Setting Expectations: How much does a customer cost to acquire?

In the past, we’ve discussed setting response rate expectations, and some of the metrics you should use to track your marketing and business in general. Today, we’re going to focus further on one particular metric.

If you ask 99.9% of American small business owners how much they spend to acquire a customer, they’ll either give you a blank look or simply tell you how much they spend on marketing. Knowing your cost to acquire an individual customer is one of the most fundamental business metrics that anybody operating a business should be able to tell you off the top of their head.

The cost to acquire a client is of particular importance to those of us that are professional practitioners. Why? Because a client for us isn’t a one-off transaction. Once we acquire a client, our objective is to keep that client for life, which means that client is providing us with revenue for years on end. There’s a metric for this, also: Lifetime Customer Value.

We are fortunate to be in a business where the investment we make to acquire a client can be quite large, since the payback to us in revenue is quite large, often from the very first transaction. Let’s run some numbers…

Let’s say we send 1,000 postcards to tax lien debtors. These are raw liens, in no way previously contacted by us. Our goal is to convert as many of these 1,000 tax liens into prospects that have actually contacted us.

Out of these 1,000 postcards, let’s say we get a below-average response rate of 0.5%, meaning we now have 5 prospects to work with. If we spent $1 each to send those postcards (about average for mailing lists, design, printing, and postage for “jumbo” postcards), then each lead cost us $200. Now that we have these leads, we obviously need to convert them to clients — this is the turn from marketing to sales, and is an important pivot point we will cover in depth in the future.

If we can then convert 2 of those 5 prospects into paying clients, then our $1,000 investment in marketing turns into $500 to acquire each new client. Since these are tax resolution clients in this example, the initial fee paid by each client will be several thousand dollars, meaning that our ROI per client is 5x to 20x, depending on your fee structure.

$500 to acquire a client that will … Continue reading

Effective Copywriting For Accounting Professionals [Available on Amazon]

Writing effective sales and marketing copy is one of those skills that we all need, but often lack resources for learning.

While there are a number of training courses available to people to learn how to become a full time copywriting professional, I’ve been hard pressed to find a guide, course, audio, book, or anything else that shows a simple, step-by-step method for actually creating effective marketing pieces for somebody that doesn’t want to be a professional copywriter, yet needs needs professional copy for their own business.

So, I wrote one for you!

Just from reading this newsletter, you should be getting plenty of ideas of how to market your practice, and how to pick your target market. But, you might still be confused about what to actually SAY in your marketing. That’s what this book is for.

Effective Copywriting For Accounting Professionals walks you step-by-step through the process of creating a marketing piece. In this book, you’ll discover:

  • How to write attention-grabbing headlines
  • What you can learn from looking at the marketing of other firms
  • A simple formula for creating an effective marketing piece that actually gets responses
  • How to use “widgets” to generate leads for long-term follow up.
  • How to get people to contact you NOW, rather than in six months
  • The single biggest mistake that accountants make in their marketing that costs them clients

If you’re ready to hit the ground running with your marketing, but haven’t been sure what to actually WRITE, then this book is for you.

Effective Copywriting For Accounting Professionals is available as a Kindle e-book on Amazon.com.

Even if you don’t have a Kindle device, Amazon offers Kindle apps for iPhones, Android Phones, and Windows and MacOS computers. These apps are completely free, and allow you to have a massive library of books in the palm of your hand (I’m a huge Kindle fan).

Order Your Copy… Continue reading

Cure for your revenue problem

The cure for any revenue problem is simply to increase revenue. The more revenue flowing into your tax practice, the better things in general tend to be for everybody at your firm.

In order to get more revenue flowing into your practice, you must add more value to the world.

What does this mean, “add more value to the world”?

You add more value to the world when you make solve more people’s tax and accounting problems. When you give somebody a solution to a problem that keeps them awake at night, they happily pay you money for doing so.

In order to solve more people’s tax and accounting problems, they need to be made aware of the fact that there actually exists a solution to their problem. You need to make them aware of that solution. Also, realize that most people are a bit stubborn, and resistant to change. So, you need to tell them multiple times that there is a solution to their problem.

Because marketing isn’t a one-shot game, and you should be receiving marketing support on an ongoing basis, I have decided to make some drastic changes to how our programs here at Tax Marketing HQ are structured.

While our comprehensive systems courses and marketing toolkits will still be available individually, as will the new subject-specific courses we create each month (such as last month’s Direct Response Marketing course), we are also making that course content available through our new premium membership plans.

These new premium membership plans are an outgrowth of this daily newsletter, merged with our tax lien data subscriptions, and enhanced with the marketing plans, ready to use marketing templates, and other resources you need to grow your practice.

Where is this coming from? So many tax practitioners have asked me to either take over their marketing entirely, or to bundle different pieces of our bigger courses together just for them, that I started seeing the need. Many readers of this newsletter need more than just mailing lists — they need ready-made marketing pieces, very specific “how to” instructions for getting their message out, assistance evaluating tax resolution cases, or want their marketing done completely for them and they just take the phone calls.

Depending upon the membership level you choose, here are just some of the new benefits available to members:

  • Monthly premium marketing newsletter
  • Monthly tax lien download credits
  • Access to new ready-made marketing pieces
… Continue reading