An Email Marketing Checklist for Law Firms

In the world of digital marketing, email marketing is, without a doubt, the most effective way to convert contacts and leads into clients. With email you have the opportunity to create a one-on-one conversation that instills trust and brings leads and potential clients closer.

Most of all, once you have someone’s email address, you have the ability to continue your marketing efforts over time. You have a direct connection that can’t be duplicated with any other marketing method.

Capturing email addresses and putting together a regular newsletter should be a top priority in your law firm’s digital marketing strategy. If you’re not taking advantage of email marketing, you are missing out on one of the most effective tools you can use to generate new clients for your law practice.

If you have never put together an email newsletter, or even if you’re already using email but not getting the results you’re after, the following checklist will get you well on your way to optimizing the ROI of your email marketing campaigns.

✅  Make it easy for people to sign up. First and foremost, you need to find people to send your newsletter to. It should be incredibly easy for people to subscribe. Especially if your firm is using blog software like WordPress, you should have an email signup form that appears “above the fold” on every page of your site. Popups that appear as someone scrolls down the page, or when they seem to be exiting the page, also work very well.

You’ll find plugins for most platforms that can help you set this up. Email service providers will also provide help if you need it.

✅  Send your newsletter at least once a month. The main idea behind sending a newsletter is to keep your law firm top of mind with your readers. As a minimum, you should send out a newsletter at least once per month. If you can generate enough relevant content, sending one out weekly should provide even better results.

✅  Draw readers back to your website. The overall goal should be to entice readers to return to your website. Ideally, newsletter links should lead to more content that will interest readers, or to specific landing pages designed to convert them into new clients.

✅  Track statistics. Just like everything else you do within your firm’s marketing efforts, it is essential that you track your results. You should be looking at how many emails are opened, which links within the emails generate clicks, and how many readers end up back on your website.

✅  Use those statistics to optimize send times. Once you’ve sent out a few newsletters, you will undoubtedly see certain patterns develop. If you see higher engagement rates at certain times or on certain days, you should schedule emails to go out at those times. In general, emails sent in the middle of the week between 10am and 12pm tend to get the best results.

✅  Never send emails on Friday. Friday is the end of the work week. People are anxious to get done and get home. It’s a terrible time to try to reach anyone. There is a very high chance your newsletter will be put off for next week — and then completely forgotten under a mountain of Monday morning emails — or it will be ignored altogether.

✅  Put thought into your subject line. The subject line of your emails can make a tremendous difference in how many people actually open and read your newsletter. One major email service provider released a report showing that subject lines can make the difference between open rates under 10% and others over 85%. SubjectLine.com provides a free tool to help you analyze your own subject lines for better performance.

✅  Keep it short. Remember, the idea is to draw people back to your website. Even if your subject line is enticing, nobody is going to read if they are greeted with a huge block of text when they open the email. Try to provide short, relevant, interesting points to draw readers back to your site for more content and information. Your newsletter should be a sort of digest, not the whole book.

If you follow this checklist as you put together your law firm’s email marketing campaign(s), you should start seeing results almost immediately. The process, obviously, is not very complicated. You just need to put some thought behind what you’re doing and who you are communicating with. Email marketing can actually be both the easiest and most effective part of your firm’s digital marketing strategy.

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