I am a CPA and the CEO of BizActions. Often I'm asked what a CEO does. After much thought, I realized my real job is the Director of Passion. In that role, I make sure our product is cutting edge and our support staff creates Raving Fans. I also oversee all financial aspects of the firm and provide the overall direction to implement our business plan. It's a great job primarily because I work with outstanding people and together we have created a corporate email communication platform second to none. We are constantly motivated to raise the bar and add new features to enhance business to business email communication.
In my prior life, I was managing partner of a regional CPA firm which was sold to American Express. I also founded an internet based company called GovCon which was sold to a public company in the go-go years of the internet.
My passion is to create a unique product that solves problems and provides the best solution for our clients. I also want our firm to provide the absolute best customer support of any organization. So....any ideas you have to make our product a better corporate email communication system or any complaints you might have, please do not hestiate to call or email me.
Thanks,
Barry
Director of Passion
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BizActions has created special CPA Email Newsletters that should be used by any firm involved in accounting services. Its purpose is to provide content about business issues. BizActions provides up to 8 content categories that are included in all CPA email newsletters at the rate of 2 articles per issue. We only include 2 per issue because most people will only read that much at one time.
Article categories include Business Finance, Business Tax, Human Resources, Marketing, Management, Sales, Operations, and Personal tax.
On top of these articles, your firm has the ability to include up to 6 custom articles about your firm, products, people, clients, and any other information you desire.
CPA Email Newsletters are very easy to manage because we provide the majority of the content. You can deliver your newsletter weekly, every 2 weeks, or once a month - the choice is yours and there is no difference in cost.
So...if the burden of providing content has stopped your firm from producing a CPA Email Newsletters take a look at the BizActions solution.
Every firm needs a "Differentiator" - something they do that's different then everybody else. Sometimes it's very hard to come up with anything especially in a crowded market. It gets even more difficult if your product is technical in nature because clients and prospects may not understand the nuances between your product and someone Else's. Furthermore, what you think is really important, a client or prospect may never fully understand.
So...what's the easy way to create a differentiator? Create an Employee Benefits newsletter that is sent automatically to your clients, prospects, and referral sources. This newsletter will set you apart from the crowd and provides an easy way to communicate complex issues, happenings in your firm, late breaking news items, and a host of other matters related to your firm.
Take a look at the BizActions Employee Benefits Newsletter because it was built specifically for Employee Benefit firms. Here are a few of the many features:
- Launch automatically weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly
- Unlimited emails
- 8 categories of Employee Benefits content included
- Room for banners and content you add
- Branded to your firm
- East to read reports on click activity - discover needs of clients & prospects
- Email Radar for targeted marketing messages
Start today and create your differentiator by signing up for the BizActions Employee Benefits newsletter. It will work!
BizActions has completed development of its online survey software tool. This tool is integrated into the business email newsletter platform created by BizActions. It's also available as a stand-alone product at
www.bizsurvey.com.
Basically the system works by allowing a firm to create an unlimited number of groups. These groups leverage the power of the Email Radar portion of the system. After creating groups, a firm chooses an existing template such as a 360 employee survey or a customer satisfaction survey. Alternatively, a firm can design their own surveys from scratch. The system sends a survey request email and provides a link to the online survey. After the survey is completed, results are immediately available online. All surveys are branded to the firm sending the survey.
A firm can create and launch as many surveys as they want. The survey tool is very easy to use and customer support is available 24 hours a day, 5 days a week.
The online survey software tool can be used within any business email newsletter merely by inserting a title, a brief summary and then assigning the "Full Article" button to link to the survey. Surveys can also be housed on a firm's Website.
If your looking for an elegant addition to your B2B email newsletter platform, please see the new enhancements offered by BizActions and BizSurvey.
Here's the SituationLet's assume you are producing CPA email newsletters or for that matter any business email newsletter. Your goal is to develop new business but you don't have a lot of time to look at reports or analyze data. How can you determine the best leads?
Create an Alert
An alert is a special flag set within the
BizActions platform that notifies you someone has clicked an article. You are notified through a special
Dashboard on your desktop and through an email. The system can be configured to send the Alerts immediately, daily, or once a week.
When you set an Alert within your CPA email newsletter, it can be configured in many ways:
- by email address
- by domain
- by type of member - client, prospects or referral source
- by article
- by type of article - custom, standard, or niche
This configuration ability within your B2B newsletters adds significant power. As an example, suppose you just added 10 lawyers from a particular law firm prospect and you wanted to know if any of them have clicked an article. Just set an Alert by the domain name of the law firm and any click by any lawyer will trigger an Alert.
