Email marketing for tax professionals involves taking time to promote and discuss financial offerings with existing and prospective clients.

The emails you send should showcase your expertise, position you as an expert in your field, and nurture relationships.

Roughly 80% of professionals find that emails help them acquire and retain customers. Also, the return on investment (ROI) for email marketing is higher than for any other marketing channel, with an estimated $36 ROI for every dollar you spend. So if you aren’t currently leveraging email as a key marketing strategy for your tax business, you are losing out on potential income.

Get the expert marketing advice and tools you need to find new financial clients and increase investment from existing ones.

How to set up email marketing for tax professionals

While you could always send individual messages to clients, automating your emails is much more effective. If you’re a tax professional looking to launch an email marketing campaign, selecting an email marketing service provider that can handle this task is a good way to start.

Email marketing service providers typically offer email automation tools, like easy-to-use templates, which you can use to craft professional email content. These tools may also include data-tracking software that can help you identify the type of content that best captures audience attention.

The next thing you want to do is integrate your existing email contact list with the provider you’ll be using. 

This list should include past and existing clients as well as any others that you’ve received permission to correspond with via email. You’ll also need a way to grow this email list.

Embedding an email sign-up form into your website, for example, is a great way to do this because your contact list will automatically update when prospective clients subscribe. 

The final step involves creating an email template that you can modify for all outgoing email communications. Having a template that you easily adjust keeps your brand consistent and ensures that your existing and prospective clients recognize your emails at a glance. 

Great tips on email marketing for tax professionals

For tax professionals, email marketing should demonstrate the value you offer clients.

Your words have the power to position you as an expert in your niche. You want to ensure that when your email recipients have a tax question, your name is the first one they think of.

To facilitate this, your emails should always be proofread to ensure they’re grammatically correct and typo-free. Online tools like Grammarly can help you edit your content so you send the best possible emails every time. 

Using high-quality images in your email marketing campaign is also a great idea.

Images will help your emails stand out, illustrate your points, and break blocks of text into digestible chunks. 

6 types of email marketing messages 

To make the most of your efforts at email marketing for tax professionals, it’s important to have a variety of emails in your arsenal. Here are six of the most common types of messages you can begin using with your contacts.

1. Welcome series

Your Welcome Email series should be scheduled to trigger as soon as someone signs up for your newsletter. Once you create this message, you can leave it alone and feel confident that it continues to provide relevant information to new clients.

The ideal welcome series consists of two to three emails. The first should be a brief message that thanks the existing or prospective client for signing up. It should also reaffirm that they made the right decision by explaining the value your future emails will provide.  

The second message in your welcome series should invite them to connect with you on your social media channels.

If you choose to send a third email in your welcome series, a getting-to-know-you survey can be a good choice. This will allow you to segment your email lists and send your customers the content that’s most relevant to their needs.

2. Newsletters

Newsletters are emails sent out on a regular schedule with updates, news, or helpful tips. They’re generally sent out weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly. Use the same professional, mobile-responsive newsletter template on all of your email newsletters to ensure your customers receive a cohesive brand experience. Incorporating multimedia elements, including images and animations, can keep your newsletters interesting and engaging.

Your newsletter can include: 

  • Information about upcoming tax deadlines
  • Bookkeeping tips and tricks
  • Relevant tax news in your niche
  • Updates about your agency

3. Tax reminders

Email marketing for tax professionals should include courtesy, tax reminder messages to your contacts, reminding them to book your services during the tax preparation season.

These can be short email bursts with information about upcoming deadlines, the paperwork they may need to locate, and a call to action (CTA) button that takes them to instructions on how to book your services.

4. Educational emails

As a tax professional, educational email content is the bread and butter of your email marketing efforts. Any time you send out educational content, you demonstrate that you’re an industry expert who can provide real value.

Think about the questions your clients ask you most often when they meet with you. These are the questions you should strive to answer in your educational email content.

When drafting these messages, make sure you avoid using business jargon and break the questions down as much as possible. Write the emails as if you were explaining the process to a teenage niece or nephew who has never filed taxes before.

email marketing for tax professionals
Offering a webinar or informational video is a unique way to engage your audience in an educational email and can be more powerful than text content alone.

5. Testimonials

When you go above and beyond with your service, your customers may be willing to provide testimonials.

Testimonials are valuable to email marketing for tax professionals because they serve as social proof that the service provided is worth the investment.

While you don’t want to spam your contact list with testimonials day and night, interspersing testimonials with your other email campaigns can help you build trust with your clients.

One way to do this is to showcase a client case study in which you explain how you helped a client with your services. Another option is to ask clients for testimonials you can include in your emails under a header like, “Here’s what our clients have to say about our tax services.” 

6. Surveys

Nobody knows what your clients need from you like your clients themselves. A survey is a tool you can use to learn more about your clients’ interests, including:

  • What topics they want to learn more about
  • What areas of tax preparation they struggle with
  • What services they use for bookkeeping
  • How often they want to receive emails from you

Sending out a quick survey and reviewing the results can help you make important decisions about future email content.

email marketing for tax professionals
Surveys don’t have to be long, and you can include them in other emails if you want. This simple email from CarMax invites people to click one button and go to an attached survey.

Integrate email marketing into your tax business today

For tax professionals, email marketing has the power to take a business to the next level.

Get started today by putting together a spreadsheet with the names and emails of current clients, previous clients, and businesses that you have permission to correspond with. Once you have this email contact list created, you can focus on growing it, sending out high-quality messages that can help your business thrive.