Essential Email Marketing Guide for Attorneys

Finding a client base is a constant exercise for lawyers. It requires hard work, consistency, ingenuity, and persistence. One cannot build a successful law firm overnight. However, one can drastically lessen the time consumed to get the business right in front of ideal clients. Law firm email marketing is the best way to do so.

It helps you generate lead magnets, and also maintain constant contact with your current as well as potential clients 24/7. So, are you ready to integrate email marketing into your business practices or revitalize your current email marketing strategy? We are glad if your answer is ‘yes’.

Steps to Implement Law Firm Email Marketing

1. Identify your Audience

Audience form the most crucial part of any law business. Owning them by providing true value plays a significant role in business success. But, to own the audience, one needs to know who they are! You cannot merely implement a ‘one size fits all’ strategy in law marketing. Clients have different needs, so expecting them to respond similarly to the same email is pointless.

You need to define your ideal clients before deciding whom to send your newsletter. Once you know your clients and their interests, you can send across personalized emails, which results in 18 times more revenue than any general message.

For instance, if your clients are HR managers in larger companies, it makes sense to send messages or updates concerning the changing HR landscape. Or, if the clients have come to you for financial services, you can approach them with a perfect email campaign right around tax time.

2. Build Recipients List

Email marketing has a hard and fast rule – You are not supposed to email someone who hasn’t specifically opted-in to receive your newsletter. So, if you are planning to create a weekly newsletter that your readers look forward to every week, try building an accurate email list first. And, this list should contain only those people who are genuinely interested in your content.

There are two ways to build a list of email recipients. Build it yourself or pay for a list of email contacts. Creating a list is a labor-intensive task, whereas the latter option gives you access to the thousands of people quickly. But, if you are choosing this method, we recommend you to be vigilant while picking the suitable email list vendor in the market.

In case you opt to build the recipient list yourself, here is a list of exercises to do.

  • Make a list of current clients, previous clients, or search your address book, LinkedIn contacts, Facebook, and other social media friends to determine who may be interested in your business.
  • Ask yourself the following questions:
  • Do they know me or my business personally?
  • Does this person fit my audience type?
  • Does this person need my legal services in the future?
  • Will this person likely be interested in receiving my weekly/monthly newsletter?

Answer these questions honestly. If you find the answer as “yes” to all the above questions, add them to your email list without a second thought.

3. Share Relevant Content

Once you know your audience, you must determine the type of content they would like to receive. The key here is to select the content type that is meaningful, relevant, engaging, and valuable to the clients.

Few ideas for attorneys include:

  • Law firms newsletter or an editorial forward
  • Articles that necessarily answer the client’s queries
  • Free legal advice snippets for tailored marketing approach
  • Interesting and relevant video content
  • Special event notification or reminder
  • Interesting reads or your website blog posts

Sometimes, attorneys find it harder to come up with something to say a week in and week out. Especially if they have only a few minutes of free time between client meetings. In such cases, you can go for the automated tools that help you personalize the content as well as send it to the clients all by itself.

4. Compose Your Email

The next step is to write an effective email that is digestible as well as understandable for the audience who are not into the legal profession. Keep in mind that the goal of your email marketing is to gain new clients or generate referrals that produce hot leads. So, make sure to keep your email personalized that appeals to the audience effortlessly.

Now you have a great email content. But how about perfecting the subject line? No matter how awe-inspiring is your content, it won’t matter unless you are capable of compelling the recipients to open it. Hence, to motivate the people to read your emails, you have to create a stimulating subject line.

Consider some of the subject lines with question pattern.

  • Are you ready for the Tax Time?
  • Does Hiring our Firm Makes Financial Sense for Your Business?
  • What Should Millennials Know About Real Estate Planning?
  • How Attorneys Can Help You in Your Divorce?

Start listing out subject lines for your email campaign. Don’t worry about how good it is; just write it down. Then, look over your lines and review them from the recipient’s perspective. It helps you identify the best subject line that will more likely inspire your readers to open your email. This process hardly takes 10 minutes but offers a huge opportunity to get in front of potential clients.

5. Stick to Your Schedule

If you are happy with the email you have composed, pause for a while. Do not just click send to all the prospects. You have to schedule the email marketing campaign so that your messages are read.

Your recipients love to receive the emails during their free hours or any particular time of the day. So, think about it before hitting the send button. Understand how your ideal clients spend their day and then determine the right time when they are ready to invest a few minutes in reading your message. Feel free to experiment.

However, make sure to create a schedule that fits into your busy routine. If you are capable of delivering quality emails only once in a month, then try sending monthly messages. Don’t settle for sending poor quality emails by over scheduling. Always plan ahead a quality content that has to be sent at the right time.

Also, stick to the schedule you have set and stay consistent. Set a reminder a few days before to prepare the content. Later, you can set one more reminder to review your message one last time and send it straight away.

That’s it, folks!

Email marketing takes a bit of patience and practice. But if you consider the advice and the tips mentioned in this write-up, you can reap the benefit from this approach pretty easily. So, spend some time on it, figure out what works best for your law firm, and implement them for faster results.