When you’re trying to grow your law firm, you may look into different types of content marketing. Blog posts and social media marketing can be fantastic ways to get new leads. But if you’re looking to improve engagement with your current client and lead pools, it’s hard to beat email marketing.
So why is email marketing helpful for law firms, and what do you need to know to get started? Below, we give you top email marketing tips for lawyers that can help you get the most from your campaign.
Why Do Email Marketing?
Before we dive into how you should approach email marketing, let’s talk about why you should do it at all. Email marketing can have a number of benefits for law firms.
- Better client relationships – As with any relationship, staying in frequent contact with your clients and leads can help to build trust and open the door for them to reach out to you. Email marketing can be a great way to keep those lines of communication open.
- Customized marketing – One of the downsides of broad marketing efforts is that the messaging may not be appropriate for each client it reaches. With email marketing, you can segment your mailing lists (more on that later) to deliver a customized experience for each client.
- Cost-effectiveness – Advertising can get very expensive, but the right email marketing service can make it easy for anyone in your firm to put together beautiful, professional emails. This makes email marketing one of the more cost-effective strategies for growing your firm.
- More web traffic – Your website is the heart of all your marketing efforts, and one of your major marketing goals should be to drive more website traffic. Email marketing offers lots of opportunities to increase your web traffic since you can include plenty of links to different pages on your site.
Email marketing also gives you lots of opportunities to let your clients know about community events you may be involved in, positive case results, new staff joining your firm, and so on.
Establish Clear Goals
The first thing you need to do when beginning an email marketing campaign is to establish clear goals.
After all, you don’t want to spend resources on doing something just to be doing it. And your goals will help inform decisions you make throughout your email campaign.
Do you want to bring in more leads with your email marketing campaign? Do you want to stay in touch with previous clients in the hopes of getting a review or referral? Do you have a new niche you’re trying to grow or do you want to highlight more of your case results?
As you’re discussing these goals, it may be a good idea to use the SMART format. SMART goals are
- Specific – Instead of setting a goal to “bring in more leads,” set a goal of bringing in ten new leads a week. When your goals are specific, it allows you to track your progress toward them.
- Measurable – It’s best to set goals that are measurable with specific data. So rather than saying you want to grow your firm with your email marketing campaign, pick a growth area that you can track data on.
- Attainable – It’s important to make sure the goals you’re setting are realistic for your firm. Aiming for 200 percent growth in the first week is setting yourself up for failure.
- Relevant – Your goals should be relevant to your overall goals for your firm. So if you’re wanting to branch out into a new legal niche, aiming to maintain contact with previous clients may not be a very relevant goal.
- Timely – It’s also a good idea to set specific deadlines and timelines on your goals. This lets you know if you’re progressing toward those goals on schedule.
Having these goals in place before you begin your email marketing campaign can help you avoid a lot of wasted time and effort.
Pick an Email Marketing Service
Once you have your goals established, it’s time to decide which email marketing service you’ll use for your new campaign. There are several fantastic tools you can choose from.
HubSpot
HubSpot is a fantastic client relationship management service that includes an email marketing tool. You can track interactions with your clients, store all their contact information, and even set up automated communications.
HubSpot has a fantastic drag-and-drop design setup that allows anyone to design professional-looking emails.
In addition, HubSpot allows you to send emails based on the recipients’ time zones and even to send A/B test emails. These emails allow you to directly compare the performance of two different elements (such as subject lines, description, and so on) so you can hone your marketing technique.
Hubspot does offer a free plan with limited marketing features, or you can get a paid plan starting at $50 a month.
Mailchimp
Mailchimp is a dedicated email marketing tool that offers fantastic functionality within that space. Not only do they offer a user-friendly drag-and-drop design tool, but they also have pre-made templates for holidays, birthday emails, event announcements, and more.
Mailchimp also gives you multi-step automation options that allow you to deliver emails to each member of your target audience at the best time for them. And it offers detailed insights so you can track different elements of your email campaign and see how you’re progressing toward your goals.
Like Hubspot, Mailchimp does offer a free version with limited capabilities, or you can get a paid plan beginning at just $20 a month.
Brevo
If you’re just starting out with email marketing, Brevo can be a great option for your firm. This platform is geared toward small and mid-sized businesses and is very user-friendly.
The Brevo email builder is easy to use, and they have a solid library of templates if you want a more defined starting point. They also offer a good range of automation tools and integrations to work with your other client relationship management tools.
And like the other platforms we’ve discussed, Brevo does offer a free tier with limited functionality. Paid plans start around $10 per month, making it a very affordable option for beginners.
Decide on a Type of Email
Did you know there’s more than one type of email marketing campaign you can run? Before you send your first email, you’ll need to decide what kind of email you want to create.
Newsletter
One of the most common types of marketing emails is a newsletter.
As you might imagine, a newsletter updates readers on the latest from your firm. This can include anything from recent blog posts and case results to upcoming speaking engagements or community events.
Newsletters are often sent on a routine schedule. Firms may send newsletters out once a week, once a month, or even twice monthly.
Promotional Emails
As the name suggests, promotional emails are designed to promote some specific service or event. Unlike newsletters, these emails are not usually sent out on a routine basis and will instead depend on the timing of the thing you’re promoting.
You may use promotional emails to let clients know about new legal niches you’re working in, community events you’re involved with, or webinars you’re hosting.
If you’re noticing some overlap with the subject matter of newsletters and promotional emails, that’s okay! You can use a promotional email to initially announce a new legal niche or event and then continue to promote it in your newsletters.
