Instantly Improve your Law Firm’s Email Deliverability

Email deliverability may not be something you think much about. In fact, if you’re unfamiliar with the term, email deliverability refers to the rate of emails that actually make it into a subscriber’s inbox. With increased security challenges and spam blockers that are more savvy than ever, it’s important to be intentional when sending an email to make sure your audience even receives it. We have some tips on things you can do to improve your email deliverability rate. A couple of them are a little more technical, but generally, these are best practices to keep in mind every time you put together an email campaign.

1. Authenticate your email with SPF and DKIM. This refers to enabling Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM) so that you are less susceptible to email spoofing (someone taking control of your email domain). That can lead to a decreased credibility with ISPs because they don’t know that you are who you say you are. Email authentication can get a little tricky, so if you don’t have the technical resources on staff, ask us for assistance and we’re glad to walk you through the process.
2. Maintain proper email infrastructure. As you send more emails, you’ll need to make sure your program can scale. If you reach 25,000 daily emails, you’ll need to send them on a dedicated IP address. A further consideration here is that before you send emails to your entire list, you need to gain some credibility with ISPs.
3. Pay attention to the opt-in process. This doesn’t require much technical savvy, but some marketing smarts. How you collect email addresses in the first place matters. It’s essential that you send email only to people who have chosen to receive them, not those who weren’t aware or didn’t agree to receive messages from you. Many marketers now use a double opt-in process which ensures more success in cultivating an engaged email list.
4. Don’t use spammy subject lines. This tip has become marketing 101, but as a reminder: ISPs will filter subject lines that have commonly used spam words, such as “Free” (especially capitalized). For example, you want to avoid subject lines like “FREE Divorce Consultations” or “Risk-free litigation advice”.
5. Give your recipients choices. Once people have opted in to receiving emails from you, give them options about the frequency or subjects of emails. You can even create a “communication preferences” page on the website where they can select these options. This will lead to much better engagement, which is great for long-term deliverability.
6. Keep your list clean. It’s not fun to deduct people from a marketing database, but if they are not active or engaged they can hurt your email deliverability over time. Periodically, you should pull data on your email list and clean it up accordingly.
7. Don’t buy email lists. This is an often-used way to expand email lists, but unfortunately those individuals didn’t opt-in to your marketing and such lists often have “spam traps” included that are designed to catch marketing email. The legal industry is particularly targeted for list buying, but it’s important to build your own list over time or risk getting dinged on deliverability.
8. Send emails that people actually want. Easier said than done sometimes, right? However, it’s critical that you are pleasing your email recipients with your content. Without doing so, they are likely to unsubscribe or place you in a spam folder. If you create email that people want to read, your email deliverability will take care of itself!

What have you done lately to improve your email deliverability? Let us know in the comments, and feel free to drop us a question if we can help you!