Even though online marketers seem to come up with new strategies almost weekly, email marketing remains one of the most reliable and profitable forms of online marketing. As social media continues to grow and content marketing techniques dominate SEO methods, email marketing continues to show a strong track record and high rate of success.
If your law firm wants to get the most out of email marketing, though, it’s important to do everything you can to create campaigns that maximize lead generation and minimize costs. Following are eight essential tips that will help you to do exactly that.
Don’t Overcomplicate Email Marketing
One of the biggest causes of failure with email marketing is simply overcomplicating the whole process. Compared to other digital marketing techniques, email is pretty straightforward and easy to understand. Whether it’s going to ten people or ten thousand, the bottom line is that you are just writing an email. Writing a good email message is going to do more for you than any other “trick” you might come across.
1. Use Relevant Subject Lines
Subject lines have the potential to make or break an email campaign. In an email message, the subject line serves the same purpose as the headline on an article. It’s a big factor for drawing clicks.
While you can’t guarantee that any email gets opened, you can almost guarantee that people are going to see that subject line in their list of new emails. Make sure the subject line of the messages you send are relevant, interesting, and most of all, they tell the reader what they can expect to see if they open the email. If you’re giving away an e-book, putting on a webinar, or have something else of value for your readers, don’t try to be overly creative and surprise them. Put it right in the subject line and get them excited to see what’s inside.
2. Keep Designs Clean
Sloppy design and formatting can make someone close your email just as quickly as they opened it. It gives an instant impression of a lack of professionalism and can drive away leads that would have otherwise converted.
If you are running a do-it-yourself campaign, you should strive to keep things as simple as possible. Write your messages the same way you would write any other email and don’t try to be too fancy with anything.
If you’re looking for a bit more than a plain black and white email message, you can hire a professional designer to create something for you, or check with your email service provider to see if they have ready-made templates you can use.
3. Strive For Easy Readability
Every email message your firm sends out needs to be easily readable and digestible. You should use large, clear fonts that readers won’t need to squint to see. Make sure the body of your message is easy to scan, just like you would a blog post. Make important points bold, or use bullet lists to make them easy to see. Above all, be sure your call to action (CTA) is clearly visible.
Write your messages assuming that the recipients will be reading it while they are doing something else like commuting to work or waiting in line. This will help you to streamline your messages and make sure that you’re highlighting the most important information.
4. Define The Purpose Of Each Email
Complete email campaigns can be made up of just a few individual messages or a few hundred messages. Either way, each individual message should have a clearly defined purpose as it’s put together.
With one message you may want to educate the readers about a certain area of law. With another message you might be trying to get people to sign up for a webinar. Next, you might be trying to drum up some attention for your social media presence. Whatever it is that you want to accomplish with each email message, you should have that purpose in mind right from the beginning and stick to it as you go through the process of creating the message.
Details That Can Make A Difference
Going beyond the basics of just writing a good email message, there are several things you can do to make each message more effective. By keeping an eye on some of the less obvious details, you can tune your messages and campaigns to continually get better results over time.
5. Use Specific Targeting
No matter how big or small your email list is, you’ve probably got more than one audience under the surface. Some subscribers might be older while others are younger, and there are probably people interested in different types of services that your firm provides.
If you seperate each of these subgroups and market to each of them with messages designed for their specific interests, you will be much more successful at converting leads.
6. Write Engaging Content
Just like blog posts, if you want people to read your emails, the content has to be engaging, relevant, and interesting. Everything should be coherent, not a mismatch of random topics just there to fill up a page.
Short and interesting articles in your emails will get your readers back to your website, your blog, or wherever else you’d like to direct them.
7. Test Your Messages
Even if your campaigns are doing well, it’s important to keep testing new ideas. You never know when you’ll come across something that can boost your returns even more.
Most email service providers will allow you to conduct A/B testing. The basic idea is that you can send out two similar messages with specific differences, like subject line or the wording of a call to action, and see which generates a better response. When the test is complete, you can pick out the characteristics of each batch that worked the best and use those to improve future emails.
8. Analyze And Tune
The most important thing to remember is that email marketing is not a “set it and forget it” kind of thing. You should regularly monitor things like open and click-through rates to make sure everything is going as planned. Sometimes just a small change in content can take your messages from people’s inboxes to their spam folders. If you’re not watching what’s going on, results could be disastrous.
At the same time, you may need to make changes to keep open rates stable. If people start to think they’re just seeing the same thing over and over again they will understandably lose interest.
It doesn’t matter if your firm is just starting out with email marketing or if you’ve been doing it for a long time. For the beginner, these guidelines will help you get started on the right foot. For the veteran, they will help you to continually improve the results you achieve. Either way, you’re sure to find what the rest of the marketing world already knows, email marketing is, without a doubt, one of the most effective digital marketing methods available.
