Staying on top of online marketing isn’t easy for a law firm. There are many marketing channels to consider, from social media platforms to content marketing to email marketing. You may be wondering which marketing channels are worth your time and money. Do law firms use email marketing?
Many of them do! About a third of all law firms use email marketing to cultivate relationships with current and prospective clients. Email marketing is a channel you should pursue if you’re looking for a cost-effective way to get new leads and develop relationships with current and potential clients.
Use of Email Marketing by Law Firms
Many law firms use email marketing as an effective component of their overall digital marketing strategy. According to the American Bar Association, email addresses are one of the most common pieces of information law firm websites collect from visitors. 92% of lawyers use these emails to communicate with their clients, and 32% use them for marketing.
Email marketing is an excellent way to update your clients on new developments in the law and share your insights on what those developments mean to them. According to Mississippi State University, email marketing has a Return on Investment of $42 for every dollar spent. This is an extraordinarily good ROI. Of course, to be used effectively, you must write your email marketing content carefully and target it to the right readers.
Benefits of Email Marketing for Law Firms
What are the benefits of email marketing for law firms? Email marketing will allow you to:
- Generate new leads by sending targeted emails with valuable, informative content to potential clients.
- Stay in touch with existing clients and cultivate an ongoing business relationship.
- Demonstrate your expertise and insight into the legal problems concerning your clients.
- Build trust by providing consistent, high-quality information.
- Remain at the top of your clients’ minds so they will think of your firm when they have a legal need.
- Automate your marketing campaigns, making it easier to communicate consistently with your clients and prospects.
- Personalize your messages based on your client’s specific needs.
- Reach a large audience of prospects inexpensively.
- Drive traffic to your website by linking to blog posts and pages relevant to your client’s needs.
- Track and analyze data about your marketing campaign, allowing you to make better strategic decisions.
Email marketing has one advantage most other types of marketing do not have. It allows you to target specific people you know to be interested in what your law firm can do for them. You can use email marketing to send subscribers content they want to receive.
How to Get Started with Email Marketing
These are the steps you need to take to get started with email marketing:
- Make a plan that addresses how you will gather email addresses, whether you will use automation, what type of content you will share, and how frequently you will share content with subscribers.
- Build a mailing list of current clients, former clients, social media followers, and visitors to your website.
- Segment your audience so you can target content to specific people. One way to do this is to have separate sign-up links on separate pages of online content.
- Write the emails you plan to send to your clients, using effective subject lines that clients will find interesting.
- Make sure you optimize each email for the specific group of clients you’re targeting.
- Send your emails to your subscriber lists.
- Start tracking Key Performance Indicators, including new subscribers per month, unsubscribes per month, email open rate, and click-through rate.
- Modify your emails based on performance to achieve continuous improvement.
Email marketing is not easy for most people to do on their own, and the average lawyer doesn’t have the free time needed to take full advantage of it. Hiring an email marketing firm like Above the Bar Marketing is the best way to ensure that your email campaign is as effective as it can be.
Writing Effective Marketing Emails
There’s an art to writing effective marketing emails. Here are the principles you should follow:
- When your readers look at your email in their inbox, they should see the same name in the From line every time. This should simply be the name of your firm.
- Write a short subject line focused on benefits to your readers. For example, “What a Comprehensive Estate Plan Can Do for You.”
- Begin your email with a compelling sentence that will convince your reader to open the email. Improving your Open rate is an important goal in email marketing.
- Write simple but compelling content with a clear Call to Action. You’re trying to get the reader to take a specific act, such as visiting your website or your Contact page.
Rather than trying to learn the art of writing marketing emails yourself, it’s a better idea to rely on a professional email marketer to create your emails for you. The content creation specialists at Above the Bar Marketing have extensive experience creating effective marketing emails and sending them out to carefully segmented client lists, then tracking Key Performance Indicators to ensure that the next email is even more effective. We can handle every aspect of your email marketing campaign for you.
Is Email Marketing the Right Choice for Every Firm?
Although email marketing can be highly effective, that doesn’t mean it’s the right choice for every law firm. Whether email marketing will work for you depends on where your prospects are in the marketing process. For example, a person who needs to file a personal injury lawsuit does not need to be cultivated over time before deciding they need legal services. An injured person needs legal help immediately and will probably pick a law firm soon after their accident.
On the other hand, if you did some work for the same person in the past, and your email marketing campaign has kept you at the top of their mind, they will be much more likely to select you as their lawyer again if they happen to get injured, or if they need any other legal services you provide. A well-designed legal marketing campaign will always consider where your prospects are in the marketing process.