Another example of using Alerts - you write a great article on the importance of Estate Planning and you know that if anyone clicks on the article, it's a warm lead. Just set an Alert for the article and watch your Dashboard and in-box start populating with warm leads.
There is significant power in using Alerts to help drive leads so take a look and start setting up Alerts in all your business email communication. It could not be easier to generate leads.
If you are contemplating a Financial Planner Newsletter then you may have special issues in sending your email newsletter. Many firms are subject to Compliance rules that require a special review by their Compliance department. Articles cannot be legally sent without such a review. To facilitate the review, some firms have had their content pre-reviewed by FINRA, the successor entity to the NASD. This does not eliminate the requirement of a Compliance review but makes it much easier.
BizActions has 8 categories of FINRA reviewed content available for use in a Financial Advisors email newsletter. The process is quite simple - you merely provide access to your Compliance department for their review and they can indicate their name and date of approval. Since the BizActions system delivers articles sequentially, the compliance department can review as many email newsletters in advance as they want. Your newsletter could clear Compliance for the next year as an example.
So, if you need FINRA reviewed articles, consider the BizActions platform. Not only do we have the articles but we have also created an online process, with an audit trail, for an expedited Compliance department review. No longer do you have to send a completed newsletter to Compliance for review because, articles can be reviewed in bulk by Compliance.
In the business to business communication world it's fairly easy to figure out what kind of corporate newsletter content is need. But banners are another story. 
Let's assume you are in charge of a CPA email newsletter and wondering what to do about banners? Should you include them or not. If so, what works and what's the strategy? Here are some thoughts to guide your decision:
- In most email newsletters, click-throughs on banner ads are very low - so..expecting a significant click-through rate is just not in the cards.
- Consider using the banners to show pictures of firm partners
- Use banners to show products or services
- Talk to suppliers and see if they have a coop advertising program - this might be a good way to get reimbursements for the cost of the newsletter.
- Sell banners to firms you work with on a regular basis - banks, insurance agents etc.
- Provide banners free to community organizations
Your CPA email newsletter can be enriched by banners but you need to develop a plan that is consistent with your firm's strategies.
Let's assume you are producing a CPA Email Newsletter or a Payroll Email Newsletter and you want to get the most from the time spent. Here are some ideas to leverage your efforts in producing custom business newsletter content.
First - write articles in which you have a core understanding so there is not a lot of research required. For CPA firms it might be tax planning articles or estate planning.
Second - consider reusing those articles in another fashion - perhaps in blog, or a Tweet or a regular column for a magazine or newspaper in your area.
Third - great a catchy title for your email newsletter - maybe something like "Estate Planning Ideas Your Wife Must Know About"
Finally, produce the articles on a consistent basis in all business email communication.
With a little effort it's easy to leverage the content needed for your CPA email newsletter and gain significant additional benefits.
Here's the problem. Your firm wants to send a CPA email newsletter to clients and prospects but you want to send different articles to various target groups. The breakdown is as follws:
- Individuals - Tax Only articles allowed under IRC 7216
- Individuals - FINRA reviewed articles on financial service
- Business - a typical business email newsletter
- Medical Practices - Business articles with medical practice management
How is it possible to create a CPA email newsletter with different content to different groups, all within the same business email communication platform?
The answer is Content Classes. BizActions has created a revolutionary method of managing corporate newsletter communication within one account. You can create a group of up to 8 article categories and send each group a different group of 8 articles. Of course, the system only delivers 2 articles at a time, so people are not overwhelmed.
Check out the chart to get an idea what's possible.
Here are a few ideas you can use to make your CPA Email Newsletters more effective: 1 - Add as many email addresses to your CPA client newsletters as possible since BizActions provides an unlimited amount of emails that can be sent.
2 - Use a subject line in your CPA client newsletters that is current, interesting, and supported by an article.
3 - Add an image to all business email newsletters. Remember that readers often scan email newsletter articles first and an interesting and relevant image often can entice them to stop and read the text.
4 - In all article summaries, create a call to action - "Click Full Article" for more information.
5 - Each email address should have a point of contact assigned for CPA client newsletters.
6 - To make CPA business development more effective, follow-up on click-activity by sending an Email radar or calling.
BizActions has created a special Employee Benefits Newsletter that should be used by any firm involved in employee benefits services. Its purpose is to provide content about employee benefits issues. BizActions provides up to 8 content categories that are included in each Employee Benefits Newsletter at the rate of 2 articles per issue. We only include 2 per issue because most people will only read that much at one time.
