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A Quick Guide To Email Drip Campaigns For Law Firms

by Kevin Vermeulen • August 31st, 2017 • Legal Marketing | Blog

Law Firm Email Drip CampaignsA great way to stay top of mind with clients and prospects, deliver value, and nurture relationships is with automated email drip campaigns.

The idea is that you can segment your email audience into different groups and fine tune the messages that each segment receives.

Why Law Firm Email Drip Campaigns Make A Difference

Assuming that your firm is collecting email addresses and building a list of subscribers, you have three basic options available when it comes to following up with those subscribers. You can:

  1. Compose and manually send each email out to your list of subscribers
  2. Send pre-written automated messages to your list
  3. Use a combination of options 1 and 2 to communicate with your list

Option three is going to be the best choice for most. Manually written messages can be sent when there is special news you want to get out to your audience, but most of the time, pre-written, optimized and targeted messages will bring the best results.

For example, you can create custom “welcome” messages for new subscribers based on how they signed up. People interested in services related to family law could receive one message while people interested in personal injury services and information would receive another.

You can even create entire series of emails that would go to specific groups based on interests or actions

Let’s take a look at how to set up a brand new drip email campaign:

Identify Your Target Audience

First, determine who’s your target audience. You can do this breaking your list of email subscribers into segments. 

Make the segments as specific as possible. For example, if some of your subscribers are students in their early 20s, you’ll want to send them drip emails that are different from those you would send to retired people in their 70s.

You can also segment your list by profession, title, location, e-book downloaded, or webinar attended. Note that each member in your email list can belong to more than one segment. 

Once you have your basic segments worked out. The next step is to think about triggers you’ll include in your email messages to help your further refine your audience segments and the messages they receive.

Types Of Triggers

Two types of triggers that you can use in your campaigns are actions or demographics.

Action triggers are just what they sound like. They are put into effect when a someone completes a certain action.

For example:

If you send a general email about areas of law your firm handles, you might include links to more information about corporate law, criminal law, family law, and so on. Each of those links could be set up as a trigger, so that when a reader clicks one of them, he or she is moved into specific audience segment that will receive more specialized emails in the future, designed to cater to that specific interest.

Demographic triggers are — you guessed it — set off based on some piece of demographic information.

For example:

If someone has been on your email list for a specific period of time, like 6 months, and has not set off any other triggers, you could send them a specific chain of emails designed to get them engaged with your firm again. You might offer them a limited free consultation or a promotional rate on services, or maybe just a short survey full of triggers asking them to indicate the areas of law they are interested in learning more about.

Writing Your Message

Now that you know who you are going to target, you need to think about what you are going to say. You need to write a message that is clear, straight to the point and works in line with the triggers you’ve set up.

When you write your message, be sure that it is written with your firm’s brand voice and that it includes a call to action.

Related: An Email Marketing Checklist for Law Firms

Planning Your Campaign

Think about how many emails you’re going to send each of your subscribers, when they’re going to receive them, and what order they will arrive in.

At this stage, you may already have an idea as to what your message is, but again, you need to make sure that it works with the actions the audience has triggered. This will ensure that each subscriber is getting messages that are highly relevant to the interests they have shown.

Starting Your Campaign

Once you have everything in place, it’s time to start your initial campaign. It’s more or less like flipping a switch to turn the machine on and let it do its thing.

Everything should run on autopilot at this point. As more messages are sent out and you get more feedback from your audience, the individual segments of your email list should become more accurate, allowing you to make your marketing more specific. Like most things in digital marketing, the key is to watch your results and make adjustments based on what’s working and what’s not.

Measure The Effectiveness Of Your Campaign(s)

It doesn’t matter why you have set up a campaign: be it to gain you more clients, update subscribers on your new range of services, or to stay top of mind. You need to measure the results of each email you send out in order to fine tune future campaigns to maximize results.

Your email service provider should provide some sort of analytics. You should also be able to combine their numbers with your own analytics from your firm’s website. This should give you a fairly clear picture of how people are reacting to your email messages.

Summary

It can be a tedious and time consuming process to get a drip email campaign put together, but because of the hyper-efficient and automated targeting, the results are well worth it. It may take days or weeks to get everything exactly where you want it, but once it’s working, you’ll have something that can run for months or years, completely automated, constantly working to bring your firm new clients, and ultimately more revenue.

See more on how to get help crafting an integrated email marketing strategy and setting up and automating email drip campaigns

Check out the helpful infographic from Salesforce Pardot, a marketing automation application: The Basics of Drip Campaigns [INFOGRAPHIC]

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