Email Marketing for Accounting Firms

But it's very important to understand that when somebody invites you into their email inbox, you want to treat it like a sacred consensual exchange. You don't want to abuse that.

You're listening to the Marketing for Accounting Firms podcast. Each episode we have conversations with firm owners and marketing experts about how to attract your ideal clients, foster trust, and build a marketing engine that works for an accounting firm. I'm your host, mat Banker. I'm the founder of Benchmark Growth Marketing. You can find more episodes and subscribe to our newsletter at marketingforaccountingfirms.com now here's the show. I'm joined today by Jocelyn Moore. Jocelyn, thanks for being on the show.

I'm glad to be here.

So, Jocelyn, why we're going to talk about email? Why should people care what you have to say about email? What are your. What's what give us some credibility here. What's your experience? Where do you come by your knowledge?

Well, the truth is, I have been in email marketing for over 16 years now, and as much as I can give you numbers tell you I've sent billions of emails from almost 100 different accounts. The big deal is that I have made pretty much every mistake you can make in email. So I have that, that real life experience of if you can break it in email. I have broken it and I have fixed it. So now I'm just a big nerd for trying to get it as good as I can be to get the best return.

Yeah, that's, I mean, that's, it's a great perspective. I've heard you learn a lot more from failure than you do from success. Because success might be luck, but failure, if you've done it wrong and then you figured out how to do it right, you know that you've like really figured it out. It's not just a coincidence.

Yes. And it's a pure love of it that comes from that. The thing that I find always brings me back to email marketing is that it's not a destination. There's. There's not a. Yes, this is perfect. I've got it. Exactly as it should be. It's always changing, always evolving. So it's a constant feedback loop with your customers and it's a beautiful, beautiful rhythm you can find to say, okay, let me test something new. That didn't work. Let's make some adjustments.

Yeah, well, let's start with kind of a big picture. So people say email marketing. Well, okay, let me start with this. This is a big question. Does email marketing Work.

That is a big question and a great question. I would say for me, email marketing is, it does work. And it is the only marketing channel that I consider. It belongs to you. You know, you have your email list, certainly you're using an email service provider, so you're at their mercy to a degree. But unless you, you know, do something egregious, something really terrible, you're always going to have access to your clients, to your customers to try to be there, not to surprise them necessarily, but you control how many times they hear from you, whereas everything else is relying on them coming to you or an algorithm showing you to them. So email marketing to me feels like something we can control. And by that I mean, of course, with marketing, having people be aware of you and aware of the problems you solve. So it's a great channel because I can control the frequency with which I'm in front of people. And I'm saying, hey, by the way, if you're having this problem, this is something I can solve for you. So it's a frequency and access question that can only be answered by email.

For me, yeah, I feel like my, my perspective has been the, like the number one, one of the number one assets that you can have as a business is a strong email list of prospects. And, and often it includes your clients as well. Especially if there's opportunity to like cross sell or upsel you, unless everybody just buys the same thing from you. But I know with, you know, we're talking to accounting firm owners, a lot of times there are different service levels or maybe they're offering payroll and accounting and not all of their clients are using both. And email gives you an ability to help promote that. So having an email list, like, super great. If I could just wish for something for all of my clients, it would be that they would have a really strong email list. The challenge is, is building that really strong email list, getting people to opt in to it or building it in some other way. And I think one of the most common questions I get from my clients is always at some point they ask, well, okay, so someone emailed me and said, hey, we've got this list of prospects that you could buy. Like, should I buy an email list and then email them? That's they're always. Because we all, we get those emails in our inboxes. What do you think? Should you buy an email list?

So I've worked with all kinds of email lists and there are three stages that I've seen them in where you have an email list that is Leads that you have no business emailing that you weren't the one who acquired. And that requires a very special technical and strategic setup. So generally I would not recommend those for the average person to engage in. It takes a specialized person to do that and do it correctly without blowing up your ability to send emails and blowing up your ability to get in an inbox, your ability to get in front of people and avoid spam complaints or ending up in the junk email folder. It's reliant on your deliverability scores and those can be harmed if you're emailing people who are not expecting to hear from you. So blanket statement, I would not buy email lists. I would not buy email list.

Like if you bought an email list to market to do you have risks as well? So you're relying on your email obviously for regular client communication. You have a risk now that your email, your normal everyday email ends up in the spam or the junk because they see your, your domain as unreliable, basically. Is that, is that the right.