Article categories include Ancillary Benefits, Benefit Tax Issues, Benefits Administration, Health Care, Medical Insurance, Business & Employee Insurance Protection, Motivating Perks, & Retirement Plans.
On top of these articles, your firm has the ability to include up to 6 custom articles about your firm, products, people, clients, and any other information you desire.
Your Employee Benefits Newsletter is very easy to manage because we provide the majority of the content. You can deliver your newsletter weekly, every 2 weeks, or once a month - the choice is yours and there is no difference in cost.
So...if the burden of providing content has stopped your firm from producing an Employee Benefits Newsletter take a look at the BizActions solution.
Many firms are struggling with the question of whether to produce their email newsletter in house or to have an outsourced newsletter. They are use to the uniqueness of their own publication and the benefits of being able to say they produced it on their own. It's full of articles about the products and services of the firm. The email newsletter is being sent to clients and prospects of the firm.
Let's assume our hypothetical firm wants to create a human resources email newsletter. Aside from the look and feel of the email newsletter, what should the main strategic objective be? Many people will have different views on this subject like it should be a targeted email newsletter or make sure it represents the best professional email communication we can produce. In my opinion, there is one MAJOR strategic objective - Don't Get Unsubscribed!
Email newsletters are different than print newsletters in one major respect. If a person unsubscribes to an email newsletter, you are precluded by the Can Spam Act from sending them another email newsletter. You are required to remove them from your email list. So...how do you solve this problem?
Content makes the difference. You must include articles in your human resources email newsletter that are not only about your products and services but will also keep the attention of your target market. When you outsource an email newsletter to a company like BizActions, the main strategic advantage is the ability to select business articles that will appeal to your target market. BizActions has more then 6,000 articles in over 100 categories. The key to email newsletter success is to select articles that match what your target market wants to read AND then add articles about your product or service. Not only will your unsubscribe rate be lower but people will appreciate your company more for providing meaningful information.
So...the answer to question about outsourcing email newsletters is a resounding YES, provided the company you outsource to has a large inventory of quality email newsletter articles for your target market.
Unless you are a natural born writer, blogging is tough work! It does not come easy to me...so why am I blogging at least once a week? And...why are many of our employees blogging? What's the pay-off. Well, here's the secret.
BizActions is in the business of creating business email communications for targeted industries. We focus primarily on professional service newsletters such as CPA newsletters, Payroll newsletters and the like. We are unique in the marketplace because our platform was built from the ground up to manage business content in a very efficient manner. Therefore, approximately 80% of an email newsletter is completed through the use of our business newsletter content.
The real question is how do we get leads? A major source of Web related leads is based on people using search engines, primarily Google, to find solutions to their needs. It's estimated more than 80% of the people going to Web sites find what they are looking for by first using a search engine. So, it's very important to appear as close to the top of a search listing as possible. The way this happens is through what's called SEO - Search Engine Optimization. It's a process of building your Web site in such a manner as to optimize the keywords your firm is trying to get at the top of in search engine listings. There are many factors that help contribute to a high SEO such as the number of other sites that link to your Web site but SEO ranks very high. So what's the problem?
When you build a Web site, it's maybe possible to optimize a single Web page to 2-3 key words. Take the following key words as an example:
- CPA Business Development
- CPA Practice Development
- CPA Marketing
- CPA new business
- CPA new clients
- CPA growth
As you can see, they are all potential words a CPA firm might input in a search engine where BizActions would like to appear at the top of the listing results page. It's almost impossible to optimize a single Web page to include all those phrases. That's where blogging comes to the rescue. A blog is really nothing more than a long Web site, a series of different articles connected together on a single page. When the search engine bots come visiting, the blog with all it's pages and content rich keywords, are indexed....and voila...our site is hopefully indexed higher and we have enhanced our SEO.
I would like to tell you I blog because I'm filled with all this knowledge I need to share or I'm an expert you need to follow but, if the truth be told, I'm just a CEO trying to get more leads to our Web site.
I love blogging!
BizActions was started in September, 2000 and our first email newsletters were delivered in February, 2001. Most firms were just starting to collect emails at that time and convincing them the future of business to business communications was going to be through email platforms was quite the challenge.
Our primary strategy was to build a business to business communications system from the ground up to manage all aspects of B2B newsletters and most importantly, to provide 80% - 90% of the business content needed for those newsletters. Today we have over 5,000 articles representing business newsletter content in 100 different categories. These articles are written by our staff or partners and managed on a regular basis to keep them current and up to date.
