The craziness of the tax season is finally over. You have a few stragglers who forgot the deadline or file extensions, but the bulk of your work for the year is complete. Now, it’s all about your client retention and referrals. If your clients only hear from you between January and April, they can forget about you. They can shop around. They can defect from your office in search of a better price.
It doesn’t have to be that way, however. From May to December, you can employ strategies that make you indispensable to your clients and encourage them to send you referrals. If you play your cards right, your business will grow yearly from your off-season marketing efforts.
Survey Clients After Tax Appointments
The weeks directly after you finalize a client’s tax paperwork is the perfect time to get feedback from your clients. The experience is still fresh in their minds, and the fact that you reach out to them to understand their client experience shows you value their opinion and business.
You can go about this in two different ways:
1. Automate the Process
You can automate the survey using your client engagement platform. That way, the surveys go out on time without fail, no matter what else is happening in the office. The questions need to apply to a wide range of clients unless you’ve found a profitable niche and can dial into a specific industry’s needs. Focus on the customer experience, what they liked about your service, and what they felt needed improvement. Not everyone will complete an automated survey, but when you’ve gotten the majority of your responses, you can look for trends and improve your service.
2. Personally Survey
You can approach each individual by phone or email. You may get more responses this way. A live person is harder to ignore than a form. It also takes time away from other activities, so you must decide if it’s worth your time according to your office priorities, staff availability, and off-season services workload. This method also allows you to ask follow-up questions if their response is vague or if you need more information on how to improve.
Send a Newsletter
Sending a monthly newsletter can provide value for your clients if you focus on their needs. They may or may not care about who in the office got promoted. They will care about industry news that affects their decisions and tax strategies.
Working within a niche can be helpful in this as you can set Google alerts for news related to your client’s industry. By scanning the news each morning, you can pull out relevant information to help your clients.
A newsletter is also good for providing reminders of upcoming deadlines, tips on what documentation they need to save, industry-specific deductions, and more.
Once you have the content, try to keep it to one page so they can scan it for what’s important to them and they don’t get overwhelmed. The last thing you want is to bog them down with information they don’t find relevant. They’ll tire of wasting time and unsubscribe from your website or spam your emails.
Use headlines, images, and teasers to grab their interest, and link the headline and image to an article on your blog. The benefit will be two-fold. You’ll increase traffic to your website, which will increase your ranking on search engines. You’ll also encourage the client to explore other articles while they’re on your site.
Once everything is set up, visually appealing, and linked to the proper articles, you can automate the dissemination of your newsletter using your client management software rather than wasting time entering individual email addresses.
Offer Tax Checkups
By offering quarterly or bi-annual strategy sessions, you can guide your clients when they make decisions that will affect their taxes. You become an indispensable member of the team if every time you get together, you provide value to the meetings. You also get the added revenue for ongoing services.
Research the client’s industry. Understand their business. Come prepared with suggestions that can make the client’s life easier or more cost-effective. Focus on the client experience. If they consistently see they are better off working with you throughout the year than doing it on their own, they will gladly pay extra to have you in their corner.
Remember the Important Stuff
To really wow your clients, get to know them. Make notes in the client information database software at every meeting and review them before every encounter. Make it personal. It makes shopping around less likely if you:
- Remember their business goals and tailor your discussions so they get closer to those goals.
- Remember their family’s names and any personal goals your client wants to achieve. Instead of just telling them how much money they will get back. Tell them they’re getting the money they need to accomplish a specific desire.
- If they mention past experiences with tax or other business professionals that put them off, note it and provide the opposite experience. Stand out as the business that went the extra mile.
- Invite them to seminars, business social events, and other activities that let you get to know them better.
The goal is to become the best business decision your client has ever made. You solve their problems and help them get ahead of the game, so they dominate in their industry.