A hundred percent. And right now we've got changes coming in the next 60 days for Gmail, Yahoo and unofficially Microsoft, where if you have regular complaints over time or complaints that spike above 0.3%, you're going to be marked as a spam sender anyways. So you want to make sure that you are emailing people who are expecting you to email them. Now, there are two ways to do that that are different levels of qualification for your lead. One way that we used to do in my old business was what we call co branding, where your name piggybacks somebody else who has permission to email. So if you go to a show or you release a special product and your name is attached to the main feature's name, you have a reasonable expectation that they'd want to hear from you or that you're not a surprise to them. So you can do that too. It's not as good as someone directly signing up for you, but it is an alternate way to build your list and certainly those you just want to deliver value right out of the gate. So if you're not 100% expected, just be 100% valuable.

Yeah, now we're both connected to the Storybrand community and I'll just putting my cards out on the table. I'm kind of a known skeptic for one of the tactics that they tend to recommend. And I'll give it a caveat though. But you know, one of the things when you start with email marketing from StoryBrand and from a lot of other People they say, you know, you gotta have like an ebook download on your website so that people opt in, you know, provide something of real value to build your list. Now what I've seen, at least with accounting firm clients, we've not, we've just not seen that be an effective way to get people to opt into your email list. The caveat is I think that there, there are some things that people can create that are so valuable that it does really do a good job of it. But the like 7 tax tips for 2024 is not going to do it this year. And I think the bigger piece of it is our buyer or Internet behavior has gotten to the point that if I see a pop up my brain immediately blocks out whatever it is and I just look for that little X button to get rid of it because it's more of an interruption. I'm not even paying attention to what's showing up anymore. And I think this is my own theory, but I think most people have adapted their Internet usage because every website has these pop ups on them. Now. This is kind of a long way of getting around to if you, if you shouldn't buy a list and like a co branded list might be okay, but it's not ideal. What do you, what do you know or what are you seeing in terms of effective ways to kind of build an email list for yourself?

It's not easy. I'm going to put that out first. It is a long game to play to build your email list but from that email list you can expect tremendous return. So I will tell you that it is worth the time to take to say what can I provide, what can I create that can't be accessed anywhere else. And for most people that is your own subject matter expertise. So something that you've seen that can solve an easy problem for somebody right away. And some of the most effective things that I've had for list building have been not necessarily a cheesy PDF download. Not to call this seven Tax Tips cheesy, but anything people can Google. Yeah if it's, if it's generally available with a Google search, you know, that's not speaking to you, to your personal brand, to why you are the person people should pick. So I've seen tremendous value in books that maybe give people something they can diy, something that can be solved quickly and easily because we are very instant gratification but also short gated content. So if you are able to put yourself out there with a short form video and then have the longer version, maybe have it be steps that somebody can go through to save, you know, X number of dollars, anything like that, that's really, really quick and punchy. But the people have to sign up to view that gives them an instant reward because they can watch it. You know, PDF downloads again as you mentioned, like unless you've got something really snappy, really easy and really valuable, they're not as effective anymore. But gated content and thing that is yours personally, very valuable.

This week's episode is sponsored by Benchmark Growth Marketing. Helping your accounting firm expand your niche with branding, positioning websites, SEO and marketing strategy. If you're an accounting firm looking to fix your marketing, benchmark is your go to solution. Learn more at marketingforaccountingfirms.com now back to the program. I've heard like quizzes and even webinars and things like that like can, can work pretty well. People like to like mystery something that they're going to discover. But like the thing about a quiz is you're discovering something about yourself. You're not just discovering information that you could Google. Right?

Yeah, exactly. Quizzes were, they pop in my head again and sometimes I hesitate because I think from I'm dating myself a little bit and my Internet habits a little bit, but they have kind of that BuzzFeed quality where it's like, you know, what kind of bread loaf am I? And you don't really necessarily want to have a quiz unless it has relevant, important value to that moment. Like, you know, take this quiz and I can bucket you with the right solution for where your business is right now. Like have it be something more than a snappy buzzfeed state flower.

No one, no one needs to know what Harry Potter house their accounting firm.

Exactly.

