Email Marketing

After learning the importance and effectiveness of email marketing this week, I began thinking about my experience with email marketing and newsletters. I think you have to be careful in choosing the frequency of newsletters or email marketing in general. If I see irrelevant emails too often, I will typically delete them before reading or unsubscribe, therefore both content and frequency are important to keep in mind. With my wife’s business, I think producing a newsletter twice a year would be more than sufficient, with occasional emails on an as need basis. Additionally, everybody likes a birthday message with a small gift, like a coupon. A welcome email for new subscribers is also nice. These two should definitely be a part of any email marketing campaign (very easy sentiments when using a resource like Constant Contact).

A newsletter before tax time would probably be welcomed by most of our tax clients. Realistically, drafting the content and producing a newsletter would be nearly impossible during tax season. My wife rarely comes home before 8:00 pm during the busiest times of tax season, so most marketing would have to be done in the off-season. Most of the email marketing we would be doing is relationship building. Unfortunately, the business is not set up so that sales can be made online. With our business, the purpose is getting new people in the door and keeping them coming back. People have to see that we are different from everybody else. With our clients, they typically feel like family, so they have to be treated as such. The moment they feel like they are just another client is the moment they consider another tax preparer.  A tax newsletter would probably include things like

·        tax tips,

·        reminders about tax deadlines,

·        fun statistics,

·        money-saving tips to help clients stretch their refund dollar.

With our immigration clients (mostly Hispanic), a Spanish language newsletter might be refreshing. Every issue could feature

·        a newly sworn in citizen with their story

·        commentary on new legislation or talks that are taking place regarding immigration reform

·         a link to the company blog (since we don’t yet have a website) where they can find previous issues of the newsletter

I would have a tax corner on the Immigration newsletter and an immigration corner on the tax newsletter. One of the advantages of having a multi-service business is the prospect of having someone come back to the office for a different service than they originally came. We see a lot of our immigration clients return to have their income taxes prepared with us, and vice versa.

I am seeing more and more how practical an email marketing campaign can be. I am anxious to start playing around with the features of Constant Contact, and possibly implement this into the business.