#012: Email Marketing For Law Firms (Yes, It’s Still Amazing!)
Although choosing marketing strategies for your small law firm can be overwhelming, one of the most potent and budget-friendly choices is email marketing.
If you think of email as old fashioned, think again: 75% of small businesses count on email as their main source of gaining clients, because it works. Done correctly, email marketing for law firms can be an ideal component of an overall marketing plan.
This episode will ABSOLUTELY help you examine the potential of email marketing for your small law firm, along with several things to consider as you get started.
SHOW NOTES
Some of the resources I visited about in today’s episode include the following:
Mail Tester (to see if your email is showing up as Spam)
Jump on my calendar to visit about your content marketing needs here!
Note: Link to websites may include affiliate links, in which I would receive a small fee or reward for the referral. However, please know I only provide referrals for companies and services I either use myself or believe in strongly.
TRANSCRIPT
Hello, and welcome back. So today, we’re gonna be talking about email marketing. And I know a lot of people think that email marketing is dead.
I’m just gonna give you the cliff notes version of this. It’s not, it’s still totally awesome!
So I know that as a small or solo law firm, you probably feel overwhelmed regarding what kind of marketing strategies are going to work the best for your small law firm. But one of the most potent, and frankly, budget-friendly, is email marketing, it is still very, very much alive and frankly gets a great rate of return.
If you think email is old fashion, just think again, because 75% of small businesses count email as their main source of getting clients. Why? Because it works.
If it is done correctly, email marketing for law firms can be an ideal component of an overall marketing plan. So here’s a bit of an overview to help you look at the potential of email marketing for your small law firm, along with several other things you may want to consider if you are just getting started. Or you are trying to ramp up your email marketing.
Email Marketing
So let’s talk first about really what is email marketing. It is essentially contacting potential clients or already existing clients through email. And that content can be a newsletter, or a short piece of information that you just had a success with, with your law firm, or a philanthropic or charity event that your law firm is involved with, or even just a short piece of useful legal information.
Create Content Consistently
The one thing that I suggest is that law firms create consistent valuable fresh content on their law firm website through a blog. When you do this, essentially, every week, you have something new to email to your list. And that is really important because a lot of times, we just don’t know what to say to our email list, but you don’t want to abandon them. You want your email list to always be getting content from you so that you are at the forefront of their mind.
Now emails can be sent with varying frequency. Some people send them once a week or twice a week or maybe once every two weeks. But no matter what you do, you should be consistent with emailing your entire list.
Why Email Marketing?
So what are the reasons for email marketing? What can you really do with this, email messages reach their target about 90% of the time with minimal effort. Now, that just means that it hits their inbox, that doesn’t mean that they necessarily open it.
But compared to other law firm marketing strategies, email marketing is really cost-effective. And the metrics are really easy to track. Email Marketing can be used to build your brand, as a law firm, share pertinent information updates about your law firm and promote your services as well as provide valuable information.
So email marketing really does work on a lot of levels, I can tell you that I personally use ConvertKit for my email service provider. However, there are many that are out there, mailer, light, MailChimp, and more. However, I’ve done all the research and my particular favorite is ConvertKit. for a lot of reasons, you can segment your list really well with ConvertKit. And that means if you want to send an email just to your estate planning clients versus your personal injury clients, you can do that. You can do that with other email service providers as well. The one I recommend just happens to be ConvertKit and I can link to that in the show notes.
Connecting With Potential Clients
So back to the reasons for email marketing. Obviously, you can develop your business and connect with clients or connect with With your potential clients, email marketing really does help you reach out and nurture established relationships and help you connect with those potential leads.
People are on your email list for a reason. You either gave them an incentive to get on your email list by offering a really great opt-in, like a download or a PDF, or a webinar or an Ebook on your website. Or they simply were just very interested in getting your newsletter. The people that are on your email list are not there by accident.
So you want to nurture those relationships as much as possible. Emails are reminding your current clients and the potential clients you may have about your services, and how you can help them as a law firm, thank you emails, and meeting reminders are also fitting ways to interact with your clients. These are going to be emails that you don’t send in bulk to everyone, but just to the people that you have connected with.
Effecting Communication
Remember, the number one complaint that clients have with lawyers is poor communication. So sending a message through email to touch base is easy and free. And it can offer helpful information or just simply say thank you for the meeting that you just had.
Just remember that email is much more than soliciting new business. It’s nurturing the business that you already have with your clients. Additionally, email can update and educate your clients, a regular email newsletter, from your law firm can include the articles from your law firms website and give updates about your law firm or alert them to some changes in local laws or even showcase how maybe your law firm was highlighted in some recent news or with some recent charities or events, or conferences, or anything that your law firm may have been involved in. It is important.
