For law firms, email marketing isn’t only about sending updates about clients; it’s a key strategy to improve communication, build trust, and drive your business’ growth. In this article, we will cover the foundations of email marketing, including how to build a list of clients, craft effective messaging, and monitor the performance of your messaging.
A successful email marketing strategy can build (and strengthen) relationships with your clients, improve client retention, and generate new leads.
What is email marketing for law firms?
Email marketing can entail a wide variety of specialized services. Still, it describes the practice of using email to communicate with current clients, prospective clients, and other contacts to inform, educate, and building relationships with them.
Compared to other industries, email marketing is especially important for law firms as you’re not selling products but the value of your firm. You need to provide messaging that shows that you and your associates are accessible, have authority on the law, and are professional with all aspects of a client’s needs.
Email marketing for lawyers: why is it important?
Email marketing provides numerous benefits for legal professionals at every stage of your services. For prospective clients, regular messaging can position your firm as a reliable expert on all matters. Consistent messaging will also ensure that you won’t be forgotten as an option, and can even convert prospective clients if the messaging is persuasive
For current clients, email marketing is an effective solution to solidify those relationships as regular emails will keep past and current clients engaged and aware of your services whenever they need them. And furthermore, email marketing is proven to show a higher return on investment at a lower cost than paid advertisements.
What does law firm email marketing look like?
When it comes to your email marketing strategies, you must first decide what you’re trying to accomplish. Email marketing can take many different forms. Here are some of the most common types of email marketing options:
- Client Newsletters – These regularly scheduled emails can take the form of blog content, event invitations, or standard emails, and provide your clients with the firm’s newest updates, helpful insights, and other general information..
- Educational Emails – These messages could include things like a FAQ for a common legal question you receive from prospective clients, detail law changes on a local or state level, or include practical legal tips that affirm your value to your client.
- Follow-up Sequences – These automated emails will go out whenever a client engages with your firm to make consultation appointments, follow-up meetings, or any other interaction with a client. They don’t need to be detailed, but they need to be consistent and demonstrate that the firm cares about the client. These can also include survey emails where you collect feedback from the client about their experience.
- Promo Emails—Send this messaging when you want to inform prospective and current clients about new services or incentive programs that your firm offers.
It will vary on a case-by-case basis of when you should use each of these kinds of messaging, but make sure that you understand that email marketing does require compliance with certain legal requirements. As a general tip, make sure that your emails always include your business name and address, an honest subject line, an easy way to unsubscribe, and are only sent to prospective clients who opted-in to receive emails from you.
Tips for Email Marketing for Law Firms
We’ve now defined email marketing and established why it’s valuable for law firms. It’s time to build an effective email list.
Build a high-quality list of leads
The first step in developing an email marketing strategy is creating a list of possible clients and defining them based on their status. With these targeted lists, you’ll be sure that the emails will reach the right audience and won’t be reaching those uninterested in your business. It also helps your law firm avoid spam complaints and mass unsubscribes that would provide you with unhelpful feedback.
It’s about curating your contacts and creating new sources for contacts. Website contact forms are the most prominent methods, but you can also disseminate free legal guides and consultation sign-ups and look for prospective clients at networking events. Or, if you have the resources, look into starting a blog! People searching for legal assistance may be taken to your content.
With that in mind, ensure you’re always using opt-in methods for emails to ensure compliance with CAN-SPAM and GDPR regulations. The CAN-SPAM Act establishes that commercial emails must include a way for the recipient to stop being sent the email. GDPR regulations outline the ways that you must process personal data. It goes without saying that you should never purchase email lists as that can not only break data protection laws but can also damage your reputation as a business.
Segment your lists and target smaller groups at a time
Next, you need to start dividing up that email list of prospective clients based on similar characteristics or interests and crafting messages catered to those groups. This is known as segmentation, a common marketing strategy that leads to higher engagement with your emails.
