A Call to Action.

• Author: Dean-Epps, Diane

You're busy, Your CPE credits are lean as you look at your two-year closing window of opportunity. You're working on an audit that has aged you, but not like a fine wine. And those month-end closing tasks have turned antacids into a food group.

Despite all this, you don't get a pass on marketing your services. Promoting your practice is part of running your business--whether you're the owner or a worker bee. As a CPA, you're likely aware of other letters that are shorthand for business models: B2B (Business-to-business), B2G (Business-to-government) and B2C iBusiness-to-consumer).

These business models tell you where the wild things--your clients--really are, and how to best market your services.

Two other reasons to go all-in on marketing are customer service and client retention. Your clients view you as a thought leader, so they expect you to be a regular communicator and provide quality information.

This means you need to feed the marketing machine with a consistent flow of new and updated content.

Equal Time for Email Marketing Along with adding machines, gone are the days when simply providing" excellent service constituted a solid marketing plan.

You may not be familiar with marketing plans, but you've likely seen one in action that involves something you use each dav: Email. Do you know what constitutes a solid marketing plan? Exactly. A solid marketing plan. Further, a solid marketing plan delineating a selection of channels. We call this cross-channel marketing in the biz.

Because email figures heavily into everyone's life, it stands to reason that email marketing should figure heavily into your marketing plan.

While social media garners an enormous amount of attention with its plethora of possibilities, it's no substitute for email-the broccoli of business communications. As a highly relevant channel email marketing is good for your business.

Billions of business emails are sent daily 128.8 billion, to be exact--and that number is rising, despite what those social media influencer whippersnappers might tell you. Statistics are plentiful supporting the fact that email marketing should figure heavily into your integrated marketing plan:

* Wordstream recendy reported 86 percent of business professionals prefer to use email when communicating for business purposes (wordstream.com/blog/ws/2017/06/29/email-marketing-statistics).

* HubSpot reports 73 percent of millennials prefer communications from businesses come via email...