236 BASIC Email Marketing for Accounting Firms

No, I'm not gonna mess with email marketing. I'm an accountant. You know why I think we hate email marketing these days as we see so many examples in the wild of people just doing it bad, B, a double D bad. But email marketing done right, it's actually really good. It's actually like there's a lot of people just slightly outside the radius of our firm who with just a little, little bit of prompting, little bit of encouragement, would happily join the squad. And so today I'm by no means like a big brain email marketing expert, but I, I want to give you enough of a primer to understand the value of versions of it. What versions of it make sense for accounting firms? Because you could probably do this yourself, you could probably task a person on your team with it, or you can hire somebody to help. But it all starts with like enough of an understanding to see where the applications are in the day to day. So that's the goal for today, to understand enough of it to know where it could potentially plug in to help your business amplify other sort of like marketing efforts that you're doing. And have one, one more little wee wee tool in that old tool belt. Huh? Huh? You got any room left in that tool belt, man? Being an accounting firm owner, that's just, that's just doing everything. Come on in, let's compare tool belts. Okay, so you started a weekly newsletter, or maybe you're just thinking about it, or a monthly newsletter, some sort of like ongoing thing going out to clients. And again, don't overthink this. It could literally just be a straight up bcc, big old copy paste, send these people an email. But eventually you ought to pick up an email marketing tool and everybody always asks, what one do I use? Not a big deal. Mailerlite convert kit. Start with just a basic one like, that will work just fine for you. And a big reason why I encourage you to just like start with a basic email marketing tool is the simple reason that one day you will accidentally put it in all those emails in the TO field instead of the BCC field. It happens, man. And when it does, it's not good. But as we're gonna talk about today, these tools actually unlock a whole bunch of other really interest stuff. As simple as seeing who opened the email, seeing who didn't see who clicked on something in the email and what they clicked on and what may make sense to, to follow up with. When you see that this person is like, oh, they were interested in this and this is where like very targeted Reaching out to people, even giving them a call or sending them a direct email becomes really, really compelling because we can now see the behaviors they take inside those emails. So we're going to run through scenarios where I think that makes a lot of sense and is not slimy cold email. And so to start off here, I want to, I want to kind of set the boundaries of the really bad versions of this, what good email marketing isn't, so that we can steer a million miles clear of this. And admittedly, a lot of folks don't do email marketing because they see these things we're going to talk about and they're like, well, I would never do that, or that it's risky because of this. And it's like, no, just steer clear of the bad version of this. So, so that we can baby step into a very basic version of the best aspects of email marketing. Examples of bad email marketing through the lens of an accounting firm. I would argue cold email. For 99% of accounting firms, cold email is not the move unless you get access to a super, super targeted list. So the one exception to the rule here, if I just work with beekeepers and I get a list of successful beekeepers, like, if it's very targeted and a very high quality list, yes, maybe it makes sense to send a cold email to these folks. But that's not the case for the vast majority of us. And cold email as we are now accustomed to it, it is like, you know, scraping tens of thousands of folks off of LinkedIn. They're just like so low context, where the things you're getting cold emails for generally are not even a thing that you would be interested in. It's like SEO and all these things that you're like, I don't even need that. We do get some more targeted stuff. Like when you go to a conference and everybody and their mom gets your email address. And so then all these brands are reaching out all at the same time going, hey, talk to you at the conference. And I'm like, no, you didn't. And like, here's why. You need X, Y, Z. And we're all just, we're all just annoyed by that at this point, right? Like, aren't we all just kind of burnt out by it? And so I think for most firms this is not the move unless you have some expertise here on how to do it. Well, this isn't the move for most of us. What I'm targeting is that person who's already super into what I'm doing reads all my emails Maybe clicks on some things. I want to know about that so, so that I can reach out to that person and be helpful to them. Like we're kind of, we're doing the opposite of cold email. Like these are piping hot emails. They're the folks who are already into what we're doing. Another example of bad email marketing is something that isn't for anyone in particular. Your emails need to be both good and two for a specific audience and for, you know, all of the fears that we have about working with a more specific type of client. The best argument for getting more specific is, is that your emails don't