What Kind of Email Marketing Content Should We Send Out?
Your email marketing campaign should include several different types of content, including:
- Educational emails about topics of interest to your potential clients. For example, if your firm handles estate planning, you could send messages about how to use a trust to avoid paying taxes on your estate. If your firm handles personal injury cases, you could send a message about your state’s negligence laws. These emails position your firm as the expert on topics of interest to your clients.
- Testimonials from past clients about what you did for them and what it was like to work with you. When your clients are happy with you, sharing their comments with the world is always a good idea.
- Case studies about interesting legal cases, especially those in which your firm was concerned.
- Newsletters tell your clients about law changes, major cases, and other interesting topics.
- Invitations to webinars your clients can use to learn more about topics they want to know about.
- Personal updates, such as employee birthdays and anniversaries, can create a sense of personal connection between your clients and your firm.
If you focus on creating high-quality content, your clients will see your emails as an interesting source of useful information to help them achieve their goals. That’s far more effective marketing than simply asking prospects to do business with your firm.
Email Marketing and Regulatory Compliance
You do need to be careful to ensure that your use of email marketing complies with all relevant laws and regulations. The Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act, also known as CAN-SPAM, regulates the use of email for marketing. According to the Federal Trade Commission, the CAN-SPAM Act serves several purposes, including:
- Regulating commercial messages
- Giving email recipients the power to opt out of receiving marketing emails
- Providing penalties for firms that violate the law
To comply with CAN-SPAM, your email messages must follow these requirements:
- Do not use any misleading information in your email headers.
- Do not use any misleading subject lines.
- Disclose that your email is for advertising purposes.
- Tell recipients the address of your law office in every message.
- Give recipients a way to opt out of receiving future messages.
- Do not send subscribers a message without an unsubscribe link unless the message is not commercial. For instance, a message updating a client about their existing case may not be considered a commercial email.
- Promptly honor any opt-out request by an email recipient.
- Ensure that any third-party marketers you hire follow these regulations, as both of you can be held accountable.
Despite these requirements, the American Bar Association reports that only 17% of law firms allow their clients to opt out of email communication. This can be a costly mistake, as the FTC imposes fines of up to $53,088 per violation. It is vital to comply with CAN-SPAM and all other relevant regulations. The easiest way to do this is to hire a marketing company with experience in email marketing and knowledge of all the regulations you must comply with.
Who are the Targets of an Email Marketing Campaign?
Email marketing allows you to target several categories of people:
- Current clients, you want to cultivate an ongoing relationship with
- Former clients who may need more legal services
- People in your community who are interested in legal topics on which you have expertise
- Peers who may be able to give you referrals
- People who reached out to you at some point with a legal question or a comment on your blogs
You can target messages to each of these groups using market segmentation.
Segmentation for Email Marketing
You can make your email marketing campaigns more effective through segmentation. This is the practice of splitting your subscriber list up into smaller segments targeted by criteria such as:
- The age, income, location, or gender of the client.
- Whether the recipient is an ongoing client, a new client, a prospective client, or a former client.
- The client’s behavior, such as their email engagement history.
- Anything you know about the client’s interests or preferences.
Segmentation allows you to send precisely targeted emails to the clients and prospects most likely to be interested in that specific content. This increases client engagement with your emails and improves your conversion rates. Clients receiving emails tailored to their specific interests are more likely to open those emails and click through. According to a study by HubSpot, companies using segmentation reported an increase in revenue of up to 760%.
Above the Bar Marketing can help you segment your email subscriber lists for maximum effectiveness, allowing you to target your messages to those most benefit from them.
Contact Above the Bar Marketing
Above the Bar Marketing helps attorneys and law firms find the people who need their services. We work with law firms that want to use digital marketing to achieve their most ambitious long-term goals. We will create a digital marketing strategy for you that addresses every aspect of your online marketing strategy, including branding, reputation management, and the ongoing growth of your firm. Email marketing is only one of the tools we can use to help you grow and achieve your goals.
Our team at Above the Bar Marketing is composed of professionals with expertise in legal marketing, SEO, content creation, and more. When you contact us about your legal marketing needs, our first step will be to offer you a comprehensive consultation meeting. In this meeting, we will identify gaps in your marketing strategy that represent opportunities for further growth.
Based on these opportunities, we will write you a customized proposal with a project plan, a timeline, and a cost analysis, as well as solutions created by industry-leading marketing professionals. Contact Above the Bar Marketing immediately to learn how your law firm can use email marketing effectively.
