SMS Marketing for Tax Professionals and Accountants

SMS marketing and business texting for tax professionals and accounting firms create more opportunities to attract customers in a crowded market. Additionally, SMS business texting significantly enhances the customer’s experience, which aids in customer retention and loyalty.

Tax preparation is generally a seasonal stream of income for tax business owners with a few exceptions, such as certified public accountants (CPA), who work with clients year-round. 

Therefore, locating and converting potential clients is essential for successful growth as a business.

What is SMS marketing?

SMS marketing is a marketing strategy that utilizes and harnesses the power of mobile texting to communicate with customers and clients. SMS is an acronym for Short Message Service and is the universal texting format worldwide. 

Since its invention and application in the early 1990s, many advancements and innovations have occurred with mobile texting. 

Today we enjoy the robust capabilities of SMS, Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS), Rich Communication Service (RCS), and data-based messaging such as iMessage on iOS devices, or social media messaging services such as Facebook Messenger, Instagram Messenger, and Telegram. 

SMS marketing for tax professionals allows you to promote your tax preparation business by sending text messages to current and new clients and prospects. 

Tax professionals and CPAs can also use it to stay in contact with tax clients throughout the year and provide relevant transactional information, such as the status of their tax returns. 

Why use SMS marketing?

There are countless mediums available to you as a small tax preparation business to market to prospective clients, including email, television ads, newspaper ads, magazine ads, door hangers, and sponsoring local events. 

However, none of these options have the success rate or conversion power found with an SMS marketing strategy. 

As a tax professional or CPA, you appreciate the value of numbers and statistics. Here are some numbers and statistics related to SMS marketing that may pique your interest.

Firstly, approximately 98% of people who receive an SMS marketing business text message will open it within 90 seconds. Of that 98%, nearly 50% will engage with the text. 

Statistically, if a link directs them to your eCommerce site, half of everyone you send an SMS marketing message to will click that link and visit your website. 

Compare that to email marketing, and the advantages of SMS marketing are superior. Emails are only opened by 20% of people, and less than 10% of that 20% will engage with the email. As you can see, these statistics are dramatically different. 

Marketing to potential clients is only the first step. The intended goal is to convert prospects into customers and clients. There is no better way to do that statistically than through SMS marketing and business texting.

Aside from open rates and engagements, SMS marketing and business texting capitalize on our society’s addiction to mobile phones. 

In a recent survey, over 40% of respondents stated their mobile phone was their most valuable possession, 83% felt anxiety leaving their phone at home or the office, and over 50% panicked when their battery went below 20%.

The picture these responses and statistics paint is clear — SMS marketing and business texting are guaranteed to outperform all other forms of marketing in nearly every category, thanks mainly to our fascination and addiction to mobile phones.

How can tax professionals and accountants use SMS marketing? 

Now that the benefits of SMS marketing and business texting are clear, let’s look at some of the ways tax professionals and accountants can use SMS marketing to grow their tax preparation business and amplify their marketing strategy. 

Deadline reminders

Transactional text messages are less about promoting a product or service and more about providing essential and relevant information, such as deadline reminders. 

Deadline reminders are essential regarding tax preparation and income taxes because the government doesn’t like to wait for taxes or tax returns. 

Drip campaigns are one tool on the TextSanity platform that can send these important deadline reminders to potential and existing clients in mass texting. 

Setting up Drip campaigns is simple, just like everything else on our platform. Simply select your targeting audience, set the rhythm and timing of your text messages, then schedule the campaign. It’s that easy.

Additionally, drip campaigns can remind clients about upcoming appointments or materials still needed to finalize their tax preparation. These transactional text messages benefit your clients and enhance the customer experience. 

Text promotions

Sending promotions via SMS marketing and business texting are guaranteed to produce better results than any other method in your marketing strategy. Successful promotions require engagement, and as we’ve already seen, no marketing strategy garners engagement like SMS texting. 

Small businesses and tax professionals have a lot of competition, especially from larger CPA and tax preparation businesses. 

When choosing a tax professional to prepare their income taxes, customers have dozens of options in their hometowns. Therefore, building client relationships and converting prospects is essential for growth and success.

What’s more, harnessing the power of SMS marketing leads to a treasure trove of customer data collection. This data can then be used to categorize customers into defined categories that we call audiences. 

Through tags, you can place customers of similar characteristics into audiences to which mass text messages can be sent without selecting each recipient individually.

For instance, you may have tags that differentiate prospective clients from existing clients. Having these two separate audiences can tailor your marketing messages based on which group you are sending promotions to. 

The benefit of having the ability to customize your marketing based on the desired target audience can’t be understated.

Helpful tax tips

Let’s face it; most people hate taxes. They hate filing taxes, preparing taxes, and, above all, paying taxes. As a result, customers appreciate any helpful tax tips you can give them to simplify their tax planning and give the IRS the least amount of money possible. 

Anything from tax prep to tax law information can increase customer engagement in your target market and help your business grow.

Incorporating helpful tax tips into your marketing tactics and overall marketing plan improves client relationships and helps you stand out among tax professionals. Our keyword campaigns are a great way to accomplish this with the TextSanity platform. 

Keyword campaigns encourage engagement and are a great tool in your overall digital marketing strategy. A successful marketing campaign incorporates your digital and physical touchpoints, such as your social media accounts, eCommerce site, and physical office location. 

With keyword campaigns, you can get engagement at all of these touchpoints throughout the customer journey and amplify your customer retention potential. 

Confirmation details

Confirmation details are another example of transactional text messages. SMS marketing and business texting shouldn’t be restricted to just promotional messages. Transactional text messages serve just as good a purpose as promotional ones. 

Utilizing the TextSanity platform allows you to schedule and automate transactional text messages, such as confirming details relating to a client’s tax returns or tax preparation. 

Providing confirmation information related to the IRS accepting their returns, the status of any tax refunds, or the receipt of tax payments gives your customers relevant and vital information in a streamlined format. 

What are other ways tax professionals can use SMS marketing? 

We’ve only scratched the surface of how your tax preparation small business can harness the enormous potential of SMS marketing to grow your customer lists, strengthen existing client relationships, and take your tax practice to the next level. 

For instance, SMS marketing can be used to send out announcements to your various audiences about events unrelated to tax preparation and tax season. 

At the end of the day, you are more than what you do. Demonstrating that to your clients and prospects through fundraisers for local non-profits, sponsoring local youth teams, or holding prize raffles are great ways to garner interest in your tax firm without taxes being involved. 

While these aren’t traditional marketing materials, they can help generate a positive image for your business, increasing your referrals and new customers.

There’s no better way to promote these fundraisers or non-tax-related events than with SMS marketing and business texting. Showing the human side of your small business builds trust between you, your clients, and the community.

The bottom line

SMS marketing and business texting offer a significant return on investment (ROI) for your marketing strategy. Incorporating SMS texting into your digital marketing strategy can help grow your business and build brand loyalty. 

We are passionate and in love with texting here at TextSanity, and we are on a mission to make harnessing its power simple and affordable. We have many tools and resources designed to automate and simplify your marketing efforts through SMS business texting.

Contact us today and connect with our team to discover and learn more about what we can offer your tax preparation business for the upcoming tax season.