand.
Benefits of Email Marketing for Accountants
Looking beyond the financial return we mentioned earlier, let’s find out some of the many benefits that email marketing brings to accountants and accounting firms.
Better Brand Awareness
When done properly, email is a powerful channel to help you build brand awareness. Email is a direct line of communication with your potential clients, so you can put yourself in front of an audience who needs your services or products.
The challenge, however, is not sending marketing emails but getting them read and opened. Once you get past that, you’re on track to better brand awareness.
You Can Communicate With Current and Potential Clients
Effective communication with your clients is vital to stay ahead of the curve.
One excellent way to achieve that is to implement an email marketing campaign with both current and prospective clients.
For instance, with your current clients, you build trust by sharing recent tax news or offering tips they can use for running their business. And for potential clients, you can email them “meaty” content to position your firm as an accounting industry expert.
Stronger Relationships with Customers
Email marketing is an excellent way to build stronger customer relationships, thus keeping lifelong clients. However, you need to provide them with good content.
For instance, providing exclusive deals and special offers through sales emails. Emails are also ideal for letting your clients know you value their input through surveys.
Related: Marketing For Accountants – The Most Effective Strategies In 2023
High Conversions
Email can likewise boost conversions on your accounting services. With the right email marketing strategies and consistency, you can increase client conversion rates and get closer to your business goals.
Cost-Effective
Email marketing boasts a high ROI, making it ideal for small firms searching to stretch their marketing dollars.
There are no paid social media ads or costs per click. Instead, you focus on writing a catchy subject line and grammatically correct content. Along with that, many email marketing tools can be used for free, so you can ramp up your email marketing efforts without spending a lot of money.
How To Get Started With Email Marketing
Canva/ Getty Images
1. Establish Your Goals
You might be tempted just to send your first email out right now. Still, it’s worth thinking about your marketing goals first.
What do you really want to achieve with this campaign? Answering this question will determine the type of campaigns you’ll send, the content you include, who you target, and how you’ll measure success.
2. Build a Reliable Email List
Email list building is an essential strategy. Statistics show that about 59% of consumers stated that marketing emails positively or negatively affect purchasing decisions.
Moreover, 80% of business professionals attest that email marketing boosts customer retention. [2]
So, to get started with email marketing, you need to build a reliable email list. It can be done using website pages, embedded sign-up forms, pop-ups, and social media accounts. You can build a mail list offline, with in-store signup sheets or at your events.
Armed with such a complete directory of contacts, your financial firm can test different messages to different groups of contacts.
List Hygiene
Another important step in building a reliable email list is to ensure you have a clean list of contacts when sending campaigns. Performing email hygiene regularly ensures you are emailing only to people who genuinely want to receive your emails and avoid your email being marked as spam.
3. Choose the Type of Campaign
There are different types of emails you can send to your subscribers, and the one you’ll choose will depend on the goal you’ve set.
For instance, you may want to focus on sending an email newsletter regularly (monthly) and writing content on a particular theme.
Or you may want to send marketing offer emails, which essentially encourage people to make a purchase. These emails offer a special promotion or discount on your services or products.
4. Make Accounting More Interesting
Now that you’ve decided on the type of campaign you want to send, the next step is to make content your subscribers would be genuinely interested in.
And for accounting firms like yours, you need to be creative with your emails. Try to make accounting fun by creating engaging content. For example, you can tell a story, leverage videos, create attractive CTAs, play with animations, or keep things simple.
You may also want to keep your emails approachable, conversational, and friendly. Talk to your subscribers like you’re talking to someone you know to make your email relatable and feel more personal.
Then, to make your email stand out, you can use professionally designed email templates.
5. Track Your Analytics
Here are some of the critical paraments you may want to track:
- Open rates – These indicate the percentages of emails you sent that are opened.
- Unsubscribe rates – It shows the percentage of recipients that unsubscribed in response. If you have a higher unsubscribe rate than the average in your industry, remove it from your sequence or rewrite that email.
- CTR – Click through rates determine the percentage of readers who clicked the links in your emails.
- Conversions – It shows the percentage of recipients who became paying clients from the links they clicked on your email.
- ROI – Indicates the revenue received vs. your campaign’s cost based on the total conversions in the year directly or indirectly.
