Email Marketing Best Practices for Accounting Firms

Inquiring about email marketing strategies for your accounting firm is a wise decision. Firms of all different sizes and specializations have found success with email marketing, and we recommend this tactic for a number of reasons:

• It’s personal. When a contact has opted into your email list, they’re actively interested in what you have to say, and more likely to take action.
• It’s accessible. You don’t need immense technical expertise or deep marketing knowledge to make good use of a basic email campaign.
• It works. Year over year, email marketing continues to prove effective for B2B businesses like yours.

But how do you leverage this tactic to gain tangible results for your accounting firm? We’ve compiled the essential best practices here so you can get your email campaign off to a running start.

Create compelling email content

It should go without saying, but the actual content of your emails might be the most important aspect of your campaign. To give readers an incentive to open your emails, keep the following in mind:

Provide valuable information

Send content like whitepapers, ebooks, webinars, and blog articles that help solve your subscribers’ problems. Useful content tailored to their needs gets higher engagement.

Write compelling subject lines

Your subject line is the first impression for your email, so make it count. Keep subject lines short, descriptive, and enticing so readers will open the email. Some best practices include:

• Actively describe what the email contains (e.g. "New report: Outsourcing Accounting Functions")
• Speak to their needs (e.g. "5 Tax Deductions You May Be Missing")
• Incite curiosity (e.g. "A Chat About Your Company's Growth Potential")
• Use urgency or social proof (e.g. "Alert: Tax Deadline Approaching")

Leverage video

Including video content can boost engagement. Use preview images that take you to the video landing page when clicked. Studies show including video can increase click-through rates by 200-300 percent.

Build a quality email list.

You could have the most compelling email content and the latest CRM technology, but it means nothing if you have a poor quality email list. While an export from your Practice Management System is a good place to start, it does not alway yield the best results. Here are the factors that determine a high-quality email list, for your consideration:

• Your contacts know you or have “opted in” This might be the most important aspect, both for legal (data privacy) reasons and in terms of ensuring you’re communicating with prospects who actually want to hear from you.
• Email address is accurate. Clean data is another consideration. If you have an abundance of outdated or incomplete information, bounce rates will soar and hurt your deliverability.
• Your list includes the “right” people. Your practice management system may have the billing contact on record, but it may not have the business owner or decision maker. As you go through your client list, it is critical to have the right contacts information.

Building your contact list can be tedious and time consuming. Prioritize your list based on each category. Start with your current clients, as they would be considered “opted in.” Next, think about adding referral sources and active prospects. The strategy here is to start with your most important contacts first and build from there.

Be sure not to confuse a “quality list” with a “perfect list”; your email list is never going to be perfect and will always be a work in progress. Waiting for perfection will just delay getting started. You can always refine your list over time.

Start with the end in mind.

When planning your email campaigns, determine what action you want your audience to take after reading your email. This is your call-to-action, or CTA, and one great way to track your CTA’s effectiveness is to make it a button or hyperlink and study click-through rates on that link.

Here are some examples of common CTAs for B2B firms:

• Learn More (To read an article on your blog)
• Watch Now (To watch a video)
• Visit our Website (To visit your website)
• Register Today (To register for an event)
• Request a Call (To schedule a call with you)

Make sure your CTA is prominently placed and easy to understand within your email, and avoid having multiple CTAs.

Personalize your emails.

You don’t need to go to extremes when segmenting and personalizing your emails, but should at least feel relevant to your recipients. You can use your CRM to incorporate personal information like your contact’s name, or business name. You can also segment your list into groups depending on their relationship to you and your firm, demographics (industry, service line, business type), interests, past email engagement, website activity, and customer lifecycle stage. Establish relevant segments like “visited service page” or “opened last 3 emails.” This allows you to send more tailored content to each segment for better engagement.

You can also personalize the email based on who the email is coming from. When you get started you might send from a general email address like info@yourfirm.com. This is not a bad place to start, but the email will be best received if it comes from the most appropriate person at your firm. As your email list evolves over time, assign each contact to the most appropriate person within your firm and send the email from their email address; marketing tools like BenchmarkONE or Hubspot make this really easy.

Personalization is one of the fastest and most effective ways to increase open rates and click-through rates, which improve your email deliverability and overall campaign effectiveness.

Optimize for mobile.

People frequently check emails on mobile devices, so it's important to make sure that your emails are optimized for mobile. This means using a responsive design that adjusts to the size of the screen, and keeping the email content concise and easy to read on a small screen. Most CRM platforms automatically optimize your emails for mobile and show you a preview of what your email will look like on different devices, so use this to your advantage when designing your layout and writing email copy.

Test and measure.

You can’t know what works (or what doesn’t) if you don’t measure it. Before sending out a campaign to your entire email list, test your emails with a small sample group. This allows you to see how the email looks in different email clients and on different devices, and make any necessary changes. Once your campaign is live, use email marketing metrics like open rate, click-through rate, and conversion rate to measure its success and make improvements for future campaigns.

Use an email service provider, CRM, or marketing automation platform.

Using an email marketing tool like BenchmarkONE, Mailchimp or HubSpot can significantly enhance your email marketing strategy and save you valuable time. These platforms support practices like segmentation, automation, and personalization, allowing for more targeted and effective communication. They also provide mobile-responsive templates and design tools, making it easy to create professional-looking emails. Additionally, these tools offer robust analytics and A/B testing features to refine your strategy based on performance data. They also help ensure compliance with regulations like CAN-SPAM and GDPR, reducing legal risks while streamlining list management and overall campaign execution.

Take Away

Email marketing is an effective, accessible, and highly rewarding strategy for accounting firms of all sizes. By implementing best practices, your firm can significantly enhance its reach and engagement. Remember, perfection is not the goal; continual refinement and adaptation are the keys to a successful email marketing strategy. If you have any questions or would like to discuss more on this topic, schedule a call today.