Inside accounting firms, marketing looks different now. Word-of-mouth, yearly brochures, and yearly tax season emails aren’t enough to get the job done now. Firms are making efforts to expand, win over better clients, and appear in the places their audience spends time: online. That’s when things start to become confusing. The programs employed by many firms cannot deal with this type of project. They are often not detailed enough or don’t represent how accounting teams really think and function.
If you’ve tried to use spreadsheets, a newsletter system, and a CRM not connected to your billing, you know how much of a hassle it can be. Most of your time is spent handling manual jobs, moving data around, and wondering if the right people got the message. It takes time without usually providing useful results. A better approach is to develop web app specifically for accounting marketing. But an app that is built to meet the needs of your clients, knows when you’re busy, and follows all your compliance standards.
Why Accounting Firms Need Custom Marketing Tools
Most of the marketing tools currently available are designed for use by businesses in general. They are designed for businesses in retail, SaaS, or media, so accounting firms can’t use them. That isn’t good. Due to the fact that accounting firms operate differently, follow unique rules, and serve various clients, they must handle their work differently.
Keep in mind how quickly you respond and how you do so. Clients want you to be prompt, accurate, and professional, not to keep shoving sales messages their way. It takes more time to close a sale. It’s common for your prospects to need patience and trust in you before they start interacting. You could work in advisory, tax, or audit, and find that your services overlap, so you need software that allows for this without making things more difficult.
That is why most ready-made solutions end up failing. They’re not designed to fit into your work routine. They don’t integrate properly with your practice management system. And they won’t allow you to create the client relationships you want.
Here’s where custom web apps can help:
- Build a connection between marketing information and usage of services, billing, and profiles of clients.
- Deliver your messages when it’s around tax collection or when audits are happening.
- Group your contacts by their service tier, their area of business, or what they have done before.
- Keep an eye on how many people open your emails, click your links, and convert into actual customers.
- Process compliance tasks and review the approval process.
- Allow teams to work together without getting in each other’s way.
- Organize everything together: content, lists, schedules, and reports.
Must-Have Features in a Web App for Accounting Marketing
Smart Client Segmentation
Not all your clients are the same. Bookkeeping for some will be a monthly task, while it is only required for others during tax time. An excellent app gives you the ability to group your customers by what they buy, how big their business is, what type of industry they are in, or their payment history. As a result, you don’t keep sending the same message to everyone. You are giving the right messages to the right people when they need them.
Campaign Scheduling and Automation
Advertising campaigns close to deadlines are very important. You should arrange ahead of time to send reminders about tax deadlines, inform customers of changes to the rules, and advertise any seasonal deals. You can’t scale up your newsletters using manual sending. The app should be set up the first time, and then work automatically. Anyone who downloads a tax checklist should receive information about what to do next right away.
Real-Time Reports That Matter
While clicks and open rates are useful, they don’t represent the whole picture. Your app ought to demonstrate the things that lead to leads or help clients stay interested. You need dashboards that link your email campaigns to what clients do, such as making a booking, checking a file, or registering for something. That’s the information that allows you to boost your following campaigns.
Seamless Integration With Your Tools
You currently rely on Xero, QuickBooks, or Jetpack Workflow to help your business. Your web app should access client info from there, so you don’t have to type it twice. As a result, the lists stay current and the messages are tailored to what clients are buying or using.
Built-In Compliance and Review Flows
Accountants have to be very careful with their email messages. Errors can bring about problems in the law or cause people to lose faith in you. The solution needs to offer the ability to review, approve, and properly track each content version. For this reason, nothing can be released until it is approved, protecting your firm from unnecessary risks.
Design Principles for an Effective Marketing Web App
After finishing the features, you have to ensure your web app is user-friendly. Most of the time, this part doesn’t get enough attention. Plenty of companies create all-in-one apps, but very few people want to use them. Why? Because they are slow to use, difficult to move around, or hard to understand. Nothing makes your team work harder than not finding the information they need in the system.
It’s best to begin by focusing on keeping things easy. Every screen should display only the necessary information. It shouldn’t take ten menus to set up a campaign. Being clear, brief, and fast is better than having an attractive design. It’s also important for a newsletter to be mobile-friendly, most marketers use their phones to view and schedule messages. Be sure to create your infrastructure for real-time applications. Any changes to a client list should show up right away everywhere. Nothing was late or out of sync.
After that, focus on how you collaborate with others. There are very few cases where marketing happens by itself. The same project is usually worked on by writers, designers, compliance officers, and campaign leads. This means your app should provide comments, approvals, and file sharing all in the same spot. Remember, your computer is a place to work, not just something you use. Role-based access allows you to display information only to the people who need it. Make sure to include onboarding as well. Smart individuals also need help when using an unfamiliar system. Just a little built-in guidance or tooltips can go a long way. A good design doesn’t draw attention to itself. Without being obvious, it helps people use their computers smoothly each day.
Don’t Build Without Testing First
You could know every detail about your firm’s way of working. You shouldn’t assume that you know all about how your team members approach their work. It’s a typical issue when developing marketing apps. You assume what features to add, but then discover that less than half of them are ever used. Make sure to ask your team how they go about designing and developing, well before you start coding or making wireframes. What keeps them from moving forward? What are the things they would like to be automated? Have the feedback from users guide the design process.
Testing should be done early on. With a simple clickable prototype, you can check that the journey through the app works well. Not having perfect images won’t block you from receiving feedback. Spending some time watching people use the draft app will reveal its problems. Maybe they don’t know where the reports tab is. It’s possible they keep choosing the wrong option. You can’t find out without testing. That’s how you come up with something your team adopts, rather than just something that looks impressive on documents.