Right, exactly. But, but if you could give someone like, like benchmarking your, you know, your construction company compared to your, your peers or something like that, and you could, you could use a quiz or you could use again, you could, you could do that, you could deliver it as a webinar, as a PDF of some sort. But the idea is it's, it's a way for them to gain information about themselves, not just gain information which is really commoditized.

Yes, exactly. And it's, I mean, I think most consumers are savvy at this point that when they put their information into any Internet form, it's going to be used, it's going to be resold. So people are a little bit more sensitive. I find it more difficult to get the landing page, landing page form conversions that we used to 10, 15 years ago. And it's certainly not a bad thing. And I will say that if you're doing a quiz, if you're putting this effort into content, it gets paid back tremendously because your leads are going to be more qualified. They're going to be really interested in you and really interested in you as a brand. For example, right now I've helped people in health and wellness. If they're giving away a cookbook with free recipes, most people are going to be tire kickers. They're going to take the cookbook and just be gone. And you're going to have a like a really high unsubscribe rate at the end of that. If you had something that's personalized, that's you in informing people from your unique perspective, your unique experience, they're going to have a little bit more buy in with you as a person or as a firm. So I think you're going to get higher conversions down the road from your email list.

You know, I've even heard from some people that like selling, promoting your email list as the value is, is actually sometimes more effective than the like. A download to email list can sometimes feel like a bait and switch. But if you say, you know, if you're really putting time into producing regular valuable content, you don't need the download first necessarily. You can kind of sell the idea that hey, every week you're gonna get a really like practical information thing or and I mean I'm a big believer in niching down. And so for firms, the more, the more narrow their focus, even the narrow the focus of the email list that they're after like that they're putting out there, you can get a little bit better response to opting in because if people know it's a specific value instead of a general value, they're more likely to respond.

Agreed. And I, I'm bad sometimes for saying people don't want your newsletter, but if you're presenting something and you're just saying, you know, sign up for my newsletter, you and I are both in the story brand space. So we know sign up for my email list and every week I'm going to give you that you can take action with now that will deliver blank benefit like that is absolutely a way to promote and sell. It's a bit of a struggle because you don't know where to put that form or where to kind of generate these signups. But that's where pulling from any media presence you have as far as Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, you pull from Those to try to grow your email list.

Yeah. So you mentioned a little earlier that Gmail and Yahoo are making some changes. What is happening just in email in general right now? Talk us through some of these changes and why are they making these sorts of changes? What is the reasoning behind it?

It's challenging for people who manage email lists like I do, but it is for the greater good. What email service providers are trying to do right now is make your inbox a little bit more guarded, a little bit more gated and protected from spam with bulk senders. So they're pretty much formalizing rules that we've already tried to implement over the past few years. And there's three really big ones. The first one is anyone sending email in any great quantity. So depending on your email list, if you're a business and you're just sending to maybe your your best clients and you're only sending out a couple hundred emails, this may not apply yet. I'd recommend doing it just to have best practices. But if you do what we call authenticating your email. So there are three ways that you tell the boxes that you're sending email to that you are who you say you are, that you're not just a spam bulk emailer that's hijacked somebody else's domain. So spf, dkim, and dmarc. And those are just three fancy ways of saying, I've gone through the steps, I've changed my DNS records, added some notes, and I am who I say I am. The second one is monitoring your complaint rate. So depending on how you've gotten your leads and what kind of content you're sending, you are going to have a certain percentage of people who complain. It just happens. And it's natural, it's normal, and it's good because they're taking themselves off your list. If you have a complaint spike, no problem. But if over time you're consistently skirting like a 0.3% level, they're gonna shut you down. So those two are the big ones. And then of course, the third one is just making sure that you give people an easy way to get off your list. So what we call your unsubscribe button, we want to implement one click unsubscribe. And you never want to mask it and you never want to make it hard for people to unsubscribe. They should never have to log in to remove them themselves from your email list.

I this is a little off topic, but we've been in our own, in our Design world. We've been focusing a lot on ADA like accessibility for websites and things and, and one of the big ones that's really easy to test but is very obvious whenever you do any reading on, you know, getting your site compliant has to do with contrast ratios and what has made me so like you can't use, can't use like dark text on a, on a semi dark background and there's specific colors that don't do well for contrast. So people with colorblindness or other, you know, visual impairments, it can be really difficult. And then I open up my email and I scroll to the bottom of this, you know, email list by like Delta Airlines or some, you know, massive billion dollar company. And I'm looking and it's in like six point font and it's like a light gray against the like the dark gray background of the footer. And it's almost impossible to unsubscribe button to this. And but the thing that makes me like obviously they're doing it because they don't want people to unsubscribe. Ethically it's not great practice, but legally it makes me wonder like why don't they, why don't some of these lawyers go after these companies who make, who make ADA inaccessible. Email market. Yeah, it's my own little soapbox, I guess.

