Email marketing for accountants

Email can be a highly effective method to engage audiences: providing a valuable source of business leads when you work on it consistently. The right email campaign can bring in new clients, build authority with existing ones and generate repeat business. This article will look at how your accounting firm can stand out from the other emails in your subscribers’ inboxes by looking at the following areas:

• What do you want to achieve with email marketing?
• Tips on how to use email marketing for accountants 
• Creating impactful content
• Committing to a schedule
• Creating specific campaigns
• Working on subject lines
• Updating your email list

Begin by deciding your business goal for your email strategy. There are lots of potential goals that you might want your email activity to provide, such as:

• Increase sales or attract new clients
• Invite more direct enquiries
• Build your number of email subscribers
• Drive more traffic to your website
• Promote a specific piece of work, such as a case study or content like a report
• Showcase or announce a new service that you provide

One email can’t achieve everything, so pick a few aims and start creating emails with them in mind to help you focus your messaging. 

For example, if you want to produce more enquiries and gain more clients, you could include key phrases such as ‘Get in touch with us today’ or ‘Find out more about our services here’. This provides a signpost to the reader about what you want them to do after reading the email, and prompts them to visit the page you’ve chosen to feature.

Now that you’ve decided on a goal, it’s time to start understanding how to leverage your accountancy knowledge and content to engage your audience better. Here are the areas you should focus on when creating email marketing.

Think about how many emails you receive every day that you disregard. To stand out in an email inbox, you need to provide your subscribers with something that draws them to read it. If they feel it is not worth their time, they will skip over it. Gain your readers’ interest and create emails using the following frameworks: 

• Solve a problem they have or improve on a method they already use
• Be bold or shocking about a topic they’re interested in
• Inspire them to try something new (especially something you offer)

In the B2B world, the way to your subscribers’ hearts is to show how you can save them time, stress or lessen their workload. Using blogs or articles that are accounting top tips, case studies of other clients or a report your firm has created on a specific sector will provide the reader with something useful and valuable that they can take action on.

You can find out more about content marketing and how to create useful content here.

Consistency is important when building an engaged email database; if you say you’ll be doing a monthly newsletter, make sure it’s monthly. Your engaged readers will come to expect the email and look forward to reading your useful content, so don’t leave them waiting. 

Committing to another type of email (like a quarterly summary or annual review) can help vary your content across the year. A newsletter is all well and good, but to really target the clients you want to bring in, you need to create something that’s timely as it is engaging. These sorts of semi-regular features can be a strong way to get noticed.

When we talk about specific campaigns, we mean emails that are directed at a more specific audience than just your entire email list. 

For example, let’s say your accounting firm has a lot of construction clients. You might create an email with helpful articles and case studies that apply specifically to builders, services companies and self-employed tradesmen. This helps show readers that you have the knowledge and services to support them best. Supplying them with content that applies specifically to their business and the accounting issues they struggle with will make them more likely to get in touch for your help.

In this example, you could create articles on:

• A guide to VAT for construction companies
• How to do your self-assessment as a self-employed tradesman

Or case studies:

• How we helped self-employed builders understand their finances
• How we saved this electrician hundreds of pounds with accounting support

You could then link the email to your website to get readers to look at your services and other useful articles. Read more about specific segmentation here.

Digital marketing is all about the best customer experience: if someone can work with you without having to visit in person, feature this in your emails. Aim to make it simple for readers to get in touch, book appointments or state what services you can manage fully online.

The subject line is the first thing someone will read and can make or break whether they open the email. If it doesn’t strike the right tone or isn’t relevant to the reader, they may not open yours at all. 

A third of subscribers open the email based on the subject alone, so take your time to craft something that will be intriguing. Specifically, try to avoid ‘spammy’ words like ‘FREE’ or ‘cash’  as many consumers have become suspicious of their usage, and some email platforms might filter them out before your subscribers even see them.

Personalised subjects can increase your open rates massively. Many email providers have settings that can use a placeholder for inserting the customer’s name into the subject when they receive it. 

It may seem counterintuitive, but regularly deleting contacts from your mailing list will benefit your engagement rates. Use your email management software (such as Mailchimp or Hubspot) to separate contacts on your list that have never opened an email or never been on your website. 

Remember that, by deleting them, you aren’t losing any chances of a sale because your business wasn’t on their radar anyway. 

You can save your practice time on manual admin and help your clients keep organised records with Countingup’s free accounting software. It’s built specifically to help you manage your self-employed and sole trader clients.

The app automates time consuming bookkeeping admin for your clients so they can focus on running their business – and send you accurate, structured data to work from. With instant invoicing, automatic expense categorisation and cash flow insights, your clients will be able to confidently keep accurate bookkeeping records everyday.

Countingup’s accounting software is MTD-compatible and full of features for you to review and manage client accounts efficiently, with direct access to their real-time organised data. Find out more here.