There are more specialized ways to segment your law firm’s email lists, but you can broadly divide them into categories like current, prospective, past, and miscellaneous partners. Each of these groups of people will want different messaging from you. Whereas current clients may be looking for ongoing case resources and legal updates, prospective clients may instead look for informational emails or legal success stories.
Similarly, previous clients or other resources may already be aware of your services and will instead want incentives or opportunities to connect or partner with you again. With legal services, this can be even trickier as you need to make sure that you’re not sending redundant or unhelpful material to a prospective client. For instance, a real estate planning client shouldn’t receive the same email as someone going through divorce proceedings.
Use engaging and eye-catching subject lines
It’s one thing to send the appropriate messaging to a client, but entirely another to capture their attention. Did you know that more than 60 percent of email recipients will decide whether to open or delete an email based on the subject line. That may seem intimidating, but there are a few best practices when choosing your subject lines.
When writing subject lines, keep them short and direct (under 50 characters). The language needs to be clear and focus on the benefit for the recipient. Also, avoid words like “free!” or “act now!” which can ping spam triggers and lead to your message ending up where no one can see it. Ideally, you would want something that’s to the point and specific, like “5 Misunderstandings about Misdemeanors.”
Provide value with every email
Every email you send needs to include helpful information whether it’s legal guides, case law updates, FAQs, and expert insights. When you need to explain complicated legal concepts, simplify these ideas for the clients. Clients want to feel comfortable when you talk to them.
As an example, here are a few sample content ideas for law firm emails:
- “What to Do After a Car Accident: A Step-by-Step Guide” (Personal Injury Firm).
- “New 2024 Divorce Law Changes—How They Affect You” (Family Law Firm).
- “5 Signs Your Business Needs a Legal Compliance Check” (Business Law Firm).
Include a strong call to action (CTA) in every email
Along with helpful information, every email needs to have a purpose and guide readers on what to do next when faced with an issue. These are known as Calls to Action, and they’re the lasting message you want to leave your client with. When deciding on your CTA, here are the best practices:
- Use actionable language: “Schedule a free consultation,” “Download your Legal Guide,” and “Read the full article.”
- CTAs need to be clearly visible within a paragraph as you want it to be the main message
- Focus on only one primary CTA per email to avoid confusion.
Maintain a consistent emailing schedule
Consistency is key with your messaging, as you want to build a relationship with the client and trust through regular communication. But just as with anything, exercise moderation. Don’t send too many emails, even if you’re not receiving the same engagement as you previously did.
Depending on individual circumstances and what’s available to send, law firms should generally send emails weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly. Set up an email calendar to coordinate and plan newsletters, legal updates, and promotions that will be sent to segmented audiences. It’s likewise important to automate follow-ups with clients after consultations to maintain engagement.
Track performance and adjust based on data
After your messaging has been sent, tracking its performance is essential. This can enable you to see which emails performed well and when to adjust strategies for messaging that is not being received positively.
When evaluating your emails’ performance, there are three key metrics to monitor: the open rate, click-through rate, and conversion rate. The open rate refers to how many recipients open the email. The click-through rate tracks when recipients click links and CTAs, and the conversion rate refers to engagement that leads to consultations, downloads, or calls.
Two easy ways to improve these results are to test different subject lines and content and to change the timing of your emails. By testing different subject lines and content, you’ll see how to change your messaging to better reach your clientele. By adjusting the timing of your emails, you’ll be able to tell if your content has a higher engagement rate when it’s sent at a different time.
Need help building a healthy email list? Let us help!
These are just a few suggestions about building a healthy email list for your law firm, but your strategy needs to be customized based on your goals. For an effective marketing campaign, law firms must regularly send substantial, well-targeted emails that build trust with and engage with their clients. But you also need to test and optimize those email campaigns to ensure highly specific metrics improve.
It’s an overwhelming task, but you can always turn to the experts to help. Do you want to attract more clients and improve your communication with current clients? Ranq is a results-driven SEO digital marketing agency that offers a full suite of services to clients ranging from blog content to optimizing website visibility to in-depth performance tracking. Learn how we can help today.