need to be as good, is that your marketing doesn't need to be top notch. The more specific you get, the lower the bar is for the quality of that next social media post because people are gonna be like, oh man, oh finally a tax pro or an accountant for beekeepers. Yes. And you could be a total mouth breather. They're just gonna be stoked to find somebody that's for them. But if you keep it general and you're not targeting anyone in particular, boy, it's gonna be really hard to write a meaningful email for no one in particular. Like, then you're up against the Tim Ferrisses of the world. And like all of these generalists, I'm not gonna top that. Not a chance. And I can tell you, coming from a guy that makes content for small accounting firm owners, I've had much more fun doing well in a smaller space than I think I would have had. Like trying really hard and floundering in a larger space. And every time you're at a social media post that's, you know, for no one in particular, this is kind of what you're up against. The same applies to your emails. So if you're putting an email newsletter out or sending marketing emails for nobody in particular, small business owners, that's not specific enough. In fact, I would push you further. Small business owners within a certain size, not specific enough. Small business owners that are cash basis within a certain size, like it's better than nothing. But man, there's a long, long, long ways to go down the path of specialization to where you're solving more rare pains that people will pay better for. Now these days you can run a cool, profitable firm that is not specialized like I did. I would argue my firm was a cool firm. People loved working there, we took good care of our clients and it was a general firm. But the fact that you can doesn't mean that's the best. Like Most calm version of a firm going down that path to specialization. That is more money for less work. And you're gen. You're genuinely a better advisor at that point because like you have a deep understanding of what their issues are rather than kind of collecting a little bit of anything and everything. Last what good email marketing is not why did I write it that way. What bad email marketing is is something that's going to get dropped into spam. And this a big spook kind of factor that folks have. In fact, oftentimes there's like never email marketing people online who will be like, as soon as you do that, you're just, your, your domain's going to get blacklisted and all of your emails that you ever send are going to go to junk mail. This can happen for sure if you're sending crap emails to people who don't want to read them. But that's not what we're doing here. There's a lot of like technical gatekeeping here around like people being like, oh, you got to have the super deep understanding of, of this and that. As somebody who's built an several email newsletter lists to decent size with no technical understanding, there's probably better ways to optimize it if I geeked on this stuff more. But like my North Star here is send good emails to people who actually want to read them. So I don't like buy email lists, I don't participate in sponsorships where at the end they give you a big long list of emails. I've sponsored a number of things and at the end they send you like, you know, 3,000 accountants email addresses. I don't put that stuff into my email list because those people never opted in and in all likelihood 80% of them probably don't want to read my newsletter. And every time somebody puts your newsletter into spam, that is a signal that makes it more likely for future deliveries to automatically go into people's junk and they never see them. So some odds and ends here. Back in 03, there was a law that was passed that said in every email your company name and address has to be there. You have to have visual unsubscribe links. You have to use a real from and reply to email address and you have to use a subject line that's actually representative of what is in the email. Any email marketing tool that you pick up, it will do this automatically. It will put your address and all that stuff in the email. And these are not things that are going to be problematic for reputable companies. They're more trying to catch the folks who are like just spamming folks and you don't have a way to opt out. A couple tips, just quick tips here. If a recipient adds you to their address book or their contacts, whatever that is, and the email platform that they use, this basically whitelists you so it will let your emails come through to them and there is no risk of it automatically getting checked into junk. So for example, when you send a welcome email, when somebody signs up, that's a good thing to ask them to do. Say, hey, if you're on Gmail, do this to add me to your contacts or Outlook or whatever it is. It's usually a couple of clicks and that's going to ensure that your emails will always get delivered. Sometimes the contents of an email can trigger spam detection algorithms, like using all caps exclamations text, like opting in and click below or order like that sort of text will make it more likely to get thrown into spam. And then last, what a lot of folks use is what's called a double opt in. When somebody you know on your website, for example, puts their email address into subscribe, it tells them to go out to their email and click confirm on an email that they just got. This does two things. It