How Email Segmentation Can Help Law Firms Keep Clients Engaged
Those in the world of marketing know that you will see better results if you use segmentation as part of your email marketing campaign since potential clients appreciate personalization. According to a recent report on the industry from Emma Email Marketing, 21% of respondents never use segmentation,
Why Email Segmentation Matters
Research from eMarketer found that incorporating segmentation into your email marketing efforts or enhancing your current efforts will lead to better email engagement. When you’re sending out the right types of emails to the right people, you will have higher open rates and less unsubscribes per email. Individuals on your email list are a lot less likely to feel like you’re spamming their inbox when they’re consistently receiving content that is specifically useful to them. As a result, your law firm will see increases in revenue and qualified leads.
Ways to Segment Your Email Marketing
All that evidence is pretty convincing, but if you have one lengthy master list of emails, how do you even begin to segment it? Well, there are multiple options for segmenting your email marketing campaigns. Here are some email segmentation ideas for law firms to consider:
How they signed up. Did they fill out a form on your blog page to receive updates? Did they fill out a form to download an eBook or register for a webinar? Especially due to strict GDPR regulations, you want to make sure you’re sending people only the type of content they signed up for. But beyond that, you can segment your list based on this information.
Say a user downloaded an eBook called “Patents, Trademarks, and Copyrights: Know the Difference”. From this activity you can infer that they’re interested in Intellectual Property law. Take a look at these various types of marketing activities and segment individuals based on the practice areas they’re interested in or the types of content they’re interested in – then send them emails that are relevant.
Previous services used. In a similar vein to how a user signed up, you can segment lists based on your previous interactions with them. Are they a current client, past client, or prospective client? Existing and past clients may want updates on changes within your firm or emails related to the practice areas they were in need of before. Prospective clients who are still within the early stages of the buyer’s journey are more likely to benefit from case studies and useful tools and content that keep your law firm top of mind when they need legal services.
Level of engagement. Sending every email to unengaged clients isn’t the way to regain their attention. Hopefully list segmentation will reduce future disengagement, but for now, limit the number of emails you send to those who haven’t opened an email in awhile. You might even want to try a re-engagement campaign to explicitly give list members the option to fully unsubscribe or update their email preferences, enabling you to clean up your lists.
Geography. Many law firms have regionalized client alerts which give insights and updates on industry news in a specific area. That being said, clients in New York most likely don’t want local Texas updates. Filter your email list by state or region and only send local topics to the corresponding regions.
Final Tips
Although the possibilities for email segmentation are limitless, it is best to start simple if you are just introducing this practice into your email marketing. Don’t feel the need to try every segmentation option at once at your law firm. Instead, try two or three to see how they impact your open rates and the number of unsubscribes. This will allow you to adjust when necessary, whether that means adjusting the types of emails you send to each segment of subscribers or changing your segments.
Also, remember that your segments shouldn’t be static. Keep collecting data on your clients (with permission of course) in order to update your segments and create new segments in the future.
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