【Accounting Firm Website Features】
Professionals like accountants have their firms and offices, and rely most of the customer relationship building in their face to face meetings. Many of the professional business owners consider a website as a benchmark: something that you created, because everyone else in the industry has one.
Outsourcing workload to your website
As technology develops and customer behaviour changes with smartphone and internet usage, a website can do much more than just that.
When put to good use and strategically designed, the website can act as your virtual office, where your business is introduced to potential clients, make introductions to your services and handle primary consultations.
Before these can take place, we need to take a step back and work on collecting visitor’s contact through your website. However, encouraging visitors to leave contact is a tricky section, as it may sometimes feel pushing or aggressive, and might scare away potential customers. Taking examples from foreign accounting firms’ website, we analysed several features you can add in your accounting firm website, to assist the process of building your client list.
5 conversion focused features for accounting firm websites
1 Introducing the professionals
Currently, many accounting firms in Hong Kong are relying on referrals to find new clients, through networking or exchanging name cards, and make connections through building personal connections.
On the website, you can apply the same process, by introducing your team of accounting professionals with individual profiles.
Personal details on the name card, along with photos can be placed online, to introduce new clients who searched up your company without meeting your professionals before. Actively introducing your team on the website gives the visitors a chance to know who they might be working with, and build trust on a personal level with your team.
Source: DMCL Website
Other than their names, contacts and photo, a short introduction on their expertise field, past serviced industries or years of experience can also be included. With a better understanding of the professionals, you can also encourage interested visitors to directly contact individuals if they have any questions in their relative field and want to reach out to schedule for a consultation.
Source: DMCL Website
2 Calculators for finances
Visitors likely need help with calculations on their finances if they are looking up accounting firms website. To assist them overcome this, you can implement calculator features into your website, with calculation formulas ranging from personal savings, housing mortgage or business cash flows, and assist them in organising multiple aspects of their financial needs.
Source: Romolo & Associates Website
When they finished calculations, the results can be downloaded as a PDF report to keep for record. Here is where you get a chance to exchange the personalised content with their contact details: you can request them to provide their email address, and send them their report through an automated email.
This way, not only you are getting their email address, but also insights into what area they are interested in. This can help you make a more vivid description of visitors, and tailor content more suitable for subscribers.
3 Tax Due Dates Reminders
Taxation is a big deal in accounting matters, and everyone needs preparation time for filing the taxes. You can assist visitors by reminding them of the tax due dates each year, by sending them email reminders around a week before the deadline, along with content on how to complete their process.
While the amount of email sent out might be large, depending on the number of visitors that subscribed to this feature, the setup can be easily done with an email automation system. Once you know the upcoming due dates at the start of the taxation year, you can set up automation to send out emails prior to each due date with a warm reminder, and include guides and blog contents for how to file the specific taxes.
Source: Greenwood CPA Website
In addition to the direct effect of assisting your subscribers in finishing their tasks, having awareness and reminder of your brand during times of need also increase the chance of subscribers converting into customer, as they are making connection between their needs and your firm's services.
4 Landing Pages for Organised Financial Contents
Your website might be the starting point for some customer’s financial organising journey. They might be looking for simple information, something you share with your potential clients on the first meeting, to build your professional image. Your website can help you handle these types of general encounters, with contents organised according to their applications.
It is important to remember that your website visitors may be beginners in the accounting field, and might not know where to look for the information they need to solve problems.
Your website acts as a directory for them,
and guide them towards the solutions.
Compiling all related content and information for one general issue, for example, mortgage-related considerations, like what type of mortgage, which bank’s offer serves the best, or testimonials sharing past experience, would help visitors to efficiently understand the whole process. You can also put download links to official PDF application forms from banks, reducing the effort that visitors might end up on another website when searching.
On the same page, you can also introduce responsible professionals from your team to handle cases in this field, and encourage visitors to schedule a consultation if they require a more specific response.
Source: Lurie LLP Website
5 Contact Us Form
While most accounting firm websites shows the office address, phone numbers and business hours, listing information and waiting for visitors to take action is a passive approach.
You always want to encourage visitors to interact with your brand, and in this case, through the website.
To reduce the barrier for those who would like to drop a line, you can use a Contact Us Form and ask visitors to fill in and send out their enquiries with several simple clicks.
Other than the basic contact information, like name, email, phone number and their message, additional questions would help you to better understand the sender. Questions like “What service are you interested in?”, “What industry is your business from?”, “What is the size of your business?” can help you paint a better scenario of where the sender is coming from. You can provide a more accurate response and solution to their specific issue.
At the same time, you can categorise these potential customers, by identifying the emergency level of their questions and how likely they would be further converted into a client of yours. This helps you identify what type of audience do you have on your website, and what situations do they encounter. If you receive several similar questions over time, including a Frequently Ask Questions (FAQ) section would improve the website user experience.
Source: Accountant Online Website
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