No, I'm with you. And it's funny you mentioned an airline because if somebody asks you to stop sending them email, you'd have about 10 days to comply with that unsubscribe, but now they want you to do it in about 48 hours. And the funny thing is is a lot of really large companies and a large airline that shall remain nameless. I've tried to unsubscribe from them multiple times and I've gotten to the point where I'm like, I need to talk to your people because you are right now not in compliance with email marketing. So you know, again, if you're sending fewer than 5,000 emails, these aren't critical. But it's very important to understand that when somebody invites you into their email inbox, you want to treat it like a sacred consensual exchange. You don't want to abuse that. If you tell people, hey, I'm going to be sending you monthly tips that will change your business. Don't suddenly get some marketing person to talk you into an aggressive 10 day sales funnel that, you know, pushes scarcity and countdown timers and all these terrible things because you haven't set people up for that. Kind of exchange with you. And when they ask to not be there anymore, honor it as soon as possible.

Yeah. So you mentioned this 5,000 emails number. Is that 5,000 emails in one send or is it like per month or how do they determine that?

So when they talk about 5,000 emails, it would be 5,000 recipients at one time. So those are kind of your really basic bulk sender levels. Most of the email lists I work with are 20,000 or more generally closer to 50 or 70,000. So big businesses will have to comply with this. But you want to be sure, even if you are only sending to a hundred people, that you take these steps to have best practices. Because the one thing I will say, if you have one complaint and you're only sending 100 emails, that is a higher complaint percentage than somebody who has three complaints who sent 70,000. So you still want to be aware of these so you don't end up going to junk.

I feel like email marketing is one of those areas where there's a real intersection between what people like or don't like and what works. Right. So this is a conversation I often have with my clients where they're like, they hate getting so many emails. We all feel like our email. I just went through a whole, like, purge of getting myself off all these email lists.

Black Friday.

Totally understand. Yeah, I totally understand that feeling of like, I don't like getting so many emails. Why would I want to send emails to my prospects and clients as well? Do you have any advice for either, like, best practices or ways to do it that I guess makes you as the sender, feel good about what you're sending and like, you know, leans into that is effective sort of range of things, right?

Yes. So understanding how people got there and being able to take your list and break it down into smaller lists, what we call segments. So I refer to it as smart segmentation. How did these people get here? What was the original interaction? And then I base my follow up either nurturing them, just trying to stay present and relevant, or my sales funnel will be based on why they got there. So that's a good way to say, okay, somebody came in because they made a purchase for me one time and I want to upsell them. So my main goal may be I want to stay relevant and in front of them for maybe once a week so they always remember who I am. So if they have another question, they're going to think of me first. The other path is if somebody came in getting something free and you want to start to make them Aware that they have a lot of problems that you can fix that might have more frequency behind it. A great example is even though I might complain that Wayfair sends me dozens of emails, I know one day I need a rug for my front room. So I stay on Wayfair's email list. I don't open the emails, I don't engage with them, but I stay, stay on because I know eventually I'm going to need them and they're going to be there and they might have a sale that I'm going to require. So, yeah, it's really smart segmentation and understanding the sales cycle that goes along with your product. So in the case of accounting, what are the peak moments? What are the peak transitions in someone's journey where they might need me and being able to show up for people to either upsell them or nudge them over the line to hire you?

Yeah, there's obviously there's a few times a year when accountants are really emailing their clients a lot. I know, I hear from, from tax, Twitter and from accountants that actually probably their frustration with email is, is not that their emails aren't getting delivered, is that they're not being responded to when their clients have like need to send them, you know, files and documents and all that. But you know, another time that is not in like the tax or busy season, like price increases are pretty common being. I think being strategic around these, these points when you have to communicate with your client base, but you want to do more than just communicate, hey, sorry, your price is going up. I view that as an ideal, like upsell opportunity. If you're communicating price increases, you may want to talk about how the different tiers that you have, they get more value if they move up a tier or, you know, there's other services that you could offer, so you want to use that. What if you have an email list, it's like good 2000 emails on it, but you haven't been emailing it for like two years or it's just kind of built on its own for some reason. You don't really. I've seen a lot of clients who have, who have kind of dormant email lists because someone said build a list, but they haven't been doing anything with it. What would be some of the things that you might recommend to do? Are there precautions you have to take, like how would you reactivate or start emailing a list again?

