Crunching Numbers and Boosting ROI: The Undeniable Success of Email Marketing

Why did the marketer get off the trampoline?

He was worried about his bounce rate.

Hesitating on email marketing? I have news - it works.

I have blogged for more than a few years, much longer than shows on my website. I did a complete rebrand onto a new website platform and only ported over some content, but the start date was my rebrand date.

What is fairly new to me, though, is my email campaigns. I didn’t think the effort-to-outcome ratio would make it worthwhile. I didn’t have a clear enough outcome of why I would send out emails. I wasn’t sure how to bring value to subscribers - what could I possibly say that would resonate with them? And I was worried about being intrusive to people’s inboxes.

Sound like you?

I bet this sounds like a lot of folks in the accounting industry!

I had heard all the reasons to start engaging people with email campaigns.

• It is cost-effective. The costs associated with designing, testing, and sending emails to your target market are relatively low. Especially if you have a niche or cornered market.
• You can personalize the notes.But beware and vet your subscriber list, as I discovered - if folks sign up using rotten conventions (all upper or lower case, no last name…), placeholders can run amok.
• You can measure results (we love our KPIs, don’t we?). Metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and more, help you measure the success of your efforts.
• You can take advantage of a ton of automation behind campaigns. Triggering actions and events from the campaigns themselves or from links within the notes.Integrations with other marketing mediums for broader reach.
• You will build brand strength. Creating trust. Consistency of the images, fonts, and colours plays strongly on the recipient’s mind.
• You engage with your audience. Fostering loyalty and retention.I often get replies to my notes, which is so rewarding!

And yadayadayada, on and on it goes, right?

Knowing and acting upon knowledge are two different animals, though. But, if there is one thing I have learned about email marketing firsthand, it’s that it works. Like crazy.

I was kind of messy when I first started, but as always, getting started was the key (okay, I was really messy…). My subscribers (who were mostly friends, truth be told) were patient (more on where to find subscribers in a few weeks) with my misteps and inconsistency.

• My notes did not go out on the same day at the same time, and sometimes they didn’t go out at all. I’m not sure anyone but me noticed unless there was a big missing period - how important do I think I am 😎.
• I monkey’d about with formats; things like where my images were, what the content elements were, the fonts and buttons and such.
• I changed up my CTAs - Call To Action - too many times.

Consistency really is a key factor in building a subscriber base, and I was sorely lacking in it.

What changed all this for me was clearly defining the outcomes I hoped to achieve through email marketing. Once I defined that, it changed everything for me. My email campaigns achieved remarkable results once I engaged my readers with a clear purpose.

My key outcome is to sell my Cloud Accounting Templates. That is the number one thing - who doesn’t love passive-ish income?

This purpose led me to have a section for my “Template Of The Week”. My templates are largely built around QBO, so that is, in part, why I do a QBO-specific blog once a month.

My other outcomes - the purposes of my blogging and emailing and what that led to in my writings:

• I strive to lift people up in this industry I love in a light-hearted and meaningful way. This is why I started writing about security - it occasionally drives a financial outcome with a partner sponsoring my writing (like this one, for example), but more importantly to me, it raises awareness for others to be security-conscious and implement simple actionables. This is the reason I have gone with a story-telling style of writing rather than going an easier route of a short blast, news or list-based notes (there are a few of those I love, though!).
• When I have emotional and time bandwidth, I want to consult with accounting professionals to help them love cloud accounting as much as I do (which is a lot!). I will do a CTA specific to that, perhaps around an article about cloud technology and efficiency. I do QBO tips to drive some training.
• I love working with technology partners, helping them develop products that improve our lives as accounting professionals. The more engaged my audience, the more street-cred I gain to encourage them to either work with me or simply sponsor my articles. I often train or speak on behalf of partners, so I added an “Events” section to help promote the events - and to make sure my friendies know about them so we can have some fun there together.
• I launched a new service, “Accounting For Accountants”, which I am excited to grow. There will be some new CTAs coming on this!

Why am I telling you about my outcomes?

Because I want you to know that whenever I send out an email campaign, I sell things and engage with folks! Every single time… The ROI is incredible. So much so that I have stopped doing the hard work parts of my emails. I have engaged a marketing company to do the heavy admin lifting. I would get stuck on getting my emails out solely because of the work of formatting them, not the work of writing them. But by delegating the bits I didn’t need to do, I will be way more consistent in getting them out.

I wanted to share my real-world success story to encourage you to run email campaigns for your firm.

I wanted you to ask yourself about your big hairy goals for this coming year. What the 2024 outcomes you want to achieve are? And then, I want you to noodle through how email marketing could help you get there. 

Don’t overthink getting started; just get motoring and then start to hone your email ideas as you define your outcomes and style.

Side note: It is not lost on me that this note is about why I email my email subscribers.

Ahhhh, but what if you were to lose your content and lists!?

I am constantly haranguing on data location redundancy and backup. It’s a soapbox for me. I preach on implementing Rewind on all QBO files and e-commerce sites. And now there is a new backup by Rewind; early access for Mailchimp is live.

You have carefully crafted your campaigns, built a stellar mailing list and then whamo - how would it feel losing your valuable Mailchimp CRM data? Rotten, that’s how. Data can be lost through mistakes, nefarious characters, corrupted integrations…

As with most cloud-based applications, Mailchimp backs up the data of their users as a whole, not the individual account data.

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