The Accountant’s ultimate guide to starting a 1000 subscribers email list
Tags: Marketing, Finance, Accounting, Insurance, Writing

The Accountant’s ultimate guide to starting a 1000 subscribers email list

When you’re starting a new accounting firm or trying to enter a new niche or industry, it can be quite difficult to get new clients.

You hustle for months trying to:

cold email

cold call

attend a few networking events here and there.

But still, you are getting pennies on the dollar for an 80 hours work week!

You realize getting clients is not as easy as all the gurus out there said it would be.

There are two main reasons why this happens.

People don’t know you

People don’t trust you

Hmmm... It seems obvious that in order to start getting some reasonable work, you have to make people aware that you mean business and also that you are to be trusted.

Building high quality, highly targeted email list is the best way to satisfy both these reasons.

With 5.6 billion active email accounts expected by the end of 2019, it’s easy to see why you might want to get connected with your potential client via email.

Once you have your email list up and running you'll be in a position to:

Share useful accounting and tax tips to your list of readers... (Positioning yourself as an expert in your industry)

sell your accounting services to a list of loyal readers.

In this post, you are going to learn how to successfully start a list of email subscribers. We are going to Mostly examine how you can build an email list without paying for any traffic.

but to scale you need to do paid traffic too! So we will touch a bit on that.

If you are ready, let's jump straight into it!

Decide on who you want to attract

Before you get your hands dirty you have to know what type of person you are trying to attract.

You are doing this to guarantee that you will be communicating the right information to the right people.

Through your list of email subscribers, you can score a killing of new paying clients that trust and know you. This is largely because of the high conversion rate that email marketing claims as the undisputed champ of marketing with a 4.16% conversion rate!

But to get this kind of conversion, you’ll have to focus on only one thing.

That’s being clear on the type of person you would like to attract. The Ideal client!

This means you should get their demographic information like:

Their age, gender, income, and level of education. If you cater for B2C clients.

Industry, annual revenue and size of the company for B2B clients.

This info also includes where these clients are situated and what factors influence their decision.

The all-important factor to consider is... What’s their pain points or problem.

Answer these questions and you have yourself a description of your ideal client.

Once you are done with that…

You have enough information to construct a buyer persona that should look like...

Voila!

The more you get to know your ideal client. The easier it to share content that resonates with them.

This step set's the tone for the rest of what's needed to successfully start an email list that works.

Get started on your email marketing tool

A simple Gmail account won’t cut it when you have to send mass emails personalized for the specific buyer’s stage your prospect is on. Plus you also have to analyze the insights and stats so you can optimize your emails to convert more.

The top three email marketing tools are Convertkit, Aweber, and MailChimp. Each of these are suitable for different stages of your mailing list, from a few hundred subscribers to hundreds of thousands of subscribers.

Click on the links to check each tool’s pricing plan:

-Mailchimp

- Aweber

-Convertkit

MailChimp gives you a feature-limited free version for up to 2000 subscribers.

It’s a no brainer... That’s a nice place to start.

This will allow you to validate whether having a mailing list is worth it, all without spending a lot of money trying to figure it out.

Before you signup on MailChimp, you have to make sure that you have a professional email and your practice/firm’s physical address

Once all that is done...

All you need to do is go to the MailChimp website, sign up and you are good to go!

Once you do this you would be ready to fish for your ideal clients and place them in your email bucket.

Create a landing page to drive people to.

this is where you will have to sell your email list, let potential subscribers know why they have to join your mailing list and what’s in it for them.

a landing page is an easy way to enjoy a 40% conversion rate if you are a b2b accounting firm.

Since you are starting off and not looking to lose a lot of money on this, you can create a landing page for free on Mailchimp... head over to Mailchimp and start creating your landing page…

…this is assuming you took my advice earlier on when I told you that MailChimp should definitely be your friend when starting off.

If you are looking for more quality and professional results, and you have the budget, take a look at these top landing page builder services:

Hubspot

Landingi

Optimizepress

Instapage

Some of these allow you a free trial period before you commit.

Now that you know where to go when you want to build your own landing page, the next step is being able to know what needs to be on the landing page.

Here is an idea of how a well-built Landing page looks like.

It has an easy and straight to the point headline Focuses on the benefits Has a clear and easy to see call to action

What you can add is details of what the potential subscriber should expect when signing up for the mailing list

The most important element of the page is…

The inclusion of a lead magnet

A lead magnet is your bargaining chip for the client’s email address… If you give them some reward, the better the chances of having a happy, grateful and willing subscriber.

