7 Best Email Marketing Strategies For Lawyers

As you know, clients could go for years before requiring your legal services again, and you’ll need to find creative ways to remain profitable.

Digital marketing is an essential growth channel for lawyers and law firms looking to attract new clients. Email marketing, in particular, is an effective tool that can help you build brand awareness, promote your business, attract new clients, and stay in front of the competition.

If done the right way, email marketing can play a key part in the overall growth and success of your digital marketing efforts. Keep reading to find out the most effective email marketing strategies you can implement right now.

Why Should Lawyers Use Email Marketing?

On average, the return on investment (ROI) for email is $36 for every dollar spent, which is higher than any other channel. Research by McKinsey shows that email remains a powerful marketing tool and is significantly more effective at acquiring new clients than social media – up to 40 times that of Facebook and Twitter combined!

So, if you haven’t started using email marketing yet as a lawyer or law firm, here are 6 reasons why you should:

1. Consistent, streamlined communication

Ask any client what their biggest complaint about law firms is, and they’ll likely say it’s poor communication. If you fail to keep in touch with your customers, they will find someone else who will.

Email marketing for law firms can help improve communication with your clients. You see, email marketing is applied in all stages of the sales funnel – from awareness to evaluation to purchase.

Whether you’re onboarding a new client, updating them with the casework, or billing, you’ll need to use email at some point.

2. Customer retention and loyalty

Emails also serve the purpose of informing clients, helping with retention, and even breeding customer loyalty. By keeping your clients in the loop with relevant updates, articles, and news, you help build relationships and retain more clients.

Once clients find you reliable, they are more likely to stick around and use your legal services when the need arises.

3. Increased website traffic

Email marketing allows you to bring more potential customers to your website with a smart call to action (CTA). Once on your website, they will find useful content that shows your expertise, testimonials, and the services you offer.

High-quality content helps boost conversion rates.

4. Boost brand awareness

Email marketing allows you to deliver personalized emails to the right people at different stages of their customer journey with email automation. By sending these periodic emails to your target audience, your firm’s brand and services remain top-of-mind when they need legal services.

5. Build your brand

By sharing useful content that helps your clients succeed in their goals, you showcase your expertise and become a trusted resource, which can create more business opportunities.

These efforts can open doors for more press coverage, article-writing opportunities, and other engagements, which are great for brand building.

6. Email is measurable

Almost every email marketing software allows you to tell exactly who is opening your emails, what they do once they open them (e.g., click on your links), and what they do when they visit your website. Emails also enable you to test different campaign messages and measure the response, in real-time.

How to Get Started with Law Firm Email Marketing

Getting started with your email marketing efforts boils down to three guiding principles:

Growing your email list. You’ll need a high-quality email list. To acquire it, be sure to contact only willing prospects who want to hear from you.
Publishing quality content. You’ll want to publish high-quality content that your prospects will find useful. The content shows your expertise in the field and can be effective in winning new clients and persuading them to take the desired action, such as booking a consultation or downloading content.
Utilizing email marketing software. Choose the right software that can automate emails so information can reach the right people at the right time, while tracking engagement, ROI, and helping with compliance.

7 Best Email Marketing Strategies for Lawyers

Hopefully, you now understand the importance of email marketing for your law firm and are eager to learn the best email marketing strategies for lawyers and law firms.

Well, below, we’ve compiled seven effective strategies to help you grow your email list and get the most from your email marketing.

1. Build a plan and create goals

Before anything, you need to define the S.M.A.R.T. goals that will drive your email marketing campaign. Once you understand the purpose of your law firm’s email marketing, you’ll know what you want to achieve and the expected results from your campaign.

Here are some common goals of law firm email marketing campaigns:

Generate leads
Build brand awareness and your firm’s visibility
Build your reputation as a lawyer or law firm
Keep in touch with past clients
Convert prospects into new clients

2. Build your email list

Obviously, the main step in email marketing (after you set goals) is creating your email list.

But, how do you build your law firm email list? Using lead magnets. These are free content pieces that are informative and valuable.

Lead magnets are accompanied by sign-up forms that capture the contact details of interested clients. The prospects will need to fill out the sign-up form before receiving the free content.

Remember, the content pieces should be designed to help your target audience with a problem. They should be focused on them – not you.

Here are some guiding questions to help you when creating lead magnets:

What does my target audience want to learn?
What are the most common issues my prospects complain about?
What are the industry trends?
What is my target audience searching for?

Some examples of lead magnets include:

eBooks
How-to guides
Worksheets, cheat sheets, or tip sheets
White papers
Invitation to subscribe to your newsletter
Webinars and community presentations
Resource libraries
Free consultations
Blog posts with sign-up posts in them

3. Segment your leads

A good thing with email marketing is that an email marketing tool simplifies the work of building your sign-up forms for downloadable content and automation sequences for prospects who have filled them out.

While your lead magnets do the most work to bring interested, target clients to you, you’ll need to segment your list to ensure each lead receives content relevant to them. We should mention that list segmentation has a major impact on your email marketing campaign.

