With CXA, Accounting and Finance Businesses Increased Customer Email Engagement 53% this Tax Season

ActiveCampaign, the leader in Customer Experience Automation (CXA), helped many tax-focused businesses uplevel their customer engagement during the 2022 tax season. Through ActiveCampaign CXA, accounting and finance businesses sent an average of 45% more emails, and increased their customer email engagement by an average of 53%, compared to tax season 2021. In an industry that has historically sent transaction-based, non-engaging emails, tax professionals debunked that trend this year by implementing ActiveCampaign CXA, setting themselves up for even greater success next season.

While ActiveCampaign helped tax professionals streamline processes and create better experiences for their customers this past tax season, there is one customer who used CXA to reach CPAs when they had limited resources during the pandemic and four natural disasters, including Hurricane Ida. The Society of Louisiana CPAs serves more than 5,400 CPAs and 1500+ future CPAs across the state, offering advocacy and career support. Part of this is distributing breaking alerts that could impact their role within their firms or businesses. Since implementing CXA, the speed and quality of those alerts has increased dramatically.

In addition to the pandemic, Louisiana experienced 4 major hurricanes in the last two years, prompting a record number of emergency regulatory and tax proclamations that directly impacted the Society of Louisiana CPAs’ members, not to mention the taxpayers and businesses they support. Whether it was the IRS, the Louisiana Department of Revenue or other entity, the information being distributed was overwhelming at times. ActiveCampaign made it possible for the society to summarize the crucial information and disseminate it quickly and accurately to its members. They receive more positive feedback about this service from their members than any other service they provide and these tax alerts get the best open rate of all the emails they send.

Through the use of ActiveCampaign’s CXA, the Society of Louisiana CPAs has been able to deliver 1:1 experiences and relevant information to their members—and they aren’t alone. Recent data from ActiveCampaign revealed 96% of businesses agree CXA helps them improve the experiences their customers have with their company, and 95% report that automations help them achieve what they couldn’t on their own. Before ActiveCampaign, the society didn’t have access to email campaign automation; all of their campaigns were manually designed and deployed. Not only has CXA improved the experience members have with the society’s communication, the technology has also saved its staff hours and hours of time. In fact, the average business saves 20 hours per month when leveraging ActiveCampaign’s automation tools. Of ActiveCampaign’s 850+ pre-built automation recipes, more than 10 are dedicated to the accounting industry specifically, including paperwork submission reminder, accounting virtual meeting reminder, and credit score tagging.

ActiveCampaign especially helped the society stay connected and in touch virtually with its members during the pandemic. When they needed to promote new webcasts on urgent topics like PPP Loans and its impact on the sustainability of businesses, they put together an email list and designed an email quickly to get the word out. Their staff gets excited when they deploy an email and can watch the registrations come in by the hundreds with every refresh.

“We know the customers we support in the tax and finance industries have many deadlines to meet, not only during tax season but throughout the entire year. The fact that our CXA technology saves them time and improves the experiences of those they serve is encouraging for improved experiences to come for everyone across the business and finance sector,” said Jason VandeBoom, founder and CEO of ActiveCampaign. “We will continue to achieve product innovation and iterate strategically to help even more customers in the tax industry, and beyond, grow.”

“When we needed to reach our members with limited resources, like electricity, we could use our email lists and segments not only to send out important bulletins, but even more personal outreach efforts to see what resources our displaced members needed,” said Misean Reed, marketing manager at Louisiana Society of CPAs. “Then, it was focusing on advocating on behalf of our members and the clients and businesses they serve, on essential deadline extensions, declarations and policy revisions to accommodate the victims of natural disasters. We want to get it to them fast, but we also want to get it to them right and ActiveCampaign helps us do both.”