sends a positive signal because they actually engaged with something in one of the emails that you sent. But second, it ensures that the folks that are on the list are like the most motivated ones that just don't want to miss the next email. So if you're doing those things and we're not sending useless emails to like big lists of people that maybe didn't even opt in to begin with. Like, we're not abusing that. Like, you generally should not have to be too concerned about your whole, like email domain being blacklisted and everything just going to junk right this episode, it is sponsored in part by liveflow. Live Flow puts your client reporting on autopilot. Because you can sync any old report out of QuickBooks to Google Sheets or Excel. I say anything every report that I've ever tried to run from QuickBooks. You use live Flow to sync that report out to your favorite spreadsheet app. But then that's just where the fun begins. You can like move stuff around, like move the cells around and they'll continue syncing from the accounting system. You can use a different sheet and point to like the cells in the report so you can build your own, like, custom reporting suite that's actually being fed live data from QuickBooks. And it means whatever Reporting that you are running from for your clients. LifeFlow is gonna support it even if it is just like boring old balance sheet, boring old P and L, whatever. Sync those into specific sheets in a workbook, but then like build your own like KPI summary or aggregation of like you know, the most important things that you want your client to pay attention to. All of that inside of a single Excel workbook. Google sheets, whatever you want. And it means you're not subject to just the reports that QuickBooks will run. It means you can get people access to information without them having access to the QuickBooks file. See where I'm going with this? Lot of helpful things you can do with that. Just getting them access to like part of your QuickBooks data. Sync it out to a spreadsheet, just give them access to the spreadsheet. LifeFlow is the the peanut butter to your QuickBooks jelly. Ooh, and they even do consolidations now. Roll up a whole bunch of different companies with different charts of accounts handles it pretty well. Learn more about LifeFlow. Check out the link in the show notes. Today's episode sponsored in part by Ookoo have you ever been frustrated with the state of billing and practice management systems? How the features usually they're pretty light and obvious and honestly sometimes just like don't even do what you need it to do. So you gotta run this whole separate billing tool alongside your practice management system. Ookoo has gone super, super deep on billing, among other things. It's a full blown practice management system system. But whether you do hourly recurring, whatever types of work you do, Ookoo's got uku's got the flexibility you need to make the magic happen no matter what. And they're running a big fat sale right now. Use the link in the show notes. They got a 50% off discount campaign going until the end of June. Half up and 90 day money back guarantee. What do you got to lose? You don't like it? 90 days, they send a man to your house, it's going to give you that money back. Is that how it works? That might not be how it works. Listen, my favorite thing about UKU you may have seen I did a sponsored demo day for them. Uku spelled uku. If you haven't seen it, check that out on YouTube. My favorite thing and they never tell me to talk about this in the ad copy, but I always do anyways because I love it. They have maybe the best view I've seen for like planning out your week. You have all of your tasks and your tasks have due dates. Right. And we're all used to what that looks like. You know, a view of overdue tasks that's a mile long, but they have a view that is like entirely dedicated towards planning when you're gonna do your work. And so like with a view of the whole week, you can, you can organize what tasks you're gonna do, what day. And this is a day that's totally independent of the due date. Your teammates can do the same. So when Tina's out unexpectedly, you can see Tina's planning, you can see what she actually planned to do. Most of these systems just have a due date and that's it. But that's not really enough to like figure out when I'm going to do the work before the due date. Right. That's probably my favorite thing about Oku. Okay. You want to take advantage of that, that half off thing. Use the link in the show notes. It's pretty cool. Check it out. Okay. What good email marketing is, I got six examples here that I really like mining for targeted engagement. So when I'm using a email marketing app and I send out, let's just say it's my, my weekly accounting firm newsletter, it's got a few Q&As in there and it's got, you know, a little write up of like the main topic of the week, beekeeping weekly. When I send that out of an email marketing app, I can see all the people who have opened it, all the people who haven't. I can see the people who opened it in the first 60 minutes or the first five minutes, and the people who never opened it. But I can also see what they clicked on inside a given email and planting like links and areas of interest. And that sort of thing inside of an email is like an opportunity for signal. So let's say you want to start doing more cost segregation studies for clients. If you've sent eight