Email Marketing Tips For Law Firms

Email communication is arguably the best way for law firms to nurture leads and maintain existing relationships with their clients. It’s a cost-effective content marketing strategy that delivers a high ROI.

In fact, you can expect a $44 return for every $1 spent on your email campaigns.

Plus, it’s the way that your clients want to be contacted. 72% of adults in the US say that email is their preferred method of communication with businesses.

When your firm was small or just starting out, you probably only had a handful of clients to manage. In this case, it’s easy for you to stay in touch by emailing those clients individually.

But as your firm grows, it’s not reasonable or practical to do this manually. You’ll need to leverage email marketing software to your advantage for mass communication.

• Constant Contact
• MailChimp
• AWeber
• GetResponse

These are some of the top email marketing platforms available today.

But simply sending emails to your clients doesn’t automatically mean that the campaigns will be successful. If you want your emails to deliver results, you need to follow the tips and best practices for law firms that I’ve outlined in this guide.

Use Your Website to Generate Leads

You won’t have success with email marketing if you don’t have any subscribers on your list.

Don’t wait until a new client has been signed before you ask for their email address. Collect email addresses using lead generation forms on your website as well.

According to the National Law Review, 96% of people seeking legal advice start with an online search engine. 74% of people will take action on a law firm’s website.

This is the perfect opportunity for you to collect email addresses from new prospects.

These people may not need or want to sign on as a client today, but they’ll be willing to provide you with their email address. Then you can nurture those leads and turn them into clients in the future.

86% of law firms fail to collect email addresses from prospects. So if you’re able to do this on your website, it gives your firm a huge advantage over the competition.

Segment Your Subscribers

Email segmentation is crucial for law firms that specialize in multiple practice areas.

Just because you’re using mass email communication to reach your subscribers, it doesn’t mean that every single subscriber should receive the same message. If you try to appeal to everyone with one email, it will be too generic and end up being counterproductive.

But segmenting your subscribers into different categories will yield better results.

You should, at a minimum, have separate lists for prospects and clients. But you can segment those lists even further based on their needs.

For example, an existing client who uses your legal services for their business shouldn’t be receiving the same emails as a prospect who is considering your firm for their divorce.

Perfect the Subject Line

Your email marketing strategy will only work if the messages get opened. That’s why the subject line needs to be carefully crafted.

The average person receives 121 emails per day.

So if your subject line doesn’t jump out at them, the recipients will just skip over it, delete it, or potentially even mark your message as spam.

Furthermore, 47% of emails are opened based solely on the subject line.

It’s also worth noting that subject lines written to create urgency or exclusivity can increase open rates by 22%. So craft your subject lines to appear time-sensitive.

Personalized subject lines have a 50% chance of being opened. That’s why segmenting your subscribers, as we just discussed, is so important for optimizing the user experience.

Include a Video

So many law firms that I consult with want to send out emails, but they just don’t know what to send. Adding videos to your email marketing messages is a winning strategy for lawyers.

Studies show that legal firms using video content grow their revenue 49% faster on a year-over-year basis compared to firms that don’t use video.

If your law firm is targeting a younger demographic, then videos are an absolute must.

74% of Millennials say that videos are helpful for making decisions about using a service. 60% of that same group says that they prefer to watch videos compared to reading content.

Regardless of age, four times as many people would rather watch videos about services than read about them.

With all of this said, make sure your videos are high-quality. It’s worth investing in the right equipment to ensure that your content looks professional. Otherwise, your video messages can do more harm than good. 62% of people have a negative perception of law firms that publish videos of poor quality.

Optimize For Mobile Devices

How often do you check emails on your phone? I’m guessing at least once per day.

Sure—when you’re sitting at the office and using your computer then you might check on your laptop or desktop, but the rest of the day you’re using a smartphone for email.

You’re not alone. The current and prospective clients on your email list do the same thing.

Just look at the results of this study about email opens in the United States.

75% of people in the US say they use their smartphone the most to check emails. Furthermore, 61% of all emails in the United States are opened from a mobile device.

So if your legal marketing emails aren’t optimized for mobile screens, it’s going to be a major problem.

Most email marketing software, including the platforms I mentioned earlier, will automatically optimize your content for mobile devices. But with that said, it’s always in your best interest to test out each email campaign before you send it to your subscribers.

Add your personal email address to your list of subscribers.

Each time you write an email, send it to yourself before you send it to everyone else. Then open the message on your smartphone to see if everything renders properly.

Track Your Results

Don’t just send out emails and forget about them. This is a mistake that I see busy lawyers make all of the time.

You need to monitor your engagement statistics to see how your messages are performing.

Your email marketing software will have these critical metrics for each campaign. All you need to do is review them.

• Open rates
• Clicks
• Forwards
• Bounce rate
• Spam
• Conversions

These are the metrics that you should be focusing on the most.

If you see that some campaigns are performing better than others, then you can double down on those strategies. Make improvements to the email content that’s not yielding high results. But the only way to do this is by carefully monitoring the numbers of every campaign.

Final Thoughts

Your law firm needs to leverage email marketing.

But for those of you who have never done this before, it may seem like a lot to take on with your already busy schedule. Depending on the size of your firm, you’re probably already working 50 to 80 hours per week.

So if you need some additional assistance with digital marketing for your law firm, consider working with a legal marketing consultant.