Three tips for increasing email engagement

Email marketing has become an invaluable tool for accountants to engage with diverse clients. However, creating a one-size-fits-all campaign often falls short of truly engaging clients and meeting their unique needs. 

Accountants serve various clientele, from small businesses and freelancers to large corporations and individual taxpayers. Understanding each client’s unique financial needs is key to creating targeted and effective email marketing campaigns. 

For instance, a startup may be interested in assessing the tax implications of different business structures, while an established business might be more interested in maximizing deductions and accounting for depreciation. 

Here are three tips for delivering the right content to the people. 

#1 Tag contacts based on demographics, needs, and interests.

By understanding the behaviors and demographics of your audience, you can send emails that are relevant and resonate with each recipient. 

For example, a young entrepreneur with a family and minor children will have different needs, interests, and financial priorities than a retiree receiving passive income from long-held investments. The young entrepreneur is more likely to open and read emails about business formation and deductions and 529 plans for their minor children. At the same time, retirees may be more interested in advanced estate planning moves to minimize taxes and fees for their heirs. 

Assuming your contacts are held in a CRM, you should be able to tag contacts based on their demographics, needs, and interests. For example, tag business owners with “Business Owner” and contacts with kids with the term “Young Children.”

You may be able to set up automation in your CRM so that contacts who visit certain pages of your website or click certain links in your emails are automatically tagged with a term relevant to the webpage or email link.

Once you have tagged your contacts, it will be much easier for you to filter your contacts for those with specific demographics, needs, and interests to send highly relevant emails that the recipients will read and appreciate.

#2 Use personas

Many firms use personas to help segment their contacts. A persona is a generalized representation based on the specific characteristics of your ideal clients. For example, an ideal client persona might look like: 

“Startup Steve” is 38 and married with a child in elementary school and one in middle school. He recently launched a tech startup but has limited knowledge of tax regulations and financial planning. He lives in a suburban area and currently earns $85,000 annually, though he intends to grow his business. He’s interested in learning about tax incentives for startups, business financial management to ensure sustainability, and how to scale his business. He reads firm resources on tax breaks, compliance, and financial audits. 

We suggest identifying your top three ideal client personas and then identifying which contacts fall into which persona, if any. By using personas, you can write and deliver content that resonates with that specific audience and helps lead them to specific outcomes.

#3 Send emails from the recipient’s primary point of contact

You can significantly increase the engagement of your emails if they are sent from a familiar source. Instead of sending the email from a generic info@yourfirm.com address, have it from the person who led the tax advisory session (or someone they’ve spoken with at your firm). Contacts are much more likely to open an email from a known contact rather than a general email address. Plus, it helps to build trust and rapport with the contact. 

Successful email marketing for accountants relies on understanding and catering to each client’s unique interests and needs. Accountants can create more personalized, relevant, and effective email marketing campaigns by tagging contacts based on their demographics and needs, creating personas to target specific groups, and sending emails from familiar sources. With these strategies, professionals in the accounting industry can maximize engagement, build stronger client relationships, and ultimately drive their business growth.