Email Marketing for Law Firms: Tips for Building Effective Campaigns

Law firms are increasingly turning to digital marketing strategies to broaden brand awareness and maintain relationships with existing companies. With an average return on investment (ROI) of $36 for every $1 spent, email marketing offers one of the most effective channels for law firms to focus their marketing budget. High ROI is just one of the many benefits that email marketing can offer to law firms. Improved customer relations, increased web traffic, and increased brand awareness are just a few of the other benefits that email campaigns have to offer.

So, let’s dive into the realm of email marketing. We will cover some key strategies for law firm email campaign optimization and provide you with the knowledge you need to start crafting compliant and effective emails. 

Start With a Clear Goal for Each Campaign

As with any marketing campaign, each of your email marketing campaigns should start with a clear goal. That goal could be to drive traffic to your website, increase brand awareness, increase conversions, etc. Having a well-defined objective will guide you as you develop a plan for your campaign.

Analyze data from past campaigns, market research, and data around your target audience to create a buyer persona and inform where your efforts should be focused. A buyer persona is a representation of your ideal customer derived from researching your target audience and customer data. 

When highlighting your goals for the campaign, you can analyze your buyer persona to highlight any pain points that need addressing or analyze your broader marketing strategy to target areas that need improvement. 

Manage, Segment, and Update Your Email Lists

You can organize your email list into segments based on key characteristics that will allow you to create customized campaigns and target your audience depending on the goal of your campaign. Plus, by segmenting your email list you can run several marketing campaigns at the same time. Be sure to continuously manage and update your email lists so your segmentations remain representative of your goals and your customers’ position along the sales funnel.

The main characteristics that you can use to segment your email list are:

• Demographics
• Location
• Customer behaviours (past engagement with your brand, shopping habits, etc.)
• Psychographic characteristics (customer beliefs, values, interests, etc)

Always Focus on Providing Value

We receive a lot of emails and it is easy for your law firm’s email campaigns to get overlooked. For your email campaigns to be successful, people need to open your emails. But that’s easier said than done. The average open rate for emails in the legal service industry is only about 33%. How do you combat this? By creating email campaigns that provide real value to recipients.

Common Types of Email Campaigns for Law Firms

There are a lot of ways that your email campaign can provide value to your readers while fulfilling your marketing goals. The foundation of this is choosing the right type of email campaign for your audience and objectives, and creating content that is interesting, informative, or otherwise useful.

Some common email campaigns for law firms include:

• Newsletters–Update your audience about new promotions, blog posts, answer common questions, etc.
• Transactional emails–Eg. welcome emails when people sign up for your mailing list or book a consultation.
• Promotional emails–Promote new services and promotions, or incentivize engagement to prompt users to take action
• Survey emails–Learn more about your customers and collect feedback for your services by sending survey emails at critical times, like after the first consultation session.
• Drip campaigns–Automated emails sent to your audience based on actions they take signing up for a consultation, cancelling a session, registering for a webinar, etc. 

The Nitty Gritty of Email Marketing Design

As important as the content of your law firm’s email campaigns is the way you package that content. If you send a 10-paragraph wall of text as your newsletter, nobody is going to read it and you will lose subscribers quickly. Here are some basics for email design to guide your campaigns.

Keep Content Concise

Your emails need to be short and sweet, but not too short. As a rule of thumb, keep email campaigns between 50 and 200 words. If you have a lot to say, you are better off linking to a blog post, video, or other long-form content rather than putting it in an email. 

Here are a few other general guidelines for optimized email content:

• Use simple language–emails written at a third-grade level have the highest response rate
• Write short, captivating, and relevant subject lines 
• Include a call to action
• Create a footer with useful links like your social media accounts and an unsubscribe button

Aesthetics Matters

Email marketing services make it easy to create custom email designs or to use email templates to create visually engaging emails. You’ll want to keep your email design consistent with your brand and website design. Where possible, use images or videos to break up text or infographics to provide information in a more engaging manner. 

Optimize for Mobile

Roughly 85% of email users use a mobile device to check emails. You need to make sure your email is formatted to suit a variety of screen sizes and formats. Before you run your campaign, test the design on both desktop and mobile devices, especially if your campaign uses a lot of images or is configured heavily in HTML.

Keep Size in Mind

Remember that email services have limitations around file sizes and that users with slower internet connections will have trouble loading large emails. Email attachments cannot exceed 25MB and it is recommended not to exceed 100 KB in HTML size to avoid issues sending your email or displaying your content.

Be Diligent About Legal Compliance

As legal professionals, there is extra pressure to ensure your emails are fully compliant with Canadian laws and regulations. Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) outlines in detail the requirements and limitations for sending commercial electronic messages (CEMs).

Some quick guidelines for ensuring compliance in legal marketing include:

• Ensuring you have implied or express consent for all emails
• Maintain a record of all consents
• Include an easy method for users to opt out of emails
• Always include your business name, mailing address, and either your telephone number, email address, or website URL
• Write honest subject lines

Track Analytics and Perform Testing to Guide Future Campaigns

You won’t know what works and what doesn’t with your email campaigns unless you track the analytics and perform regular A/B testing. Most email marketing services offer tools to help you perform A/B testing and track key analytics–like open rate and click-through rate. Tracking your email-specific analytics along with your webpage engagement data and broader marketing performance indicators to better understand how to improve future campaigns. 

Work With an Email Marketing Agency

Creating compliant and high-performing email marketing campaigns is just one part of a comprehensive digital marketing strategy. You can continue down the rabbit hole of email marketing strategies or you can let us handle it. The marketing experts at Consultus Digital can help lawyers create personalized email strategies that convert. Contact us today to get a free growth marketing plan.