5 Ways to Get More Attention From Your Law Firm’s Newsletters

Newsletters are an excellent way to kill many birds with one stone, but there’s a fine balance between utilizing the tool properly and having your emails land in your client’s spam box. Finding a way to both engage and inform your target audience can be extremely tricky, but with the help of these five tips, your law firm’s newsletters are sure to hold your clients’ attention.

1. Simplicity is Key

While your newsletter certainly should serve to inform your clients, let’s be real, sometimes legal talk can get a little dry. Even if you’re not the next Jimmy Fallon, incorporating a little humor and making your newsletter more lighthearted can go a long way in regards to keeping the attention of your clients. An easy way to incorporate this into your next newsletter is by using more colloquial language and less legal jargon. That way, not only will the information be easy for clients to understand, but seemingly less dense as well which will improve open and click rates over time.

2. Use Visuals

It’s no surprise that the attention span of an average human being has decreased drastically over the course of the past couple decades. With the rise of social media platforms such as Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat, there’s a heavy emphasis on the ideology “less is more”. Using visuals to supplement some of the text in your newsletter is a great way to catch the attention of your audience – people who may not have the time nor interest to simply read. However, be careful when using this tool as sometimes, it simply isn’t appropriate or relevant and an overuse of visuals can actually lead to your email being categorized as spam.

3. Keep it Short and Sweet

Consider how much time you have to read emails. Not much? Your clients have busy lives too. Often, when readers see hundreds of words in small text in an email, they aren’t encouraged to read the newsletter, rather they become quite overwhelmed. Limiting your word usage and keeping your firm’s thoughts to the point can significantly aid in holding the attention of your audience and not scaring them off right away. In a study conducted involving B2B newsletters, researchers found that the optimal newsletter length to be approximately 241 words. Keep the text short and link back to your law firm’s website for full length articles and alerts – not only will this increase engagement, but it will also draw readers to your site.

4. Include External Content

Frequently, firm newsletters tend to contain little more than company news. While this is no doubt the purpose of a newsletter (to some extent), the audience can only read so much about you. The key to increasing the number of users that thoroughly read your newsletter is to include content that particularly applies to them. Showing off curated content is an excellent way to bring in external news that could be related to either the legal industry and your firm’s practice areas. Not only does this offer variety to your audience, but it shows clients and prospects that your firm is well-versed in current news and trends in the industries you work in.

5. Get Personal

Now this doesn’t mean you have to ring your client’s doorbell and hand deliver your newsletter, but it does mean people like to feel special, and your clients are no exception. To add a little of that special touch people crave, personalizing your newsletters can go a long way in making your audience feel as though you as a firm are speaking directly to them. Not only will this boost your audience’s interest in your emails, but your click rates too. How do you do this you ask? Name or company personalization can be incorporated in various aspects of email marketing from the subject line to the greeting prior to the actual newsletter. Further, with the use of certain automation tools or CRM software, you can segment your email list in order to create several newsletters that are more targeted to specific client groups.

Takeaway

Newsletters have been a part of email marketing campaigns in the legal industry and numerous others for many years, proving to be an integral tool for dispersing information to clients. However, the balance between informative and boring has proved to be quite difficult to strike, and one that requires firms to think outside of the box. Using these five tools, your firm’s newsletter is sure to attract the attention of more of your clients. Still need assistance with altering elements of your newsletter? Make sure to contact us so we can help.