Survey Emails
Survey emails can be a fantastic tool for getting feedback from your clients and leads.
These emails ask readers to fill out a survey, usually related to your services, your marketing efforts, or their legal needs. They can help you get some direct opinions from your target audience so you can better meet their needs.
That being said, these emails are asking your readers to do work for you, so it’s a good idea to pair them with an incentive. Opportunities to win a gift card or event tickets can work well, as can access to educational materials.
If you do plan to offer an incentive, be sure to double-check that you aren’t violating any ethical guidelines from your state bar.
Survey emails should be sent only on occasion and preferably around important transitions for your firm.
Transactional Emails
Transactional emails are a special case in that they’re sent only in response to a specific trigger.
So let’s say a lead reaches out and schedules a free consultation with your firm. It’s a good idea to make contact with them, confirm the consultation appointment, and let them know what to expect and what they should prepare for the meeting.
A transactional email can be a great way to handle that communication. And best of all, many of the email tools we discussed above allow you to automate those emails so you don’t have to do any hands-on work to send them!
Transactional emails can be used when a lead schedules a consultation, when a new client signs on with your firm, around milestones in a client’s case, and when you wrap up work with a client.
Provide Value to Your Readers
As you’re planning and drafting your emails, the most important thing to remember is that you want to provide value to your readers.
On average, people get over 120 emails every single day. You want to make sure your emails aren’t just part of the noise if you want recipients to actually spend the time to open and read them.
Use your emails to answer common questions you hear from clients and leads. Make them engaging to read and easy to understand.
It’s also important to avoid devoting too much of your newsletters to sales pitches. While a few CTAs and plenty of links are good, unless you’re sending a strictly promotional email, aim to spend the majority of the email educating your audience.
Keep It Short
A 2022 study showed that, on average, people spend just nine seconds reading an email. About a third of emails only get readers’ attention for two seconds, over 40 percent get between two and eight seconds of attention, and only a third get more than 8 seconds of attention.
What this means for you is that you need to keep your emails short, sweet, and to the point. This is not the platform for long, eloquent paragraphs. Break up your email into easy-to-digest sections, and keep each one to just a sentence or two.
One good approach is to provide previews to longer material that you post on your website. Not only does this keep your emails brief, but it gives you lots of opportunities to drive interested readers back to your site.
Craft Solid Hooks
Besides keeping things snappy, another way to beat that nine-second time limit is to craft solid hooks for your emails.
It’s hard to overstate the importance of a good subject line for your email. Your subject lines are a huge part of what readers evaluate to decide if they’ll open your email at all and how much of it they’ll read.
A subject line should be direct, captivating, and informative. Highlight the information readers will find in your email, and look for ways to make those subject lines snappy. Puns, references, and jokes can be helpful (though they should be used carefully).
If you’re sending a survey email with an incentive, be sure to highlight that incentive in the subject line.
And don’t stop with the subject line – your email preview can be a fantastic way to draw readers in and convince them that your email is worth their time.
Segment Your Audience
One of the major advantages of email marketing is that you don’t have to send the same message to your entire audience.
Email segmentation is the practice of dividing your audience into groups based on anything from demographics or interest to sales funnel stage. You can send different emails to each of these segments based on what’s going to best resonate with them and their needs.
You can establish audience segments based on previous interactions with these leads and clients.
If a lead signed up for your emails because they wanted access to a PDF guide to what to do after a car accident, you know you can target them with other educational and car accident-related materials. If a previous client brought a medical malpractice case to your firm, they’ll be more interested in medical topics.
Using email segmentation can help you improve your open rates and create a better experience for your readers.
Keep an Eye on Compliance
Of course, as you’re planning and writing your emails, you always need to keep one eye on compliance.
The American Bar Association and all the state bars have a very specific list of regulations for how lawyers can advertise. It’s a good idea to check those regulations (both state and federal) before you hit send on your first blast email.
In general, you may need to
- Include your business name and contact information in the email
- Only send emails to people who have opted in to receive emails from you
- Include an easy and obvious way for people to unsubscribe from your emails if they wish
You may also find our guide to lawyer advertising rules helpful as you’re designing your email marketing campaign.
Track Your Results
Remember those goals we set way back at the beginning of the email marketing process? Once you’re sending out emails on a regular basis, it will be time to revisit those.
As your emails roll out, you’ll want to track the results that are rolling in. The email marketing tools we discussed above will all show you helpful data such as
- Your email open rate (often adjusted to account for bots)
- Which links are getting the most traffic
- How much time readers are spending looking at your email
- And more
These statistics can help you determine if you’re moving toward those goals we discussed.
If you’re seeing positive progress, great! Keep doing what you’re doing and keep an eye out for dips that may indicate that it’s time to mix things up.
If you’re not making progress toward your goals, you’ll know it’s time to try some new tactics. You may take another look at your headlines, look for ways to redesign your emails, or play with some A/B testing to see what your audience responds more to.
Grow and Maintain Your Email List
Email marketing can be a fantastic way to stay in touch with your clients in a cost-effective way. If you want to start email marketing, begin by setting clear goals and choosing an email service. From there, keep the focus on providing value to your readers in a short, digestible format.
If you’re looking for more ways to bring traffic into your firm, LawRank is here to help. We provide legal marketing that works, including SEO, PPC, web design, and more. Contact us today to start getting honesty, transparency, and results from your marketing firm.