According to data by Mailchimp segmented campaigns:

Have an average performance of 14.31 percent higher than non-segmented campaigns.
Have 100.95 percent better click-through rates than non-segmented campaigns.
Receive 4.65 percent lower bounce rates than non-targeted emails.

Given these statistics, the worst thing you can do for your law firm is to send prospective clients generic, automated emails. Keep in mind that their problem or case is personal, stressful, and usually scary. They need someone who understands their issues and cares about what they are going through.

That’s what segmentation helps you with. It allows you to personalize each email to show you understand their plight and care about them and their case. More importantly, it shows you care about them as individuals, not just as another prospective client.

You can segment your prospects using the following criteria:

By their stage in the sales funnel: leads who have downloaded informative or educational content are less engaged than those who have booked a consultation.
By legal focus: if your law firm offers multiple legal services, include a dropdown in your sign-up or consultation form. This allows you to segment leads by their entry.
By action: say your prospects have booked a consultation but failed to attend. You’ll need to add them to an email segment that delivers content and emails that persuade them to get back in touch.

4. Follow up after your first email

Your prospective client should receive an automated email immediately after signing up. Following up after that first email can increase reply rates by up to 30 percent.

This doesn’t mean bombarding your prospect with sales emails. Make them intentional. For example, after the “Thank You” email, you can follow it up with an “Any Questions” email to address any concerns they might have. You can then follow this up with a “Book consultation email.” Often, these emails are automated, and it’s essential that you segment your list to ensure they are relevant.

It’s also advisable to include a video in your email introducing yourself to your potential clients. Videos are more engaging and are great tools for clients to learn more about you.

5. Choose an email marketing solution

A dedicated tool can tremendously elevate your email marketing efforts. Email marketing platforms are effective and powerful when it comes to lead generation and sales. They can help you design your emails as well as the content of your emails.

They also allow you to schedule emails to ensure consistency and analyze your email campaigns to measure success rates. When looking for an email marketing solution, consider the following features:

Easy-to-use dashboard
A great design
Premade templates
Email automation
Mobile responsiveness
Native integrations and API
Cost
The platform’s scalability

You also want to opt for a tool that works seamlessly with your existing marketing stack, such as your CRM solution.

6. Optimize your emails for mobile

About three in five consumers check their email on the go (on mobile), and 68 percent view marketing emails on their smartphones 2-3 days per week. Therefore, you want to ensure your emails display well on mobile phones. Failure to do so and your emails may never be opened.

Worse, email recipients will automatically delete non-responsive emails and even unsubscribe from your email list.

7. Measure your results and keep improving

Once your email marketing campaign is up and running, it’s important to track the results, measure success rates, and look for opportunities to improve your strategies. Monitoring your email marketing performance allows you to maximize your marketing campaign efforts.

In addition, it ensures your time and money are spent on activities and prospects that will bring value to your business.

You can measure your results using a variety of metrics, including:

Open rate: the percentage of recipients who open your emails.
Click-through rate: the percentage of prospective clients who clicked a link inside the emails.
Unsubscribe (opt-out) rate: the percentage of prospects who unsubscribed from receiving future emails from you.
Bouncebacks: the number of notifications from your email service provider informing you that emails cannot be delivered to the intended recipients.

Using an email marketing solution that has built-in analytics can help you get accurate data on how your emails are performing. This analysis can inform your decision-making and help you take the right action or determine what needs improvement.

Top Email Marketing Tools for Lawyers

We’ve mentioned utilizing email marketing solutions for your email marketing campaigns severally. Below, we’ve listed the 7 best email marketing software for lawyers and law firms.

Mailchimp: offers templates and plenty of integrations and comes with an automation platform that allows you to set up intricate automated flows that automatically send emails when triggered by certain actions.
Constant Contact: apart from templates, it offers automation to segment lists, welcome messages for new subscribers, and sends emails based on triggers.
SendFox: an ideal option for users who want to scale their email marketing solutions.
Klaviyo: an excellent option for lawyers targeting specific personas. It also offers personalized recommendations so subscribers can see the content they want.
Hubspot: While it’s popularly known as an inbound marketing tool, Hubspot can be used for email marketing. It offers a powerful CRM to help you keep track of leads and prospects. It also allows users to create personalized emails for increased conversion rates, click-throughs, and open rates.
GetResponse: The tool offers in-built analytics that gives you insights into how prospects are interacting with your emails.
Zoho Campaigns: Zoho is an ideal tool that offers A/B testing in real time. It also gives you access to polls, surveys, and other tools that enable your firm to connect with subscribers and gain valuable consumer insights.

Grow Your Practice with Email Marketing

Creating marketing emails can be a complicated and time-consuming process. You can simplify this process by leveraging email marketing tools. When done correctly, email marketing can be a cost-effective way to attract and retain clients, and grow your business.

Most importantly, always review your results and success rates. Check the open and click-through rates and review your email marketing best practices to ensure they are up to par. And remember to optimize your subject lines to drive opens.