newsletters and in two of those you linked something about cost segs, and for the hundred people you sent it to, there were three who clicked on the cost seg link twice. Let's follow up with those people. Why did they click on those two things? And this can literally be you just hammering out a personal email to that person. The beauty of like working on a small scale like we do is the solution here is usually just like reaching out and actually trying to build a human relationship. And because we don't have to have 10,000 clients to build a profitable firm, like that kind of low leverage thing actually goes a long ways with People like, we can get those folks into our firm, they're going to feel, they're going to be impressed because they're, like, almost being pursued in a way on a. In a totally not automated way. It's like, oh, this is an actual person that's trying to be helpful. And it's those signals which create great opportunities to, you know, either get people to become a client for the first time. Like, if this is your. If your little email newsletter is the way that you're first reaching people, kind of outside your client bubble, and you've sent 10 of these things and you see there's 20 people that have read every single one of them. Be like, you want to hop on a chat, like, call and just chat sometime? It looks like you're getting value out of this. I'd love to learn more about you, why you're reading this, and how I can keep making the newsletter even better. You're going to meet a person in the process, maybe even build a bit of a relationship with somebody who could ultimately become a client. Now, ideas for various things that we can put inside of newsletters that are, like, clickable, that can give us helpful signals that we could act on. Ebooks, white papers, infographics, like downloadable reports, checklists, templates, stuff that they can swipe, webinars like app recommendations. These are all things that we can put in our newsletter and then go back and see who engaged with these things. And if you notice any patterns there, take a moment to, like, follow up. Second thing I had here, finding your super readers. Guess the cat's already out of the bag on that one. Yeah. So basically, who are your most engaged readers? If there's any folks there who are not on the client list, even folks there who are on the client list. How can you be helpful to those people? You just hop on a call with them. If, you know, one of those super readers has their own newsletter or blog or podcast or something like that, obviously they're drinking the Kool Aid. Reach out to them and be like, hey, how can I be helpful to you? And what you're doing. It's maybe the best part of like, quote, unquote, marketing, which I know we're. We're all allergic to. Maybe the best part of this is that it's a welcome departure from everything in the email inbox and all of everything all day being so, like, clamorous client work and production and ROI focused. When you get back to marketing, it's a little bit more about just like, being human and trying to Be helpful and making connections for people. But if you're looking at that inbox through the lens of oh, these are just to dos coming in, that can be a really stressful, anxiety inducing thing rather than over on the marketing side, it's a little bit more just about like meeting cool new people that you enjoy chatting with. And if your specialization aligns with something you just enjoy doing, that can be a, that can actually be a ton of fun. So like being willing to take the time to meet people and get into their networks and just be helpful. That for me was always like a welcome departure from the ever looming eye of client deadlines. Number three, segmentation. As we discussed, an email that's for nobody in particular comes with a really high bar. It's got to be world class then if anybody's going to read it, as opposed to my silly little beekeeping newsletter where they're just happy to have someone writing for beekeepers, right? And the advice I'm giving them is if like we let out the cat out of the bag, probably a lot like the advice I would give anybody else. But it's framed through the lens of what they do, using their vernacular and all that. Now segmentation, if you have a more general email list, this can be a helpful way of like tagging the people in that email list. Are they beekeepers? Are they something else? Do they own an escort? Are they on Quickbooks? Are they on Xero? If you can enrich that email list with additional information, oftentimes you can capture that when they sign up. You don't want to force somebody through this big long intake form most of the time when they're signing up because sometimes that can be too much work to get them to commit to it. But the more you can segment the folks that are on that email list, the more you can target what you send out to just go to the people who really, really need it. So for example, during COVID relief there were different provisions available for folks who own an S Corp versus had a schedule C. And we took great care to segment our email list to send to those folks what was most relevant to them. We also had a dental segment and had like a whole series of specific to dentistry Covid release stuff. And had we not segmented those mailing lists, which is really just like tagging people, had we not done that, everybody like would have gotten these kind of general emails and we probably