Email marketing is a powerful tool law firms can use to build stronger client relationships, stay top-of-mind, and grow their businesses. It enables you to deliver highly targeted content that helps you retain existing clients and attract new ones.
In this guide, we’ll take you through:
- The benefits
- 5 email marketing best practices
- The best email marketing platforms for law firms
- The performance metrics you need to track
Let’s dive right in.
How Law Firms Can Benefit from Email Marketing
If your law firm isn’t taking advantage of email marketing yet, you’re neglecting one of your most important marketing channels.
Let’s take a look at some of the many benefits of an effective email marketing campaign.
- Keep your clients informed: Email is the best way to keep your current clients informed of things like court dates, upcoming appointments, and changes to your firm’s opening hours.
- Targeted legal marketing: By using tactics like segmentation and automation, you can deliver highly targeted messages to existing and potential clients. This makes them far more likely to convert.
- Enhance client relationships: You can use your email marketing campaigns to provide your subscribers with relevant and valuable content that helps to build user trust in your brand.
- Increased traffic: By including links to your site within your marketing emails, you can significantly increase the volume of traffic you drive to your law firm’s website.
- Competitive edge: Email marketing can greatly improve your authority within the legal niche. As a result, you stay top-of-mind among your target audience. The legal niche is highly saturated and competitive, so email marketing is vital to help you stay ahead of the competition.
- Cost-effectiveness: Email marketing requires little start-up costs. Typically, you just need to budget for the software you use and the content you create. It’s the most cost-effective marketing channel and you should get a high return on investment (ROI).
5 Email Marketing Best Practices for Lawyers and Law Firms
In this section, we’ll guide you through five best practices to engage subscribers, build trust, and increase your conversions.
(There is another option. You could use InboxArmy’s email campaign management service to do all the hard work for you. Our expert team will handle every element of your campaign. From growing your email list to designing your templates, we’ve got you covered.)
1. Identify your goals
The first step of any campaign is to set clear goals – and email marketing for lawyers is no different. Before you begin, you need to know exactly what you want to achieve with your efforts.
Why is this so important? You’ll need to use different types of campaigns to achieve specific goals.
For example, if your goal is to attract new clients, you may want to launch a customer success story campaign. This involves using social proof like client testimonials to demonstrate the value of your services and convince recipients to start using your law firm.
If your campaign goal is to improve client retention, you may want to set up a personalized check-in email campaign. These emails are a good way to keep your current clients engaged and show them how grateful you are for their continued support.
2. Segment and automate
Automation and Segmentation and are two of the most important parts of a effective email marketing strategy.
Segmentation
Segmentation means dividing your audience into smaller groups based on things like demographics and interests. It’s been shown to be one of the most effective email marketing tactics as it enables you to target different groups with highly personalized messages. This massively improves subscriber engagement and can increase your firm’s revenue.
Automation
Automation is the process of using workflows that are triggered automatically when a specific event occurs. For instance, if a subscriber hasn’t opened one of your emails for a set period of time, a re-engagement email series will be triggered. This has two main benefits:
- Automating your campaigns saves you a huge amount of ongoing time and effort. If you think about it, people working in legal services don’t have the time to manually email all of their subscribers, right?
- Email automation ensures that your recipients receive the exact type of message you want them to at the optimal time. For example, you don’t want an existing subscriber who’s been on your list for a while to receive a welcome email, as this makes your brand look unprofessional.
3. Be legally compliant
You’re a law firm. You have even more responsibility than other businesses to comply with the laws and governance surrounding email marketing. (It’s critical for everyone, but law firms need to “walk the walk.”)
These laws can vary depending on the state you’re based in. If you’re a US firm, you always need to ensure you comply with the CAN-SPAM Act and other state-specific regulations like CCPA, and more. If you have any EU or Canadian clients, your marketing messages must comply with GDPR (in Europe) and CASL (in Canada).
Here are some of the steps you need to take to remain compliant:
- Include an unsubscribe option in all of your marketing emails.
- Ensure you only send your marketing emails to subscribers who have opted in to receive them.
- Include the name of your law firm and its contact details (including physical mailing address) in every email.
If you do this, you can show your subscribers that you’re committed to following legal requirements which will help you build trust within the legal niche.
4. Create engaging and valuable emails
This best practice is often missed in many brands’ email marketing efforts. Yet, creating engaging and valuable content is arguably the most important step. Simply put, if you deliver poor content you’re going to get bad results.
Here are some tips for creating high-quality email content:
- Use compelling subject lines: Your subject lines should be concise (40-50 characters) and accurately describe the content of your emails. Optimized subject lines are one of the best ways to increase your open rates.
- Avoid “legalese”: Use the language and verbiage your intended recipients will understand. Often, it’s tempting for lawyers to slide into “legalese” when creating content for their emails. This can be confusing and off-putting for subscribers who lack the same legal knowledge as you and your brand. Use straightforward, descriptive language that keeps readers engaged.
- Focus on relevance: Ensure the content is highly relevant to the audience you’re targeting. This means the content will provide a solution to a specific pain point.
