Email is still one of the most reliable forms of communication for legal businesses. With more and more clients having access to mobile devices like smartphones, the attorney, and other legal professionals can now interact remotely through email more than ever before.

Therefore, this means that email is a medium that should not be taken for granted by law firms. When it comes to marketing, this handy and cost-effective tool helps you reach out to your target market from any given location. That said, there are several other benefits that your legal business can earn through email marketing.

• Connect with the people quickly and efficiently as they regularly check their email inboxes.
• A well-written customized message can meet the needs and whims of the clients.
• Drives a higher conversion rate than other communication mediums such as social media, telemarketing, etc.
• Builds credibility in the market by offering real value to the subscribers.
• It requires a low operation cost, thereby saves you from spending on the unnecessary marketing approach.

With the advantages mentioned above, email marketing will always be one of the best options for a law firm looking for clients. However, if your law firm is new to digital marketing, then you may be unaware of the power and approaches of designing a focused email marketing strategy.

To help, we have outlined the best practices for law firm email marketing. Follow them to refresh your legal brand in no time.

1. Use the Website to Gather Subscribers

Ensure you have a good number of subscribers on your email list. If not, optimize your existing website to draw the attention of visitors to the lead generation forms. Do not wait for a prospect to sign up for a form or directly connect with the lawyers. You won’t reap great ROI with email marketing if your list has fewer or zero subscribers.

If you did not know, 96% of clients seeking legal advice begin with the usage of a search engine and 74% of them always visit a law firm’s website to proceed with further action.

This indicates the perfect opportunity for attorneys to collect email addresses of new prospects and get in touch with them.

However, 86% of law firms fail to do so. If in case, you can do this on your website, you have already gained a massive advantage over the competitors.

2. Rightly Segment your Email List

Stop using mass email communication to reach out to the subscribers, especially in the law firm specializing in multiple practice areas. Not all your subscribers are interested in your generic message. Therefore, by reaching out to the prospects with the same content, you will likely turn out to be counterproductive.

For instance, clients using your legal services to resolve their corporate issues should not be receiving the same email as a prospect who has approached your firm for divorce.

Start by segmenting your email list to resolve such issues. The simple technique is to segment your subscribers into different categories, such as their age group, geographic location, area of interest or concern, etc. You can also segment those lists further based on other unique needs.

Email list segmentation is proven to produce impressive results. MailChimp has surveyed about 2,000 users of their platform using segmentation, and determined the following outcome:

Campaign Metric	Average Performance
Opens	14.31% higher than non-segmented campaigns
Unique Opens	10.64% higher than non-segmented campaigns
Clicks	100.95% higher than non-segmented campaigns
Bounces	4.65% lower than non-segmented campaigns
Abuse Reports	3.90% lower than non-segmented campaigns
Unsubscriptions	9.37% lower than non-segmented campaigns

 

3. Autoresponders for Personalized Email

The automated email response system helps the law firm in creating personalized content on given time. For instance, it sends out birthday wishes or anniversary messages based on previously stored data. The popular email service providers, like MailChimp and ConvertKit, offer such tools that let you choose the parameters for a message to be sent on your behalf.

Apart from special days, legal professionals can also leverage such tools to trigger an automated message based on the customer’s buying journey. For example, they can set up a welcome note or a series of follow-up messages to move the customers into the sales pipeline.

Autoresponders work best for personalized messages that are focused on particular audiences. Here, you need to develop different messages for leads, prospects as well as existing current clients. You may use the same message, but configure the tools to customize the subject line with the subscriber’s name.

4. Optimize for Mobile Screens

Most of the clients check emails on their phones. Be it while traveling to the workplace or just about to go to bed, they open emails right from their mobile device. According to Litmus, around 47% of people open the email in mobile applications, followed by webmail and desktop in 2018.

Therefore, it is essential to optimize your marketing emails for mobile screens; otherwise, it will be a significant problem for your law firm. Some of the email marketing software like ActiveCampaign, MailerLite, etc. are capable of automatically optimizing the content for mobile devices. They provide visual email builders and easy-to-use interfaces to simplify your email creation task.

But with that said, it is always in your best interest to test out each campaign before you send it to your email subscribers.

5. Monitor your Email Metrics

Lastly, do not forget to analyze the campaign performance. This is the most common mistake committed by lawyers today. If you do not want to be one among them, start monitoring engagement statistics to see how your emails perform.

Email marketing software helps you in measuring the critical metrics for each campaign. Some of such metrics are shown below. Review those metrics to reap great results.

• Open rates
• Click-through-rate (CTR)
• Email forwards
• Spam rate
• Bounce rate
• Conversions

If you identify some campaigns that are performing lower than others, you can work on its content and structure to improve the email marketing ROI.

Wrapping Up

In many ways, email marketing is proven to be an ideal platform for legal businesses to broadcast the message in a targeted and measurable format. In addition to immediate views and actions, this marketing approach helps you build and maintain brand awareness in a world full of distractions. So, why delay? Integrate email marketing strategies into your existing marketing mix and generate a good number of leads quickly.