would have never sent the more targeted ones like for dentists and for very specific things. And oftentimes those are the most almost Always those are the most valuable emails, the ones that can be very, very specific to them. Number four, a great welcome email. I think we don't think about our welcome emails enough. Some things to be thinking about here. Ask them to add you on LinkedIn, like, how can I actually like take this relationship to another level as it were, and not just be, you know, an anonymous subscriber, but actually another person who you may have other connections with. Ask them to reply to the email. Just say like, curious, why did you sign up? And what, what would be like the very best subject for the next email that I could write? Like, what is that person struggling with? And you'll find that people are actually very likely to reply. And when they do, that's a really positive signal for email deliverability. If people are taking the time to reply to your email, it's never going to go in that person's junk again. And that's just generally a positive signal. Just don't forget when they get that welcome email, they are at like their peak level of interest in following you. And so what else could we capitalize on? When they're at that peak level of interest, maybe you even reward them with something that they didn't expect, like, hey, here's this awesome resource that you can go and download right now. Maybe there's a way you can weasel into their network. More and more email marketing tools are have like built in kind of referral systems where you can give them a link that they can send to their friends or their colleagues to sign up. And if you want you can build like a kind of a reward scheme around that or it's just, you know, credited back to them. Doesn't even necessarily need to be any rewards. You don't want to ask for too much in a welcome email, but something, something to think about. Number five, nurture campaigns or drip campaigns. So this is separate from like the, say you're running a weekly newsletter like every Wednesday or something like that. These campaigns are their own thing that don't run on any kind of specific calendar time schedule. Basically you set up a sequence of emails in the marketing tool to go out based on a certain trigger to go out like on a certain, you know, after X days the next one goes out, the next days the next one goes out. And so these are like automated email sequences that you can kick off based on certain things happening. So when somebody signs up to your email newsletter, for example, that may get them on the normal like weekly new stuff that's coming out. But maybe it makes sense to send them a sequence of like kind of your greatest hits. Like, you know, the best seven emails you've ever sent. You, like create a version of that that goes into this drip campaign so that if your weekly email goes out on Wednesday, maybe this sort of best of goes out each Sunday and they're getting that sequence of emails. Maybe it's a sequence of emails for a particular type of person where if they indicate at signup that they're an S Corp or beekeeper or something like that, it's like a whole other sequence that you've designed that goes out over time to that specific type of person. Cool thing here is you can build this sequence once and it works in your sleep. So every single time a person signs up or otherwise meets the criteria that someone needs to meet for this sequence to start, you build that thing once. Maybe it's like a, you know, a kind of roundup of all these different resources. Build that thing once and it's going to go out to anybody that meets those, those criteria. And then when you look at that like the results of that sequence, you could trigger further actions. So you could set any email in those sequence sequences to stop if they didn't read the previous one or if they're reading every single one. You can make the sequence go on longer and longer, give them more information. You can even like fork these sequences based on behaviors that they take, what sort of things they click on in the emails, whether they engage with something or not. You can have these like all these different forking paths that you take them down for this whole sequence. This episode is sponsored in part by Tech Guru. I'm in Florida right now at an accounting conference. And you know who else is? I think I probably spoiled it already. Tech Gurus here. They're here exhibiting at a conference, an IT company. You know why? Because they understand accountants, they value them. They go around hobnobbing at stuff like this, having conversations about, you know, computer things and whatever it is that IT companies talk about. But the main thing is that they are focused on us and our problems and the tools that we use and the best way to get that IT stuff handled so that we can focus on the important stuff, which is not it. Now, any old run of the mill IT shop, they're not going to understand your needs same way that Tech Guru does, right? You think about all the other accounting firms. Tech Guru is working with the best practices that they see and develop, working with those firms. And then your firm joins the the squad. You better believe you're Gonna benefit from a bunch of the stuff they've learned with working with other people. Right? Who are you using for it right now? Huh? Let me take a quick look out the window. Nope, I don't see them here. They're