So those are great questions. That's absolutely one thing that comes up quite a bit in business because emails data is A commodity. And people hate to let go of an email list because they're like, well, I haven't emailed it in two or three years. There are two really big things to keep in mind. The first one is that you're going to have to gently start sending to them. There are some technical setups. You know your send domain. If you Suddenly go from five emails a day to 2,000. There are some inboxes, Verizon based ones are a great example. Yahoo, AT&T. If you suddenly spike volume on your domain, they're going to stop your email for a second. They're going to say, wait, this is suspicious because all of a sudden this guy started sending 2000. So you do need to do it gradually sort of back into it. The second thing to consider is what we like to call like a confirmation or reconfirmation and say, hey, I have this great thing again, always being value forward, building that reciprocity and offering an initial benefit. I've got a great thing for you. I know this is coming out of, you know, not having spoken to you for a while, but if you'd like this and other things like this, click here to continue being on the list. Now you will lose a significant portion of your list asking them to reconfirm being there. But especially with Gmail sunsetting old accounts starting in December, anyone inactive on Gmail for more than two years, they've closed those accounts down. If you send to people who aren't opening or who bounce, it affects your deliverability and it ruins your deliverable reputation. So you want to do it gradually, in small bits, maybe 100 people the first day, 500 the next day. Provide tremendous value and maybe avoid sending Gmail addresses you haven't emailed in the last two years.

So you would, you would probably recommend like affirmative click to continue rather than like big button click to unsubscribe.

Yes. Yeah.

And one of the things we've often talked about, like with our clients is you set up like a three email sequence. So the first one might be like, hey, you're on our list, like we're gonna send you something here, but we're starting to move in this direction. Something's coming. And this is, I'm thinking just strategically in my brain right now, what I'd almost want to do is send them that kind of warning. But say, hey, we are. We've got this new great thing for you. We haven't been emailing this list for a while. We only want people who really want this to be here. Click Click to continue. But you're still gating that really good thing behind the next email that's being delivered. Right. And so then you deliver the really good thing as like email number two. And then email number three might be the, either the start of a, like a soft sales funnel or like a sales letter. Basically something that's a little more educating around. Here's the services we, we provide. And so that's kind of a slow warm up. You're not trying to, you know, day one email and say, hey, hire us for this email, this dormant email list. Now you need, now that you're on it, you gotta, you gotta schedule a call with our salesperson.

Right, Exactly. And that's, that's a perfect example of a, what you might call a re engagement funnel. So you're trying to get people on board to deliver great value, to build reciprocity, but also to set expectations. And anytime you can have people click, reply to or engage with that first email is going to be huge for your deliverability as well. Because most mailbox providers, Gmail especially, they look for your first email in a while from that domain over your specific IP to have somebody open it, have somebody click, have somebody reply because that tells them that somebody signals to them, hey, this person is expecting this business to email them. So anything you can do there that does, as you say, like have a gated content maybe that they have to click through that gets that recognition from the mailbox provider. So within your first email, you should always have something they have to click or engage with. Surveys. Tell me your favorite 80s movie, like anything like that to get people to pay attention to you. Will you have unsubscribes? Absolutely. Is that a good thing? Absolutely. Negative news. And email is actually good news because it tells you what you're doing right? And it tells you that the people who stick around are built in with some kind of trust and some sort of recognition for your brand, which means revenue down the road.

All right, I have two last questions for you about email. Are there cases when a business should have a separate domain that they're using for email and like what, what are those, what are those situations that you would, you wouldn't want to email from your main domain? Or are all of them like scammy black hat, like.

