Consider the elements of your current digital marketing strategy. If you are seeing any degree of success, your law firm is likely using SEO-researched keywords, organizing your content in a way that leads potential clients to your contact information, using social media platforms to connect with leads, optimizing your website, and more. But what about email marketing?
Email marketing is one of the most cost-effective and powerful marketing tools attorneys have at their disposal, but few firms take the steps to generate and send campaigns. If you are looking to take the next steps in your law firm’s digital marketing plan, you need to understand the power of email marketing.
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Why Should Attorneys Use Email Marketing?
If you have not considered email marketing for your law firm before, the concept can seem irrelevant. However, there are numerous benefits to email marketing campaigns.
- To start, email marketing is cost-effective. Unlike other forms of digital marketing, email marketing is relatively inexpensive to start and run. Whether you run the campaigns yourself or choose to outsource, you will likely only be looking at a few hundred dollars per month.
- Email marketing also allows you to capture leads earlier. When you control the traffic that goes to your website with an email campaign, you can direct potential clients to contact you faster than if they would have organically reached out.
- Finally, email marketing helps you remain top of mind with past, current and future clients. When your emails turn up in clients’ inboxes, they will see your brand and have the opportunity to recall what you do and how you could potentially help them.
How Do Law Firms Create an Email Marketing Strategy?
Building an effective email marketing strategy requires considering a number of elements before officially implementing a plan and sending out emails.
As with any marketing strategy, you need to start with defining your audience and goals. For an email to be effective, it needs to be relevant. Consult your client personas or, if you have not developed personas, consider what your ideal client looks like in terms of demographics like age, career, financial status, education and so forth. Once you define your audience, you can start tailoring email campaigns to their needs.
In terms of goals for your campaigns, there are a number of elements to consider, like open rates, click-through rates, click-to-open rates and unsubscribe rates. If you do not know where to start, you can use the average email statistics for your industry to benchmark your goals.
Types of Emails
The types of emails you send will depend on the area of law you practice, what you expect your ideal clients may need, and how you decide to communicate with clients and legal professionals. For attorneys, the most common types of emails include the following:
- Newsletters. Newsletters are the most traditional type of email that attorneys use. Newsletter audiences for law firms are often made up of existing clients, other attorneys and business partners. The primary benefit of a newsletter is ensuring you remain top of mind with your audience.
- Drip email campaigns. Drip email campaigns include a series of emails with related content that are released on a scheduled basis. For a law firm, this could be an e-book or guide relevant to your users’ pain points.
- Webinars and similar offers. Depending on the area of law you practice and the size of your service area, you may offer webinars via email.
Email Personalization
In addition to deciding on the types of emails to send, you also need to consider email personalization. The most common examples of personalization include the following:
Basic Personalization
- Name. Any email you send out should prominently include your law firm’s name. This ensures users know who the email is from, which increases the chances of them opening it.
- Subject line. Including individual names in subject lines has been shown to improve open rates. You can use services to make this task easy by storing names and emails.
Advanced Personalization
- Copy. The most common way to personalize copy is to insert the recipient’s name into the content of the email.
- Images. If you target different geolocations surrounding your law firm, consider importing unique header images with pictures unique to different users’ cities.
- Dynamic content. You can use certain demographic and geographic data to develop dynamic content that relates to different ideal clients.
- Re-engagement. Depending on your relationship with prospective, current and past clients, you may consider sending emails asking if certain users still want to hear from you. Assuming your content is already appealing, this may encourage users to open more emails from you.
- Service request abandonment. If a potential client reached out to you for more information but did not follow up after you initially made contact, consider sending a reminder email to let them know you are still available to help.
How Do You Analyze Email Marketing Campaigns?
Once you have your email campaign off the ground, it is essential to analyze its results to determine its effectiveness. The metrics you should focus on are the same as when you were setting your goals: deliverability, open rate, click-through rate and unsubscribes.
Once you have evaluated the success of a particular campaign, you can adjust email components — subject lines, images and headlines, for example — to improve results. Over time, you will come to learn what works best for your law firm, and you will be able to implement different campaigns at different times to meet specific goals.
Email Marketing: Next Steps
Understanding the power of email marketing is crucial if you are looking to improve user engagement with your law firm’s website. While it may seem like yet another challenging element to add to your digital marketing plan, email marketing ensures you stay top of mind for clients and others on your list. With the right email marketing strategy, you could see an increase in website traffic and contact requests.
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