19 Jul Direct Response Tool: Income Tax Planner
Each tax season, I will be offering a FREE Income Tax Planner Guide to potential clients as well as existing clients. The planner for existing clients will be pre-populated with their tax information from the prior year to include everything from their W2, interest, dividends, Schedule C businesses, K-1s, farm or rental real estate businesses to name a few. The generic guides will have blank forms that the potential clients can use to record and organize their tax documents.
I have created two places on my website where someone can request the guide.
- Location One: the form is located on a side bar of the main page of my website: http://www.siskmorriscpa.com/
- Location Two: the form is on my website under the tab “Free Resources” http://www.siskmorriscpa.com/free-resources/
The potential client will need to submit their name, email address and phone number. It will then be linked to my mailchimp.com account. The person will received an email from my Mail Chimp account requesting that they confirm the request and then there is a captcha test to validate the account is set up by a real person. Once the person is confirmed they will be added to my “Tax Planner Request” list. I will receive a daily email from Mail Chimp giving me the additional new subscribers to the Tax Planner Request List. The next step is that I will email the sample tax planner to the potential clients with an offer to assist them with their tax preparation for the upcoming tax season.
I marketed this Tax Planner in January, February and March via Facebook posts and through making the offer to students in my AB Tech QuickBooks and Social Media for Business classes. I also offered the information at several networking meetings. My initial system did not include the mail chimp program. I simply received emails and Facebook posts and responded with the request. Here is a link to the blog post that I created in order to make the offer. This post was then shared on Facebook. Some people emailed me directly and 16 posted on the blog. http://www.siskmorriscpa.com/free-2014-tax-organizer/ All people who received the document seemed very pleased and appreciative. Some turned into new clients.
This tax year I have created the Mail Chimp account so that I can better track the free tax planners to people who are not clients. Last tax season I sent out around 40 tax planners to potential clients. The 2015 tax planner will be available in December of this year. The 2014 tax planner is currently available.
The current clients all received their customized tax planner via email. These custom documents were created in my tax software and I send those out at the end of December or the beginning of January (whenever the new version of the software becomes available). Many of my existing clients really liked having the customized “road map” for pulling together their documentation. Approximately 40% of my existing clients used the forms.
The PDF file that is sent to the existing or potential client includes a cover letter along with thirty eight blank forms. Note that I have used my corporate address stamp to make sure that my contact information is on every single page of the document.
Overall, I find his a very valuable free service I can provide to potential clients. Once the initial work of writing the letter and creating and scanning in the document is done, it is a pretty simple process to email out to everyone the forms. Using Mail Chip should help create a smooth process that I can do in batches throughout tax season instead of sending it out one at a time throughout the day.
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