Getting Email Marketing Right

It is important to regularly keep in touch with your clients and prospects. Emails can help you to promote your firm, market your professional services and demonstrate your availability should your clients need to get in touch. Periodic newsletters and email campaigns are an easy and effective way to do so.

 

This blog post looks at how you can use email marketing to keep clients up-to-date with latest developments in the industry, as well as company news and services. We also cover important best practices that can help you get the best out of your emails.

Content for emails

The accounting industry is a fast paced environment where communicating key information, such as the latest news or changes in regulations that may affect your clients and their business, will not only provide invaluable updates but also add value to your firm.

Email newsletters are a great source of information and give clients the opportunity to respond with any queries they have. Branded newsletters containing relevant news stories will remind your clients that you're a knowledgeable and trustworthy firm.

Getting the email right

The following are some best practices that can help you improve the open and click rates of your emails, along with increasing engagement from clients:

Email subject

Be mindful of the subject lines you choose for your campaign. Subject lines are the first point of contact with recipients and can effect if they will open your email. It is essential that the subject line is concise and engaging to your audience, ideally it should clearly reflect what the email details. We recommend no more than fifty characters in a subject line, this will then work on mobile devices and avoids too many words.

Branding

Ensure that your emails contain your firm name and logo in the header or footer of your emails. Within the footer of your email, ensure that your contact information is visible and easily clickable on both desktop and mobile device. Including social media icons to your firm's social media pages will encourage your contacts to follow and like your company pages, thus increasing your online presence. Most importantly, the header and footer in all your emails should always be consistent.

Personalisation

You can personalise your emails to clients by inserting your clients' first or last name and greatly improve your email open rates. Personalisation to your emails can add the personal touch that clients look for, it can help to foster relationships with clients and add a sense of familiarity when communicating with them.

Call to action

A call to action is prompting someone to interact, click or view the key information that will benefit them (and you). If an email has been designed in order for the reader to take an action, it is imperative to use a call to action - in the form of text, image or a button. It should be clearly labelled with the action to take, such as Read now, Buy now or Contact us and should inform the client of what to expect on clicking.

Signature

It is important to add a signature to your businesses emails - it may seem obvious, but it is something that can be overlooked. An option is to include your name and photograph so that your contacts will be able to put a face a name and feel confident and assured that you can be trusted with their finances.

Track your emails

It is essential that you are analysing your emails to gain further information about your clients and understand how they respond to your brand. Having access to analytics tools can enable you to view open rates i.e. how many clients have opened your emails. Moreover, it is possible to see which call to action(s) your subscribers have clicked and engaged with. This can help you understand client buying behaviour and show what services and topics your client is interested in.

Email marketing can be a really useful when done right. It should be used as part of your overall marketing strategy- there should be a purpose to everything that you communicate to your clients. Most of all, keep the number of emails you send to a minimum and the content within them relevant and engaging to your subscribers.

Find out how Mercia totalsolution can help your firm with email marketing. As part of our service we can automatically send a range of branded emails to your clients, contacts and prospects. Visit our website for more information or email us or call us at 0116 258 1242.