News
Email Marketing for Busy Attorneys
It seems like new digital marketing tools are constantly being rolled out—and each one is championed as the latest and greatest thing. To be clear, we think there’s great value in cutting-edge digital marketing platforms, whether it’s Snapchat or Instagram, but we don’t let the new hotness distract us from those things we know to be tried and true. As a case in point: Email! There’s certainly nothing flashy about email, yet many marketers will attest that it’s the single best way to stay connected with customers and clients.
In particular, lawyers can benefit greatly from a robust email marketing campaign. And the good news is, you can make email marketing work even if you’re extremely busy (which most lawyers are). It takes a relatively small investment of time to make email marketing effective, and the results can exceed what you’d get from a comparable investment in Facebook or Twitter.
Routine is Key
The most important aspect of email marketing is commitment. Simply put, starting an email newsletter and then sending it out just once a year probably isn’t going to be worth your time. It should be like clockwork—something your clients can expect to receive from you on a regular basis. Start off slow if you must, once a month is a good starting point. From there, increase the frequency as you need to, and your audience grows.
Segment Your Audience
Another important aspect of email marketing is choosing the right audience.
For example, say your practice focuses equally on personal injury and on estate planning. It can be tough to combine those two fields into one email newsletter, so we’d recommend picking one route to focus on. You might segment your email newsletter, sending it only to your estate planning clients, and make the content exclusively focused on estate planning matters.
Ambitious attorneys could even have multiple newsletters they send out, catering to different segments of their clientele—but again, you may want to start small.
Curating Content
When it comes to the content of your email newsletter, brevity is key. That’s good news, because it means you don’t need to spend a lot of time typing long messages! Some recommended approaches to your newsletter content:
- Start with a quick introduction—just a paragraph or so greeting clients and letting them know of anything new that’s going on in your firm or in the industry.
- Curate content, either from your firm’s blog or from third-party sources. For example, for estate planning lawyers, you might link to an interesting new estate planning article you saw in The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal, along with just a sentence or two of your commentary.
- Provide some quick “tips and tricks”—for example, a short bulleted list reminding people what they should do to get their estate planning in order, what to do if they are ever in a car accident, etc.
- If your firm is sponsoring or participating in any local events—for example, if you’re appearing as a panelist somewhere—you can quickly summarize this event and provide relevant links or registration information.
- Always conclude with a call to action, and note that this doesn’t have to be too long or salesy; just a quick sentence inviting people to stay in touch will do just fine.
Once you choose a template, get your list segmented, and develop a routine, this process can become easy to manage. With that said, you may still want to talk to a professional about the value in email marketing, and about the ways in which it fits into an integrative marketing plan.
Driven2020 is here for that conversation! We have ample experience providing marketing services for attorneys and would love to talk you through your available options. Reach out to us today to start that dialogue.