Not at all. Not at all. Actually, I had this really amazing webinar I went on from validity and they had the VP of product development from Yahoo was on there and he was great. And he said that they actually prefer that you have separate sending domains for your transactional emails, which is, you know, hey, you bought this for me. Here's your receipt and your marketing emails. So it might just be, you know, support.yourdomainname.com is where you send all your receipts from and then your marketing, your newsletter. Anything like that could be mail.domain.com and those subdomains to your root domain are very important because those reputations are so separate. You know, I never open a receipt email unless I need it. So it's going to have really different behavior than my newsletter metrics and it's actually beneficial long term to keep those separate. If you're doing any cold outreach or any sort of possible high complaint emails, I always recommend a separate domain. Not because it's black hat, but because it allows you to isolate performance and reputation. Especially because it's so easy to have a high complaint or high unsubscribe rate ruin your deliverability.

Sure. A lot of, so a lot of accounting firms obviously have their client list and they're sending important information and, and that should be a list that they don't and can't opt out of. And I think most accounting firms are usually they're sending those emails through like a practice management software rather than like a marketing email software. Right. So you're sending it through a different program, but that, that could be on one domain. Maybe your main domain is for your client communication and then you have a separate domain that is your marketing email list so that you're, you're sending over there. And then you mentioned the cold outreach, which was my other question. So for firms that are doing outbound sales, calling, appointment setting, telemarketing, any of that, that would be another case where you'd want to probably have a separate, a separate domain. Is there anything else with when it comes to cold outreach that is either going to help improve performance or that you shouldn't be thinking about when you're doing that?

Most of it involves finding a way to which I at this point have said many times, but to deliver value and tell people what the benefit is and to be really value forward, to give people a reason to pay attention to you by giving them something with no strings attached. So allowing them access to a high value piece of content that they can DIY and then having them come to you if they want a done with you or done for your solution. So anything that builds that reciprocity is really good when you're doing cold outreach. I am not a fan of cold outreach because it is a challenge. I know it's A numbers game. And it's very time consuming and very demanding. But I know for a lot of businesses that's the only way to really start building your contacts and get leads. Doing it slowly if you are relying on email for it because you don't want to do too many at once. And the last thing is to make sure that the send domain that you're sending from is either a subdomain of your root domain or it's valid and linked to you. So just for example, I know that Gmail, Yahoo and Microsoft unofficially are going to make sure that your reverse DNS records match you. So. And the information has to be public as well, so you want to make sure that they're legitimate. Otherwise you'll be spending all this time to craft this outbound cold outreach and no one's going to see it because it's going to go to spam.

Yeah. So use a separate domain. A sub domain would be preferable. Subdomain, deliver, deliver value. And then you mentioned go, go slow. Just as in like don't mass email all in one day. Exactly. Drip out the number of new emails that you're, that you're sending. 5,000 was like the 1 number. So you got to. If your list is bigger than 5,000 for mass email, that's, that's an indicator to say you should pay attention to that and make sure that you're being careful. Are there any other, like, threshold? So like with cold outreach, are you trying to stay under, I don't know, 500 a day or is there, is there any recommendation around that?

Well, I'm a fan of starting small because as I said in the beginning, email provides you this beautiful feedback loop. So if I have an email that I want to write and I have a list of maybe two or three thousand people that some really wonderful VA got for me and I want to send them, I can say, you know what, I'm going to test this to 500 of these people, see how effective it is, and then come back and make changes. So small is good. Don't ever consider an email finished. Always be looking for signals that, okay, my unsubscribe rate was over 1%, so I must have done something to trigger that because we want to keep under 1%. My bounce rate was higher than 2%. If your bounce rate is higher than 2%, then something's wrong with the emails that you've got, generally speaking. Or the mailbox providers see you as spam or they see you as possibly a phishing message, which means your content Needs adjusted. So there's all these little data points you can take back and say, all right, now I've got it, I can refine it, and we're going to move it down the assembly line to the next 500 people.

There's a fuzzy line between sales and marketing. I generally think of marketing as when it comes to email. I think of marketing as, as mass emails, like one to many. We're building a list, we're communicating to lots of people. But I know folks in sales, you know, rely a lot on direct outreach, email, LinkedIn, DMs, you know, all these things. And I would say if you, if you want to know what not to do, I'm sure you can just go through your own inbox right now and see a whole lot of them. This kind of goes back to this idea where, you know, you know, email, email works. I even believe cold outreach works. I got a direct mail cold outreach last year that was pretty, that was pretty good. And I ended up scheduling a call with the person. So, you know, this, this cold outreach stuff can work, but there's so many ways to do it poorly. And I think one of the things people often don't think about is there's also, with email, some dangers and risks of. It's not just like doing it poorly will mean you don't get the results you hope for. It's that there could be some other issues that you create for yourself if you're not being thoughtful about the way that you approach it.