Originally, we focused totally on CPA email newsletters primarily because that was the industry we knew the best. To my amazement, we discovered CPA firms were in many businesses and provided a broad array of services. If we were going to keep pace with our clients, we needed to expand our offerings to other industries. Over the years we created newsletters for accountants, Chartered Accountants in Canada, payroll firms, employee benefit firms, law firms, financial service firms, and basically any B2B newsletter.
An allied strategy to providing business newsletter content was to create other tools to help organizations better communicate with their clients and prospects. I will be discussing some of these other tools in future posts.
Let's assume you are producing your first Financial Planner Newsletter with all those FINRA reviewed articles or for that matter any type of email business to business communication. Your boss wants to know whether the email newsletter is effective or not and he heard about something called Open Rates. Quite naturally, he assumes this means somebody opened your email newsletter and is starting to read it... so, he says, "Charlie, what's our open rate and I want a report everyday on my desk - we need to see if this fancy corporate email communication system you talked me into really works"
So...you start preparing your daily email marketing report for the boss and are seeing figures between 10% and 20%. What does this mean and can it be relied upon?
First, in order to understand Open Rates, you need to have some knowledge of how it's determined that someone has opened your email newsletter. Email marketing companies embed a small image inside your newsletter in such a manner that you can't see it. But, every time you open the newsletter, a response is sent back to the company sending the newsletter who tracks the number of times it received the response.
So......let's consider the following real life situation. I just bought a new laptop with Vista pre-installed and configured with the latest version of Outlook. I took particular care to set my email window up so I could see the list of emails received on the left side of the screen and a preview on the right side. As I'm reviewing my first batch of emails, I notice a lot of emails coming through with Xs on them. I didn't give it any thought until I realized I wasn't receiving any images at all and those Xs were in place of the images. Microsoft has turned off my ability to see images by default! I began looking to see how to get them back and couldn't find where it was in the Tools menu, and I looked really hard. A little research on Google found the answer of how to turn it on, which was rather convoluted. I also learned Microsoft allegedly did this so Spam companies wouldn't have the knowledge gained by embedding the tracking image.
Oh, great!!! What about that daily report my boss wants? How do I now explain that all our Open Rates are artificially low because of Big Daddy protecting us.
So...you decide...Do Open Rates on Email Newsletters matter?
Suppose your accounting firm wants to create professional email newsletters and targets three distinct niches: manufacturing, high net worth individuals and real estate prospects. You would like to get your corporate message out to these unique groups, but because they are unique, they each need specialized content to make the email newsletter campaign relevant to their market segment. Now, I’m going to go out on a limb here (not very far out) and assume that you don't want to purchase and manage three different B2B newsletters. Yet with only one business newsletter you are doomed to having a manufacturing specific announcement being delivered to the high net worth individuals and the real estate article going to a manufacturing prospect or client. On the other hand, there are certain messages you want all groups to get. An example might be opening a new office or promoting a partner.
What can you do?
BizActions has recently completed version 2 of an enhancement called Master Accounts. This enhancement allows sub-accounts within one Master account. There are many ways to strategically design a Master account. One method is to create sub-accounts by target market and send selected messages to each target market while still having the ability to send messages to all accounts. You could even send to a target market by partner. Additionally, you can have unique mastheads and other attributes for each target market. So ... as an example: the masthead for the manufacturing division could say, Friedman and Company, CPAs - Manufacturing Division.
The strategic design possibilities are endless with Master Accounts - it all depends on how you go to market. What works for your company and your strategies? Here are a couple of examples:
1 - Sub-accounts by office location
2 - Sub-accounts by sales rep or partner
3 - Sub-accounts by independent reps
4 - Sub accounts by member type - client, prospect, referral source
5 - Sub-accounts by department
6 - Combinations of the above
One other great opportunity with Master Accounts. Suppose you go to market through independent reps. You now have the ability for each rep to have their own branded account within your Master Account. You can send announcements that will appear in each reps newsletter and the rep can add their own content about their services. This would be very effective for real estate brokerage companies, financial brokers etc.
Hopefully, you see the advantages of email communication with target marketing through Master accounts. It is a major step forward in sending the right message to the right target market. It will increase readership and click-activity which should generate more warm leads.
How do you get started? Just talk to your Customer Support Rep. They can help you analyze what works best and the process for managing the sub-accounts.
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