not here. Okay. That's why you should use Tech Guru. Cause they're here. And I think that about sums it up. Okay, Tech Guru link in the show notes. This episode is brought to you in part by Teamup, helping you recruit top Filipino accountants without any ongoing monthly fees. The difference between Teamup and all the other offshoring options, the Team up helps you hire staff directly. No middleman. You work directly with your new hire in the Philippines. Hire the person, not the company. Guys, gals, gang. Here's just a few reasons to hire directly. You have access to higher level talent. Makes sense. You have complete control over team culture and training. They keep 100% of what you pay them and it's a lot more affordable for you. So you can retain your team for the long term. Team up can source accountants with experience working at US or Australian firms familiar with tools like Xero, QBO and Dex. Also recruit specialist roles, team leaders, tax specialists, administrative assistants. Thought experiment. What if you had an executive assistant for the first time this tax season? Just. Just throwing it out there. What would they do? Start at that email video I did on the main channel recently. Get help with that stanky old inbox. I digress. Team up recruits these talented folks for a flat one time fee of 4,000 US American dollars. That's it. 4K one time. Somebody at Robert Half just did a spit take. Robert Half reference. We ever going to get Robert Half to sponsor this pot? Not anymore. And they can connect you with an affordable employer of record if you need help with payroll and compliance once you hire that person. Big fan of hiring in the Philippines. You know, I did a bunch of that. Check out the link in the description to learn more about Team Up. Now people will build wildly complicated things. Like for example, you have these, you know, hundred day email series where like you learn a thing in hundred days. And these are all built on these nurture campaigns and they're optimizing the heck out of them. Like what was the lowest performing email? What was the highest performing email? Adding more like branching logic when they go and take specific behaviors. We're probably not going to geek on this like to a totally wild degree inside of our accounting firm. But if you know, for example, it's something as simple as coming up on the annual renewal process, you want them to Know a number of things. Kick off this nurture campaign for a bunch of existing clients, right? If you're gearing up for busy season, maybe tax season, and you want to give those folks on your list who are not a client an extra push to consider becoming a client, maybe you do a campaign that only goes out to your most engaged people. That's a sequence of like three emails where they only get the next one if they engage with the previous one. And the last is like, you want to book a free call with me, let's just chat so I can learn more about you. And then you try to, you try to bring them on then. What I love about nurture campaigns is they work while you sleep. They don't require you to make them every single week. And your email list could just be a nurture campaign. Like you could do the write an email every week sort of thing, or you could bank a bunch of these and when somebody signs up, they just get put on that drip campaign and they get one a week or one every few days or something like that, and that's it. If you can make your emails evergreen so they're not super tied to timely things, in some ways that may actually be better to put them on like a sequence of emails like that because then you're actually like not requiring yourself to then write an email every single week if you don't want to or don't have the energy to those nurture campaigns. It's like one of the kind of biggest brain, largest lift things where you can actually build an entire business around just a killer nurture campaign. So if you want to go to the extreme with it, you absolutely could. I suspect, I suspect most of us within accounting firms, like we're probably doing a very, going to do a very basic version of this last number six upsells and cross sells. So as we were productizing our firm better and getting people into specific packages and more discreet like services, we can then segment our email lists for like active clients. Well, that's one segment is who's that an active client and who isn't. But even within the active clients, what package or what services they are on. Because in any given email you can put conditional blocks inside of the emails that are sent. So for example, if a recipient is not a client, I'm going to have a conditional block there about what it looks like to become a client and what the starting point is. If they're a client on service level bronze, I'm going to put a conditional block in there about the Benefits of some specific thing that's in service level silver. See where there's going. So like, you can cross sell additional services, you can upsell like the next tier of services. And it's. And like the wrong way to do it is to say, I see your silver. Here's why you should be gold. Like, that's not the right way to do it. The killer way to do it is if they're silver and they don't know that this stuff is being done conditionally. If they're silver, there's a block in there about, look how cool this report is that we do on annual tech reviews. And then somewhere in there it's like, yes, we do these for