Email Marketing Campaigns for Law Firms

One of the best tools at a law firm’s disposal s one that numerous firms don’t consider is email marketing. With the huge amount of emails that we are receiving nowadays, you might question this resource but this only happens when is not used correctly.
Why email marketing works? Most businesses find email marketing as a low-cost investment resource with a high return on investment. The main reasons your law firm should use email marketing to meet your marketing goals are:

• It is a cost-effective advertisement resource. Law firms usually handle a lot of client information including email addresses. Firms can take advantage of this information and segment their clients’ lists to send customized email marketing campaigns.
• Your Law Firm will be in your customer’s minds. Receiving emails from your law firm, from a client’s perspective it makes a huge difference. When they are looking for a law firm you would already have won their attention by sending email marketing campaigns.
• Increase Referrals. Not only your clients will repeat business but you are also increasing the probability of being hired from clients referrals to their own network.
• Attract visitors to your website. When you send an email campaign and encourage your audience to go read a blog or visit your website you are automatically attracting your target audience to your website. This will have a positive effect on the traffic of your website increasing the likelihood of having a returning visitor to your website.
• Capture leads earlier. When you constantly communicate with your target customers you do not close the doors after a service is delivered. They can easily select your law firm because they know you are easy to access and find.

When you segment your clients is because you want to send them personalized email marketing campaigns offering them content specific to the segment group they belong to. The same concept applies to email marketing campaigns they can have different formats and purpose. The main email marketing formats are:

• Drip Email Campaigns
• Newsletters
• Offers & Webinars

We are going to guide you through each one of the email marketing types and help you understand what goals you should be achieved with each one of them:

1. Drip Email Campaigns

As the name suggests they are a sequence of emails sent one after each other. The sequence is triggered by an action a customer has executed such as signing for a piece of content, ebook or webinar. They usually offer a magnet that is usually a piece of content and the person visiting the website will give their name and email address to receive it. After they have signed up with their details the email sequence is activated.
The goal of a drip campaign is to capture leade before they are ready to hire a lawyer. The lead magnet is in this case what grabs the users’ attention and throughout the email drip campaign, the goal is to warm your prospects into contacting your law firm.
For instance, let’s say you provide legal advice to businesses. A lead magnet could be a form where prospects sign up for a course that teaches them the basic legal aspects of setting up a business. This campaign is sent in form of 3-4 lessons sent each 2-3 days, At the end of the 4th lesson prospects should have a grasp of what are the legal requirements of a business and only those ready to take the action will contact you. Your law firms become more efficient because you will not spend time on prospects not ready to purchase and you have at your hand the ones ready to become clients.

2. Newsletters

Unlike drip marketing campaigns, executing email marketing campaigns is a lot easier. You do not need to create a lead magnet to attract new prospect. In this case, you use your existing connections and customized for each client segment. Newsletters are sent on a monthly, quarterly… basis with the purpose of:

• Staying in touch with your audience
• Informing them about news in your law firm, cases or other topics of interests
• Sharing activities your law firm has engaged in

Now you don’t want to bombard your audience with a lot of unnecessary information. Newsletters need to be relevant, specific and tailored to your target audience. When a newsletter campaign is not well executed the opening rate drops and you increase the likelihood of having a high rate of unsubscribers.

3. Offers, Webinars and other Events

Another reason to reach your customers is when you want to inform them about an event or webinar your law firm is organizing. Depending on the practice area of your law firm and marketing strategy your audience and messaging will need to change. For instance, a real estate law firm will likely create a free webinar for their users, whereas a tax lawyer will send a checklist before the tax season.
Using email campaigns for these events have resulted to be an inexpensive way of promoting different activities to a targeted audience.
The format of these campaigns adopts the format of drip marketing campaigns where you send multiple reminders to your audience to sign up and follow the event or webinar.

How to build email lists for your law firm?

During this article, we have mentioned different sources of prospects, from previous clients to leads coming from referrals or email marketing campaigns. When you use multiple ways of attracting new customers you are also receiving a lot of connections and the message sent to each one of them will also change. You need to define what type of email marketing campaigns are you ready to run and which are the objectives and strategies for that specific marketing campaign. We suggest the following options to classify your connections:

• Existing and new clients
• Leads and Prospects
• Lawyers Referral Sources
• Own network and Business Development Groups

How to avoid the spam folder?

When you are new to email marketing it is important to consider a few technical aspects of this resources to avoid ending up in your contacts spam folder and getting penalized by google.
Start slowly if your domain is new. When you are new to this technique is better to start slowly and not sending large amounts of emails. Limit the number of emails at first and increase them gradually.
Know the limits of your email provider. Each email provider has its own limits in terms of how many emails per day you are allowed to send. When you are using Gsuite you can send up to 2000 email per day to 100 email addresses. You need to check with your email providers what restrictions your email has.
Add verification records to your email. To increase the security level of your firm’s email you need to add authentication and security verification by enabling DKIM, SPF and DMARC features. This is something that you should leave in a professional’s hands.
Request permission to subscribers. Always try to ask your email subscribers the permission to become part of your subscription lists. Not only to avoid being penalized but also it is not professional to use consumers emails without their consent. Additionally, you should always include an unsubscribe button for when someone does not want to receive your emails.
Follow AntiSpam practices. There are trigger words when added in the subject of an email or its content can cause a penalization from email providers. We provide a list of tips you should follow to avoid being marked as spam.
Keep your emails relevant without sounding spammy. We have discussed in the article the importance of segmenting your lists and delivering always relevant content. Behind each email, campaigns go a lot of strategies to achieve the best result. We advise you to take into account the aspects mentioned to obtain better results and satisfied audience.

Conclusion

We could talk hours about email marketing campaigns and explain all the benefits well-designed email marketing campaigns can have for law firms. To advertise, build trust and create awareness just to name a few of the advantages law firm can use to continue engaging be top of mind of their customers.
Decide the strategy you want to follow and keep improving from list classifications to email formatting to increase your success rate among your audience.