In the above example, the lead magnet is 2 months free payroll! Who would really resist such an offer?

If you are clueless about what to offer your clients… Stick with me as I will show you how to create a lead magnet.

A lead magnet is anything that is… (a)Immediately actionable and (b)of value that you could give away to the client in exchange for their email address.

So what exactly can you give away?

It can be an ebook

A download of any kind

An email course

A video course

A free service for a limited time

There’s plenty you can choose from, as long as you know your ideal client’s pain points (these are what you are aiming to help the subscriber alleviate).

Can’t think of anything to give away at the moment? Then stick closer to me… Let’s see what options you have.

Giving away an ebook?

If you want to give away an ebook and you don’t have any inspiration, you can simply head to kindle, type your desired search term and you will see the following…

Hmmm… Already there’s a treasure trove of ideas that we can use to create an ebook right here.

The good news is you don’t even have to buy any of these books since you are a tax expert yourself… You can simply borrow the inspiration and create a “just as good” 10 pager ebook that a subscriber will surely be grateful for.

You can create an email course

When signing up… your client could enjoy a 7 to 10 days daily course(totally dependent on you) — that will help him save a lot on taxes this financial year. If you have no idea how the course could be structured and need inspiration… Checkout Udemy and do a general search within your niche.

Can you look at that! A lot of ideas already popping up on your screen… this is your holy grail and you can do whatever you see fit with it.

If you have no idea what modules you can divide your course in — click through any of these you like, it will have the modules there that you can use to create the course… It will appear as such:

There you go! 4 modules for a great 4-day course delivered daily to the subscriber's inbox… Wasn’t that hard, was it?

now that’s covered… You can add the lead magnet to your landing page.

Collecting emails

This is the part where the bulk of the work is done, you can either do paid ads to attract new subscribers or you can put in the work and time to attract organic traffic.

Luckily you don’t have to go far, you can start with:

Emailing your current clients and leads you’ve cold emailed before

These people are your starting point since you already have their emails.

You want to add a link to your email signature that directs to the landing page you created earlier on. Like so…

So whenever you send your next email, you will be promoting your email list via your signature.

You will also want to create an email you could send to all the people you have emailed before, this includes leads you have cold emailed and you never heard from again (think of this as a follow-up email).

Once you have exhausted all your existing connections, only then can you move on to the heavy stuff, buckle up… it’s about to get really bumpy!

Using paid traffic

For beginners, options like google ads could be a mountain task, to really move the needle and avoid wasting time, starting with Facebook is a good idea.

Head over to https://www.facebook.com/ads/manager/.

First, choose — “get more website visitors”

Then click on creative ads, add your landing page/website link on the URL line. Creating Facebook ads is a topic on its own that I won’t cover on this post, you can find out more on how to write a great ad headline and text here.

The next step depends on your company’s buyer persona for your ideal client. You need to know:

Location of your ideal client

Their industry or profession

Let’s use MossAdams here as an example. They are an accounting firm operating across 50 states in the US, providing companies in the real estate industry with accounting services.

Here is an idea of what they offer:

Your interests will be based on the industry you work in and the micro-niches in that industry, also keep in mind the geographical location.

Here is how it would look like:

Once you have run a few ads and you have started getting some subscribers sign-ups… you can start using lookalike audiences. This is where facebook does the targeting for you.

That was the last of the paid stuff. Now we get into a free method that might take you a lot of time to do, but it is as effective if not more!

Posting content on your blog

If you happen to want to blog, you better be different than the average person, considering that over 2 million blogs are written every day. In addition to being different, you have to be able to win against the search engine algorithm.

To do all of that you have to:

Write blogs based on popular topics within your niche. You can use buzzsumo to find the right keyword for the industry you are writing about.

Write long blog posts and repurpose the content for your social media accounts

Research your keywords thoroughly and don’t be afraid of using longtail keywords in your content

Remember to include pictures in your blog and some stats to back up your arguments.

I’ve just blabbed nonstop on how to create a quality blog post, but how do you use your blog to generate email subscribers?

You create a blog upgrade

Once you are done and ready to publish your blog, you can create a pdf version to make it easy for readers to download it (of course their email will be required to complete the download). You can also create a checklist based on the blog the reader is reading.

Here is how it might look like:

The reader will at most times be happy to receive the checklist to a point that they would gladly give you their email address.

My final thoughts…

The single biggest reason people will subscribe to your email list will probably be the giveaway you offer them. You have to wrap it nicely in words that sell it.

Considering that 20% of marketers admit that email marketing is a primary source of income for their businesses, you don’t want to not have some kind of email marketing for your practice.