Email Marketing for Law Firms: Getting Started with an E-Newsletter

Email Marketing for Law Firms: Getting Started with an E-Newsletter

Discover why an e-newsletter is one of the smartest marketing investments your law firm can make.

With social media, mobile marketing, and other relatively new marketing tactics hogging the limelight, email marketing is often seen as outdated. However, email marketing is still one of the best marketing investments your law firm can make. The benefits of an effective e-newsletter include the following:

• Position you as a thought leader and expert in your field

• Attract new clients

• Attract referrals

• Encourage people to share your content and visit your website

• Spread the word about your services

The best law firm e-newsletters provide readers with useful news and information. The content tends to be short and sweet, describing legal issues in laymen’s terms. Legal e-newsletters give you the opportunity to demonstrate your expertise and provide advice and commentary on issues that affect your client base.

Done right, email marketing is a powerful tool for delivering targeted messages to your audience. Done poorly, however, email marketing can create a negative image of your law firm and even get email providers to label your messages as spam. The key to creating successful email newsletters is identifying your target audience and then crafting e-newsletters that resonate with their needs. If you only use email marketing to make announcements about your law firm, such as a new attorney joining your firm or a new office opening, your e-newsletters will likely be ignored or deleted. While it’s OK and even expected to include these types of announcements in your e-newsletters, the focus should be to provide your readers with added value.  

Developing Your Email List

Tapping into your law firm’s case management software or customer relationship management software is a great way to start building your email subscriber list. You can ask contacts to opt into your email subscriber list. You can also have employees at your law firm send out an email from their work email address, requesting professional contacts and vendors to opt into the e-newsletter. Other ways to gradually build up your email list include adding a sign-up form to your website, adding a subscription link to your email signature, posting links to your e-newsletters on your social media accounts (with a subscription link), and adding an email subscription link to your law firm’s Facebook page.

In addition to promoting your e-newsletter content, provide incentives that encourage people to subscribe to your email list, such as a free e-book, white paper, access to a video series, or downloadable kit. Such incentives give people another reason to subscribe to your email list by providing them with valuable, in-depth information about legal processes, courtroom procedures, their legal rights, and the like. 

Segmenting Your List

When building your email list, it’s best to segment your list into different groups based on your relationships with them. That will allow you to create targeted content and email marketing campaigns that align with each segment’s needs. For example, you could have separate lists for referring attorneys, Social Security disability clients, personal injury clients, vendors, etc.

Creating Content for Your E-Newsletter

If you don’t have a dedicated marketing staff member, designing and writing a regular e-newsletter can be a time-consuming and difficult endeavor. It may be easiest to start with a quarterly newsletter and then gradually transition to a monthly newsletter.

It’s important to write enticing email subject lines that encourage readers to click and open the email. It’s also essential to write in a distinctive brand voice while delivering high-quality content that is relevant to readers’ needs. Because people’s attention spans are short online, especially when reading emails, it’s crucial to create concise content that can be easily digested. The content should be engaging and informative, encouraging readers to come back and click to learn more.

You could require readers to click and visit your website in order to read the rest of your e-newsletter, or you could provide them with a call-to-action encouraging them to contact your law firm, follow you on Twitter, “like” your Facebook page, or download your free e-book. You should also feature social sharing buttons on your e-newsletters to encourage people to forward your content via email or share it on social media websites.
 

Launch an E-Newsletter for Your Law Firm with efelle’s MailFusion System

efelle builds clean, professional websites for law firms that capture your law firm’s brand image and help you generate more qualified leads online. Our professional legal websites come equipped with a complete content management system that includes a e-newsletter module, which allows you to easily create e-newsletters with a branded email template, build and segment your email subscriber list, create attractive e-newsletter sign-up forms to display on your website, and track the results of your email marketing campaigns. Please call 206.384.4909 or fill out our online contact form for more information about our web design and marketing services for law firms.