Have someone on your marketing team report these stats if you’re doing the email marketing in-house. Make sure to A/B test your campaigns to see what’s working and what’s not on your campaign.
But did you know? There’s another cost-effective yet highly effective marketing strategy that you can use to increase traffic to your accounting firm’s website and move ahead of your competitors.
It’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
How to Combine Email Marketing and SEO for Better Rankings
Both email marketing and SEO have the same fundamental goal: building and increasing brand awareness.
SEO For Your Accounting Firm
SEO is the process of improving the website’s ranking to increase its visibility in search engines, like Google and Microsoft Bing, whenever people search for:
- Services you provide
- Products you sell, and
- Information on topics you have experience or deep expertise in
It is also the area of Google search that is directly seen beneath paid ad results. Many online users recognize that the first results are often paid advertisements, so they often skip and rather click the organic section.
By combining email marketing with SEO, you can boost the effectiveness of your overall marketing campaign. The two marketing channels encourage new and repeat business and build authority with existing clients.
Email marketing fosters a direct relationship with existing clients and prospects by sending them relevant and high-quality content. And high-quality traffic from email boosts a website’s ranking, driving off-page SEO.
Off-page SEO includes activities made to increase the website’s search engine rankings. These off-page SEO actions include increasing engagement, building backlinks, and encouraging branded searches.
Here’s how you can build a bridge between email marketing and SEO to rank higher on Google organic search results and increase brand visibility.
- Repurpose Newsletter Content
Search engines don’t crawl emails. However, you can make them crawl your content by reposting it on your website.
You can simply create a newsletter archive so your emails become website content. This also allows site visitors to see what they’re missing out on by not subscribing. Adding that some content is exclusive for subscribers creates an opportunity to grow your mailing list.
But remember to make optimization adjustments before posting, such as correcting errors, restructuring keywords, and adding the canonical tag.
- Create Automated Email Sequences to Generate Traffic
An email sequence is a series of emails automatically sent to specific segments on your list and is trigger- or time-based.
A sequenced email can be triggered based on actions, including shopping cart abandonment, browsing behavior, buying a product, downloading or reading content, and subscribing to your list.
A time-based email sequence is emails sent at predetermined time intervals, including 30 days after purchase, on the anniversary of subscribing, or right after opt-in.
Creating an automated email sequence will provide you with an automated traffic flow that keeps growing. When Google notices that change, it’ll begin ranking your website on certain search results.
- Use clear CTAs
A call-to-action is a vital part of an email. It asks the recipients to take a specific action. By using a clear CTA in your emails, there’s a high chance that people will follow that particular action and then let them decide.
For instance, you can ask your subscribers to comment on your blog post or encourage them to share your content by having social media links at the footer of your newsletter.
- Ask for Reviews
Another way to combine the power of email marketing and search engine optimization is by asking your subscribers for reviews. This is particularly helpful for local businesses to attract new clients and improve client loyalty. After all, reviews are among the most important factors in SEO.
Additionally, reviewers can use relevant keywords, which further helps your site rank higher in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
Why Accountant SEO is the Right Choice for Your Accounting Firm
Our team recognizes that accountants often search for digital marketing solutions that will add a personal touch to their existing clients and target customers.
At Accountant SEO, we take the marketing of your accounting company as seriously as you do.
We strive to make your SEO campaign successful, meaning your website appears in organic search results of specific keywords. This is excellent news for you because users that find you through organic Google searches usually lead to higher conversion rates than other means.
For instance, a user searches for “local tax expert” or “best accountant near me,” and your website appears. When you’re website appears in the first organic result, users will inherently trust your service from the start because you are perceived as an authority figure.
Here are other benefits of SEO for accountants and accounting firms
– Better potential to win business and close deals
– More qualified traffic
– Higher keyword ranking
– More inquiries and leads for your business
Let’s Wrap It Up
Canva/ Getty Images
Having a marketing strategy for your accounting firm is very important if you want to build your business and attract new customers.
Digital marketing may seem complicated, but there are always experts in the field that you can hire to help you reach your goals.
Contact Accountant SEO today to get consistent new leads through search engine optimization.
Article References: