If you are an accountant or a consultant, what can marketing automation help you with? The answer depends mostly on the type of business you run, but in every case, you will save a lot of time and streamline several time-consuming processes. In this post, we want to show you how independent professionals can use marketing automation.
People working on their own usually need to wear many hats – you probably are not just a business owner but also a marketer, accountant, customer service agent, and… sometimes even janitor. If that’s true in your case, we have some good news – you can regain a lot of your time by adopting marketing automation in your business.
But what can marketing automation help you with specifically? We want to show you four crucial areas:
- Lead generation
- Email marketing
- Client database management
- Surveys
Let’s have a look at each one of them.
Marketing automation streamlines lead generation
Let’s start with a simple fact – as a solopreneur, you need leads to keep your business going. And while MA cannot find new leads for you, it can facilitate the process of turning them into paying clients. Thanks to marketing automation scenarios, you can automatically guide every prospect from the first interaction with your website to placing an order or signing the contract.
MA scenarios can comprise many different actions that happen in direct response to your prospect’s activity. For example, when someone opens your website, there can be a pop-up encouraging them to download your free checklist or cheat sheet. They download it in exchange for an email address, correct? The next step comprises several lead nurturing emails where you show your expertise and gradually build trust.
After several such emails, there’s another email encouraging to book a free consultation with you. And if someone decides to sign with you, they get automated onboarding emails and materials.
We use emails in our example, but it can be more:
- Text messages
- Push notifications
- Automated web sections
- WhatsApp messages, etc.
In short, marketing automation makes your lead-generation efforts much easier. Your job is to direct traffic to your website – marketing automation will do the rest.
Email marketing automation
For sole proprietors, emails are very important – you probably use them to stay in touch with both new and current clients. Email marketing can help you gain someone’s trust, start a new cooperation, and remind yourself to some of your past clients.
However, if you think about it, there are many different emails you can send, right? Creating them all every single time from scratch can be time-consuming! And this is where marketing automation steps in the game.
You see, with marketing automation, your email marketing activities are much easier, too! In fact, almost all emails intended for more than one person can be automated! With iPresso, you can automate:
- Lead nurturing emails
- Onboarding emails
- Newsletters to your client base
- Technical emails (e.g., your taxes are due on…), etc.
All you have to do is prepare templates for the emails you want to send to your clients. And if you also use other tools available within our marketing automation platform (e.g., contact database management features), and you can even automate your emails’ contents, especially variables, such as [first name], [last name], or [company name]. This one little tweak can help you save hours spent on crafting emails!
SEGMENTATION
Finally, email marketing automation can help you with one more thing – segmentation. Most likely, you have many different types of clients. If you are an accountant, you probably work with both sole proprietors/small business owners and large corporations. Obviously, these two groups have different needs and interests.
If that’s true in your case, a smart move would be to segment your client base depending on the business type and interests so that you can send them more personalized emails that are adjusted specifically to their needs. Sending one and the same email about a new corporate tax that doesn’t even apply to solopreneurs would be counterproductive. Half of your client would probably decide your emails are boring or irrelevant.
Segmentation is one of the keys to keeping your clients engaged.
Contact database management
Even if you don’t have many clients, it’s a good idea to keep all of their information in one organized place. That’s what our contact database management tool is for. With it, you don’t have to browse hundreds of old emails to find one important piece of information – you can store them all in your client database (our platform allows you to add non-standard attributes that you want to keep for future reference purposes).
Contact database management is also very helpful when it comes to email marketing, as we mentioned earlier. With contacts well-organized in your database, you can automate variables such as the first name so that you don’t need to write generic emails such as “Dear Sirs.” You can easily go with a more friendly and effective “Hello, [first name]!”. This makes you feel like a real person and a partner to your client and not a soulless machine.
Surveys
Lastly, we want to tackle getting feedback from your clients. How often do you ask if they are satisfied with working with you? Probably not too often, right? And that’s a mistake because conducting client surveys can also help you keep them engaged and satisfied with working with you.
There is one thing to remember – surveys must be short and to the point. Sending a ten-mile-long survey asking for every tiny detail makes no sense, and people will almost immediately feel discouraged to give you their feedback.
But a short survey containing one or two well-thought-out questions is a different story. Our platform will help you automate collecting feedback from your clients. And once you have five or ten surveys, you can better understand what people think about working with you.
Wrapping up
Marketing automation can be hugely beneficial for your company or practice. The good news is that all the tools and features we mentioned in this article are available in iPresso, so you don’t need to pay for several different tools – you need just one. And a really straightforward one, too.
If you are an accountant, a lawyer, a consultant, or any other independent professional, marketing automation will save you many hours of work every year. And as your client base grows, these savings will be even more apparent.
We invite you to give iPresso a shot. You can sign up for a free trial to see how our platform works. All you need to do is go here and send us a short contact form containing some of the basic details of your company.
We look forward to working with you!
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