Agreed. There are so many, as I mentioned, mistakes I've made over the years. And even when you are trying to be careful and trying to be a legitimate bulk sender, you will hit some of these sort of potholes along the way and be like, whoops, I need to fix that. So being prepared to look for the signals that something is wrong and mapping out the, okay, if, if this doesn't work, what can I change? What can I do? And doing it thoughtfully and remembering that it's a cycle of consent, you know, you want people to know, why should I listen to you? What benefit is there for me? And communicate that as clearly and as early and as often as possible. So email lets you do that because you can control the frequency better than you can fighting any algorithm.

Yeah, I mean, as we talk, the, the thing that just keeps coming into my head is so much of the, like, the problem with email, all the things that we hate about getting emails could be solved by writing better content. Like, it's not really an issue issue. As much as it is. Like, instead of, instead of sending cold emails to try to like book sales calls, be more generous. Like, be thoughtful about what you send that that is helpful and needed for your. That particular person or, or that market that's really beneficial to them whether or not they hire you like that. I think that's part of the key. And with your mass emails as well, like, you don't need to send everybody on your list, you know, a Happy Christmas email just for the sake of showing up in their inbox. Right. You can send something that's thoughtful and, and great. And are there any, are there any email lists that you just love as far as like, just you. You're excited to be on their list? I know I have a couple.

Oh my goodness. That is a great question. I am on Page Worthy's fellow story brand.

Yeah.

Those emails, they are expected. They are relevant and they provide value. And so those would be the thing that you always want to, to be able to hit for your people on your list. And you know, you know better than anybody why they showed up. So you'll know better than anybody how to deliver on those three points.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, for those who are listening, Paige Worthy is a. She's a copywriter. She does have a great email list. Her emails are always a ton of fun. If you're looking for inspiration of how to. Now, she's a great writer. No offense to all of you accounting firm owners out there, but I don't know, I'm not, I'm not as good a writer as she is. Also, she has literally the perfect name for being a writer.

Really does.

But yeah, sometimes we just need examples of people who are doing it well to know that it is possible. Right. And we can move ourselves in. In that direction. So find, find a couple email lists that you do want to be on. If you are in an accounting firm and you're doing email marketing, subscribe to some lists to find out what you think is. Is good and bad. Right. Like you need to be aware of what's happening out there. And there are, there are, there are some people who are doing it well. There are ways to do it well, I believe. And if we're not aware of the right. The good ways to do it is probably because we're not on the right lists yet. So unsubscribe from all the bad ones and.

Yes.

And find yourself a couple that you can use as inspiration.

Exactly. Exactly.

Well, great advice, Jocelyn. Thank you for being on here. If people wanted to connect with you or they were having, especially if you're having trouble. If you're an accounting firm, you're having trouble with deliverability around your emails or you have lots of concerns on these different things. Jocelyn is very smart about these things. Where can they find you and what would be the right way to connect?

The best place right now is actually to find me on LinkedIn. So Jocelyn Moore and my company is Atypical Marketing. The A is eh because I am Canadian and if you want to drop me a direct line via email, it is jocelyn atypicalmarketing.com and I am happy to help with any deliverability, any questions you might have on the technical points or if you're just a little bit concerned and maybe terrified to click send on an email, I'm happy to take a look and give you that confidence to do so.

And if you're wondering if you should buy an email list, you can reach out to Jocelyn and she'll probably tell.

You no, I will, I will very much tell you no, don't do it. Terrible idea.

So, all right, well, I think we'll leave it there. Thank you for being on the show. This is a ton of value. I know our audience is going to get a lot out of this. Out of this. Thanks, Justin.

It was my pleasure. Thank you.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Marketing for Accounting Firms podcast. If you liked this conversation and found it valuable, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It's really good for the algorithm and it helps other firm owners find this show. You can subscribe to our weekly Marketing for Accounting firms newsletter@marketingforaccountingfirms.com and you can connect with me, Matt Banker, on LinkedIn or Twitter. We hope you tune in next time for another episode of Marketing for Accounting Firm.