folks on the gold plan. If you're interested in the gold plan, click here. But the only people that get that are the ones that are on the silver plan. And that's like the next tier up, right? And so these could be standalone emails that go out, could be part of a nurture campaign, but could even just be part of your weekly regular old email where you've got this conditional block based on whether they're a client or not already and what service level they're at. What's that old adage that it's like 10 times more expensive to add a new client than to keep an existing one or something like that. Oftentimes we lose sight of just how much new revenue there is to be had within our existing client base. In fact, in my firm, over half of our annual growth year over year was within, like, existing clients. It wasn't new clients necessarily. And by default, we maybe, maybe only ever have these conversations once a year. If you actually talk with that person when they re engage, more likely they may just like see a proposal once per year and maybe there's other options on that proposal. But it's very rare that we're sitting down and talking about, like, what are all the different things that we do. And even rarer that we show off the cool things we're capable of doing, because that's, I don't know, like a hard thing for us to do and feel comfortable doing. Like, we're not good at shilling what we do. But in the context of an email, that can be more just like storytelling. Like, here's an example of where we did this thing that saved somebody a bunch of time or a bunch of money. And you share that in there because when people see it, there's going to be an element of FOMO that's like, oh man, look, that's I've got a lot in common with that person. I could benefit from that as well. And then that client that you already have is now, you know, paying you more money. We would do this selectively into the services that were most profitable for us. So like, I've shared the kind of the story around the cash deposit reconciliation kind of stuff that we did for dentists, and that was a big thing that we pushed for folks because it was a really high margin service for us. So that was more of a cross sell where we would try to remind people of how valuable and helpful that was for them by like telling stories of like, you know, how this is a source of fraud and how dentists waste their time doing this themselves when we can do it for them. So those emails become kind of like a new surface area for folks to discover what you do, remember that you exist, hear your voice, to keep your front of mind. I think where most folks at is probably they've got like a real basic either weekly or monthly newsletter or they're thinking about doing that for the first time. Maybe I don't want you to like, overthink this and think that the only way in is this big, complex version because that's, that's the biggest trap we fall into is we're thinking about, well, what is this going to look like 10 months from now? Or what is the right platform or this or that. And we like, we think about all these things that get in the way of us just starting. When that's how you learn is just starting. It's going to be bad. It's not always going to be great. Like that's the reality. But you can't be good at it until you've been willing to be bad at it. So I don't want to overcomplicate this to say that you absolutely have to do this if you are sending emails to clients. You don't, but it is an opportunity to learn more from every email that you send and do a little bit of courtship, you know, for the first time. You know how in high school there's usually a dance where the boys ask the girls and then another dance where the girls ask the boys. In accounting firms, it's pretty much always them asking us. And I've learned in general, like, there is just as many people who will say yes if you ask as there are who are going the other way. So, like, I think you can genuinely, like double the rate at which you take people in if you're like, man, you are a great fit for what we're trying to build. What would it take you to come work with us? What would it take to get you to come work with our firm? And I'm talking like clients, which is weird, like doing this outreach and like asking somebody to become a client or something like that. And maybe it doesn't need to be that direct and maybe it just needs to be an offer to be helpful or hop on a call to learn about them or something like that. But for all of the people this, in this next 12 months who will ask to become a client, I would argue there are just as many people, if not more, who if asked and if they got a warm email that looked smart and as though you understood what they do, they would be flattered and they'd be like yes, totally. That's I think what this helps to identify. You can see the people that are engaging with your stuff and it opens the door to making a connection, reaching out to them. If you've done much of this stuff, and again I'm not a big time email marketing geek and I probably going to trigger a bunch of bots that are now going to comment on this video. If you've kicked this stuff around much, if you got an email marketing app that you really like, any wisdom to share there, please drop in the comments. Cuz I think the vast majority of us have like a, a very entry level sort of expertise with this. That's all we got for today. Thanks for coming and hanging. See you tomorrow.