However, if you are going to email your entire list that you have a goal, you need to have a plan because sporadic random emails are not going to really trigger a positive result.
Remember, I said you need to be consistent with your email list. Perhaps you just want to stay in touch with past clients. That’s an excellent idea. But the problem is, a lot of attorneys just don’t simply know what to say, it’s important that you have a goal in mind, as you’re constructing your email marketing plan, you may have several goals, you may need to launch different email campaigns, you can have one set of emails, go to prospective clients, you can have one for past clients, and one email segmented list for professional relationships and colleagues, in order to gain referrals for your law firm from other professionals.
So it is really important to have a goal in mind. And once you have a goal in mind, you need to combine it with your ideal target audience, just like I said, because if you don’t match the right email to the right audience, whoever’s receiving your messages, they might just unsubscribe or just file them under spam and never really look at them again.
So you want to make sure that the emails that you’re sending out are getting to the right people with the right message. So if you have a goal in mind, perhaps your goal is that you want more five star Google reviews, you could create an email to all of your past clients saying, hey, thanks a lot for being a past client. I’ve really enjoyed working with you. I hope that you think of me if you ever need any legal services again. In the meantime, if you could just leave me a quick Google review and leave the very short link to the Google review site. This would be an excellent way to attempt to get more five star reviews, but you wouldn’t want to send that email to your entire email list because your potential clients can’t give you a review yet.
Targeting the Right Audience
So you want to make sure that your emails are targeted to the right audience. Targeted emails can actually turn up 18 times more profitable responses than just general emails sent to a general audience. So start segmenting your lists. Every email service provider ESP will do this differently.
Optimising Your Email Marketing Plan
Convert Kit has a way to tag all of the different people on your list as potential clients, new clients, older clients referrals, professional associations, however you want to label them. So make sure that you are sending the right emails to the right audience. Let’s now talk about a successful email marketing campaign. For your law firm. These are the tips that you need to seriously consider if you’re going to optimize your email marketing plan.
Stay Concise
The first is you need to stay concise. Most people are spending under one minute browsing an email newsletter, skip any preliminary chatter, just get right to the point. Be kind to your readers keep their attention by creating short blocks of text. Many people are reading their emails on a mobile device.
So make sure that it is visually appealing, include images, if it’s appropriate, I will tell you that sometimes emails that have large images in them can get and they can end up in the spam folder, frankly, so be careful and use photographs sparingly.
Also use short sentences and you know, steer clear of legal jargon. If you have more to say, leave a link to a longer article that’s located on your law firm website. Frankly, this is exactly how I do my email campaigns. I have a very short introductory sentence or two. And then I link to the article. If someone wants to read more, they can just click on it.
Focusing on the Message
The next tip is to focus on your message. Now we’ve already talked about this a little bit. But just remember that you need the right message in front of the right audience. If you’re sending an email campaign to colleagues or other professionals, focus on your request for referrals. If you are attempting to send out an email campaign to prospective clients on your email list, you could perhaps illustrate some legal how-tos or discuss a regional issue that has recently come up that relates to your law firm.
Mobile Friendly Email
The next thing you want to do is really be mobile friendly. Now I talked about this just a minute ago, but up to 75% of your audience is going to be reading your email on a mobile phone. So just confirm that your text or your images, if you have them are optimized for mobile use. Many of the email service providers will allow you to look and see what your email would look like on different devices before you actually send it. So that is always a best practice.
Provide Value
The next thing you should do, it sounds intuitive, but it isn’t always the things that are interesting to lawyers and law firms are not always interesting to past clients or potential clients. So make sure that you are providing value because let’s be honest, we all get way more emails than we read. So make yours count. Really try to create valuable content that will either intrigue them pique their interest or answer some common questions. You can give helpful advice, discuss current events or even simplify a legal concept. This is going to help people understand that your emails are short, concise, and provide value and that means that they will open more of them not only now but in the future.
Uphold Best Practices
Another thing you want to do is make sure that you follow best practices when it comes to email marketing. As with everything else, your law firm really should be upholding certain digital marketing practices. You have to allow your recipients on your email list to opt-out of emails at the bottom of every single email.
Also, you must place your law firm address on every email you send. If you are a virtual law firm, you have to still put some sort of address on the bottom of every email it can be a PO box, but you have to do that that’s the law. You need to also avoid any words or phrases that might trigger spam filters and have your emails landing in spam instead of the inbox.
Some of the things that you want to avoid are words like free or why pay more eliminate debt discount, words like that. Anything that you might think would trigger your email going into spam.