- Use email templates: Make the most of the pre-built templates provided by your email marketing platform (more on this later) if need be. This will save you lots of time and enable you to create emails with eye-catching, engaging designs.
5. Think mobile-first
In this day and age, all email marketing campaigns need to be optimized for mobile devices. Here’s how you can do it:
- Simple layouts: Keep it simple by using single-column layouts and plenty of white space. This makes your emails more readable on smaller screens.
- Responsive designs: Create your emails using responsive designs that automatically adjust to different screen sizes.
- Mobile-friendly CTAs: All CTA buttons and links should be big enough to easily tap with a finger or thumb. (We like to say your emails need to be “fat thumb-friendly.”)
- Concise, scannable content: Use bullet points, clear headers, and short paragraphs.
- Optimize images: Compress image file sizes to ensure your emails load quickly on mobile devices.
Email Marketing Software For Law Firms
The days of mail merge should be long done. It’s time-consuming and almost impossible to get the desired results you’re looking for.
There are many email marketing services (or email service providers) out there that can provide you with a suitable platform for your email marketing efforts. Let’s take you through three great solutions (in no particular order) for email marketing platforms for lawyers:
1. Mailchimp
Mailchimp is one of the most used and trusted platforms around, and it’s easy to see why. It comes with all of the features you need for a super-effective campaign. Plus, its interface is intuitive and easy to use.
It has one of the gentlest learning curves which makes it ideal for beginners with little experience in email marketing.
One of our favorite things about Mailchimp is that it comes with plenty of pre-built automation workflows, like these:
The platform also includes:
- A powerful segmentation tool
- Pre-built email templates
- Sign-up form templates
- Cross-device testing
- Campaign analytics and reports
So, you’ll have everything your law firm needs for a successful campaign.
2. HubSpot
HubSpot is an all-in-one marketing platform that can be used for email and many other marketing solutions. It comes with:
- Automation and segmentation features
- A drag-and-drop email editor
- A free CRM
- A landing page and sign-up form builder
- A/B testing
- A smart time zone-sending tool
And much, much more!
It’s a more complex tool than Mailchimp and the learning curve is steeper. Still, it shouldn’t take you too long to get the hang of it. For instance, designing emails is pretty straightforward as you can choose from its extensive library of pre-built templates.
As a result, HubSpot can be a real time-saver for those in the legal services niche and allows you to focus on the other aspects of running a busy law firm.
3. Moosend
Like HubSpot, Moosend has an easy-to-use drag-and-drop editor, meaning you can create highly engaging emails quickly.
It has a nice and simple sign-up form builder. Creating sign-up forms is essential for growing your subscriber list, so the platform you choose should come with form templates, like this:
Moosend also allows you to integrate the platform with other third-party software like:
- Salesforce
- Nudgify
- Zapier
- WordPress
- Facebook Ads
Additionally, Moosend has a sender score of 98%. This means emails sent from the platform are considered very trustworthy and have high deliverability rates.
Email Marketing Metrics That Law Firms Should Be Tracking
Once you’ve chosen a platform and set up your email marketing campaign, you need to ensure you’re properly measuring the performance of your emails. To do this, you can use the analysis tool that should be included with your platform. This will allow you to track various metrics, including:
- Open rate: The percentage of emails opened by recipients once they were received.
- Conversion rate: The percentage of recipients who completed a desired action (booking an appointment, hiring your firm, etc.).
- Click-through rate (CTR): The percentage of recipients who clicked on a link in an email.
- Unsubscribe rates: The percentage of recipients who opted out of receiving further emails after receiving one or more of your emails.
- Bounce rate: The percentage of emails that weren’t delivered.
- Spam complaint rate: The percentage of emails that were marked as spam by recipients.
To give you an idea of what tracking these metrics looks like, here’s an example from Mailchimp:
These metrics show you which elements of your campaign are performing well and which aren’t. You can then use this data to improve your overall strategy and get far better results
Conclusion
Email marketing offers your law firm a cost-effective way to engage with your clients, build trust, and increase revenue. If you follow best practices, like identifying clear goals, segmenting your audience, and complying with legal requirements, you can give your firm a competitive edge within the legal industry.
Remember, the marketing platform you choose needs to have pre-built automation workflows, segmentation capabilities, and all the other key features outlined in this article. This will give you the best chance of creating a highly effective campaign.
FAQs
How can a law firm grow its email list?
Some of the best ways you can grow your law firm’s email list include:
- Providing free resources like guides and ebooks related to legal topics in exchange for sign-ups.
- Offering free consultations in exchange for contact information.
- Placing optimized sign-up forms on your website and sharing them across your social media channels.
- Creating high-quality, relevant blog posts that engage your target audience and encourage users to sign up for your list.
When is the best time to send marketing emails for law firms?
There isn’t one specific time that’s guaranteed to improve performance metrics for law firms. It’s a learning that comes from testing, especially by intended audience type. A great place to start would be sending marketing emails on weekday mornings. This is when users start their day, are most alert, and can tend to engage more with emails.
