E-Mail Marketing Profit Practices: The Intelligent Alternative for Your CPA Business
The title "best practices" frequently means aged rules and methods, and processes to avoid. This mind-set can stymie innovation.
If we take a look at some new trends and change the wording from "best practices" to "profit practices," it helps shift our thinking from following the status quo to ensuring our efforts continually generate 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. Here are some practical suggestions...
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. For example you could offer a short report with more information 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. Spamming your subscribers is not only disrespectful, it's also unprofitable. You will lose subscribers and by extention the revenue they would have brought into your company.
A recent study from Epsilon put the value of an e-mail address at $23.
Use social media carefully. Fans of your facebook page may not necessarily want to be marketed to, but you can use your facebook page to collect e-mail addresses from the ones that do.
Don't waste time sending e-mails to people who don't know your company. 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. Sending too many e-mails causes people to skip over your messages and to unsubscribe from your list - it's just that simple. People aren't going to want to use a CPA that's constantly annoying them with pointless e-mails.
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? Just like the "best practices" that preceded them they very probably will transform as technology and attitudes do. The "profit practice" concept is here for good, however, for the simple reason that it allows for this.
About the Author
Jim Tourville is the Operations Manager of CPA Site Solutions, one of the country's most successful website design companies oriented solely to CPA sites. His company presently provides websites for more than 4000 CPA and accounting firms.