21 Ways that the Best Email Marketers in the World Get New Clients (Part 1)

We marketers are on a never ending quest to get our messages in front of prospects and to convince them to take an action. Once upon a time we could do this more leisurely (and more expensively) with branding strategies that required a combination of time and money to generate results. But today, it seems like we have just mere seconds and somewhere between 80 and 140 characters of text to do battle for new clients.

For CPA, consulting and other professional services firms, the front lines of this battle are always going to be referral marketing and relationship building. But for many firms, that’s simply not enough to meet their new business objectives. They need to turn to two other battlegrounds – search engine rankings where getting found first is critical, and e-mail marketing, where many marketers and partners aren’t keeping up to speed with the rapidly advancing sophistication and technologies of the battle of the inbox.

In the 2012 Email Marketing Benchmark Report: CPA Firms from BizActions, Gary Kravitz, Director, writes that “email continues to succeed as the most effective (and profitable) marketing tool for accounting firms of all sizes”.

So, we’ve looked at what the best minds in email marketing have to say when it comes to best practices, and over the next couple of posts, are going to present 21 tips, observations and insights that can help your CPA, consulting or professional service firm marketing program generate more leads and new business.

Here are the first 11:

• Always be building your database
• Perform regular de-duplication and cleansing of your database.

• Sending emails on Tuesday results in better open rates
• Sending emails between 8 a.m. and 12 p.m. results in greater success
• Don’t send emails on Fridays – it’s the worst day for email open rates.
• The most effective offer to include in an email is an invitation to a webinar.
• White papers are the second-most effective when it comes to generating responses
• Minimize the use of less-popular content in email offers like freebies, discounted services, limited time offers, and personal, text-based emails
• Conduct deliverability testing by checking content against major SPAM tools
• Test your emails for accurate mobile rendering
• Since 80% of all email users use Outlook, Gmail, AOL, Yahoo or Hotmail, make sure your email design renders correctly in all of these clients

Stay tuned for the next set of world class best email practices. … and get those e-blasts out on Tuesday before noon!

Sources for these killer tips include:

Pardot.com: “Survey Reveals Changing Role of Email marketing”

WPP.com: B2B Email Marketing Best Practice Guide

clickz.com: 8 B2B Email Marketing Tricks of the Trade

MarketingSherpa: Email Marketing Benchmark Report