Keep a Catchy Title
The next thing you want to do is make sure you have an awesome title to your email. You want people to click on your email and there are a lot of tools that are out there that will tell you whether or not your email has a great title. So I will link to some of those in the show notes. But definitely consider what the actual title and then the first sentence of your email is because a lot of people can see not just the heading of your email, the title of your email, but they can also see part of that first sentence. So that is super important when they are making their decision whether to click on it or not.
Add a Call to Action
You also want to put at the very end of every email, even if it’s a short one, a call to action. So a call to action is you are telling someone to do something. And the overall point of email marketing, or frankly, any marketing is to tell someone to do something, hopefully, eventually, that’s to hire you as a lawyer, right. But email marketing is to connect personally. So make sure that your email contains a specific call to action, directing them to the next step. So that could click this link to read this article or call our office if you think that this new law applies to you.
After you’ve sent out all of these amazing emails, and segmented your list, what you’re going to want to do is check your results, you want to see how well you’re doing with your email marketing campaign, make sure to check your results. And then the important part of that is to adjust your strategy accordingly. So ConvertKit, I know I’m talking a lot about it. But that’s the one that I use, gives you analytics to see how many people open this email, how many people clicked the link, how many people unsubscribed.
And these numbers matter, because they tell you if you’re reaching your goals, or if you kind of need to tweak your strategy. If you find that a dozen people are unsubscribing, every single time you send an email, there might be something wrong. If you see that one email gets a lot of opens, then you want to be attempting to replicate that with other emails that you send.
Perhaps emails on a certain subject get opened more than other emails, maybe your estate planning emails get opened way more than your personal injury emails, you want to really look and dive deep into the analytics, because that will help you adjust your strategy.
And two important metrics to measure really are the open rate. That’s the number of recipients who actually opened the email. And then the click through rate is the second piece of analytics that you need to really be looking at. And the click through rate is the percentage of individuals who opened your email, and then clicked a link within the message. Usually, that link is back to your website to an article or to a landing page. To sign up for something, it’s usually back to your website.
Another thing you should consider is integrating your email and your social media together within your law firm’s marketing plan. So let me explain that a little bit. Both email and social media have really different strategies, although both of them tend to have people coming back to your website to increase your organic traffic and to increase your overall visitors on your website which increases your SEO score. Email marketing and social media marketing both have their strengths. And they can be united in order to drive awareness and build your law firm brand and frankly, is expand your reach all throughout the internet.
But you can combine these two by encouraging followers on your social media to subscribe to your email list. And then you can also use certain social media excerpts in your emails. You can also use any of your blog posts in both social media and emails. So it’s working a little bit smarter instead of harder.
The bottom line of this entire podcast today is all about the fact that email marketing is not dead. In fact, I believe it is a very robust way to communicate with your existing clients, communicate with your potential clients and promote all of your business goals. And if you have a plan regarding a specific email strategy to specific segments that you are sending emails to email marketing can really deliver quality results, frankly in a very cost-effective way for law firms of any size.
And remember, because you are writing these emails that are short, this should not take you a considerable amount of time. Before you get going, you really want to start by considering your goals. And then examining your ideal audience for each one of those goals. And those goals can change. For example, if you have emailed your entire list regarding Google reviews, and you’ve gotten a lot of them, you can put that particular email marketing campaign to the side for about six months, and then revisit it. And you can focus on something else regarding email marketing, perhaps your potential clients, or receiving referrals from your business associates.
Just make sure that you create a strategy so that you’re not just haphazardly emailing your entire list, with frankly, a bunch of content that may not impact them or that they are even interested in.
As a bit of a final note here, I will say that if you need content for your emails, you just simply do not know what to say to your list. Consider starting with the blog posts that are on your website, because having a weekly blog post and foundational content on your law firm’s website really does allow you to have something to visit with your email list about every single week. And they expect that consistency in their email inbox.
I created a series earlier that was about creating great content, how to find good ideas for articles, how to keyword it, how to format and optimize blog posts, and then how to promote it not only on social media but also through email marketing. So feel free to go back and listen to those podcasts.
But if for whatever reason, you as a law firm simply do not have the time or maybe even the inclination to put a weekly blog post on your law firms website, I would welcome the opportunity to visit with you for free regarding your law firm websites content, and how Law Quill can help take care of those tasks and just take them off your plate. We create that foundational piece of content that you can then spin throughout all of social media and on your email marketing list.
If you’d like to schedule a meeting with me, you can do so by hopping on my calendar at your convenience www.calendly.com/lawquill. And I’ll link to that in the show notes as well. I know that choosing marketing strategies for your law firm can just feel overwhelming from deciding what social media platforms that you want to be active on to your email marketing campaigns. I understand it’s overwhelming and a bit of a difficult choice. But I hope that today’s episode, at least showed you that email marketing can be a really powerful tool and budget-friendly if you are a small or solo law firm.
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