How Financial Marketers Can Prepare Customers for Tax Season

Financial marketers can make tax season less stressful for customers by messaging before the new year, so they can be prepared as the April deadline approaches.

Brad Walters

January 14, 2019 3 min read

It’s often said that nobody likes tax season. After all, it can be stressful if you find yourself disorganized or unprepared when Apr. 15 rolls around. However, for financial marketers, tax season is full of opportunities to provide customer experiences that solve problems and drive sales.

To ensure your customers experience a less stressful tax season, make sure they are financially organized and personally prepared. Here’s how to help.

1. Leverage customer data and insights for relevancy

Data is your financial brand’s prime tool for delivering meaningful customer experiences during tax season. The information you’ve gathered about customers through your CRM can help you understand which tax services they might need as April approaches.

Automation powered by artificial intelligence can also prioritize new tax season leads and opportunities, based on your customer history. Using AI you can create segmented profiles from your directory of past and present customers. Then, you can use these lists to create predictive marketing journeys feature personalized messages to remind your audience to take tax season actions — such as filing with you again. If you segment profiles based on age or income level, then you can create marketing relevant to major life events that often impact tax filing.

2. Use content to maximize value for your customers

You can also educate and inform customers with valuable and timely content regarding tax season. Encourage customers to approach April fearlessly with content that touts the benefits of early filing and illustrates ways to maximize tax returns. If you’ve invested ina content marketing strategy, you can use content to position your company as a resource for expert tax advice.

Emails and blog posts are both excellent places to share content that provides customers with tax season guidance and links them to services to help them prepare. On social media, you can address individual questions about navigating tax season and create interactive polls to teach your audience must-know tax filing tips.

Using marketing automation you can help your brand meet the customer wherever they are on their buyer’s journey. For example, you can schedule content to be published at set times throughout the first quarter of the year to help customers keep tax season — and your services for handling it — top of mind.

3. Build customer journeys that make tax season a breeze

Every tax season journey is a customer journey. After all, most people use software or accounting services to file their taxes and may also use other products or services to organize financial information during tax season.

No matter what kind of tax services your financial brand provides, it’s essential to provide your customers with the same type of seamless and personalized customer journeys they’ve come to expect from brand interactions. With data insights and marketing automation powered by AI, you can build tax season journeys for your customers before they even begin and personalize content touchpoints as they progress through their individual journeys toward Tax Day.