5 tips to create a successful email marketing campaign

Email marketing might feel like shouting into the void — but did you know that successful email marketing strategies can average an ROI of $38 on every dollar spent? What’s more, email conversion rates are often up to 40 times greater than those of social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter.

If you’re looking for a way to drive new business to your law firm, email marketing is an easy and effective way to expand your reach and establish your expertise. Here are a few tips on how to get the ball rolling:

Be topical

As is the case for most industries, email marketing for lawyers really comes down to one thing: delivering a targeted message. In order to keep clients (both current and prospective) engaged, stick to content that will resonate with your audience.

That doesn’t mean your emails need to sell your services directly — rather, they should demonstrate that your firm is up-to-date on the latest developments in your field, and communicate a well-informed perspective on any interesting case law emerging in your space.

Be consistent

Whether it’s weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly, email marketing should be a regular activity. Sending out emails on a consistent basis (and even at a consistent time of day) can be enormously beneficial to your open rates.

So what is the best time to send marketing emails? According to a Customer Intelligence survey, 58% of people check their email first thing in the morning — so if you want to maximize the number of recipients who read your email, the early bird route might be the way to go.

Build your list

If your firm hasn’t already started using a CRM (customer relationship management) platform, now is definitely the time to start.

Your email marketing strategy is only as good as your list of contacts. (Photo by Stanley Dai on Unsplash)

The bigger your CRM database, the better your distribution — but don’t be afraid to start off small! It’s easy to grow your mailing list over time. Just make sure that the next time you get someone’s business card, you log that data for future use.

Track performance

Chances are you have a limited email marketing budget, so you’ll want to make every email count. Unfortunately, email campaign performance varies highly based on open rates — which means that no matter how good your content is, if they don’t click it, it was all for naught.

Open rates are largely a function of your email marketing subject line, so be sure to spend an extra 10 minutes cooking up an opener that will really get them hooked. Just don’t ignore your other vital content marketing metrics! Use tracked links and build landing pages specific to your marketing campaign that can be used to measure performance at a granular level.

Keep it simple

How many times have you received a marketing email and been truly wowed by the sender’s fancy template? I’d venture to guess seldom (or never). Far more frequently, these HTML newsletters come through with broken images or stylistic errors, giving them a sloppy appearance and distracting from the message itself.

So when it comes time to choose your email marketing layouts, consider this: what do the emails you actually read look like? Perhaps it’s a very light HTML template, or it could even be plain text. At L&T, we often find that plain text works best — but feel free to experiment!

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DISCLAIMER: This article expresses my own ideas and opinions. Any information I have shared are from sources that I believe to be reliable and accurate. I did not receive any financial compensation in writing this post, nor do I own any shares in any company I’ve mentioned. I encourage any reader to do their own diligent research first before making any investment decisions.