Email Marketing For Law Firms: A Step-By-Step Guide [2024]
Law firms gradually turn to digital marketing tools to maintain their relationships with existing clients and find new ones. Emails can play a massive role in this process, with 4 billion daily users visiting this channel for work or personal purposes.
In this guide, we’ll explore email marketing for law firms and share tips on creating a step-by-step strategy for professionals who want to optimize this marketing asset. In the last section, you’ll find three first-class email marketing platforms to streamline this process effectively.
The easiest and most affordable email marketing and newsletter software!
Why Is Email Marketing Important For Law Firms?
What major benefits can law firms reap from creating email marketing campaigns? Find them all here:
- Better customer relationships: You can nurture old and new clients with interesting and relevant content to make them trust you more.
- Customized legal marketing: It enables you to deliver personalized emails to the right people at the right time utilizing email automation and marketing segmentation.
- Cost-effectiveness: You can reduce your yearly costs by employing this affordable marketing tactic.
- Website traffic: It lets you invite potential clients to your law firm’s website with a smart call to action.
- Competitive advantage: You can stay top of mind with clients by delivering content that maximizes your authority in your niche market.
- High ROI: If you succeed in all the above, you’ll manage to increase your return on investment over time.
So if you’re interested in email marketing for law firms and want to promote your legal services successfully, read this step-by-step guide.
1. Build A Plan
Before initiating your email marketing efforts, you should define your goal for this channel. Set an objective for each email newsletter, such as increasing your conversion rates or brand awareness.
Analyzing your so-called buyer personas is a prerequisite to realistic yet fruitful goal-setting. It will enable you to build relevant campaigns that address their pain points and deliver them at the right time.
The clearer your goals are, the better results you will get. Check your existing marketing plan to find what areas need improvement or how you can align emails with other platforms like social media. You can also use the well-known SMART framework to make better decisions.
Moreover, determine your available budget and how you’ll distribute it in this early stage. Ensure that your email marketing costs will not over exceed your gains. A safe way to approach this is to start with small steps at the beginning to see what works best for you and save riskier choices for later.
2. Pick An Email Marketing Solution
If you want to take your email marketing efforts seriously, use a dedicated tool to elevate your lead generation and sales. Thankfully, there are many email services for different budgets and needs. You can find a description of our suggested options in the last section.
Here are the top features to look for in an email marketing platform:
- Premade templates and intuitive editor
- Easy-to-use dashboard
- Marketing automation and audience segmentation
- Real-time analytics, reporting, and A/B Testing
- Mobile responsiveness
- High deliverability score
- Native integrations and API
Once you determine that a platform checks all functionality boxes, go to their pricing page to see if this is an affordable and scalable solution for your law firm. Before purchasing it, you can also request a free trial or sign up for a demo.
Lastly, it’s essential to see how well it works with your existing marketing stack, such as your CRM solution, to create a high-performing marketing engine that will gradually lead you to success.
3. Grow Your Email List
To start sending emails to existing and prospective clients, you first need to collect their email addresses and get their opt-in, which is permission to send them a campaign. Here are some email list-building tactics to choose from:
- Create lead magnets: Build free resources (e.g., eBook, checklists) or give incentives such as free consultations in exchange for the visitors’ email addresses.
- Build pop-up forms for your website: Find the right format and emphasize the value of your offer to attract more people.
- Create a dedicated landing page: Craft a high-converting landing page and post it on your social media like LinkedIn and Twitter.
- Craft a referral program: Motivate existing clients to introduce your firm to partners and acquaintances.
For more email listing activities, read our comprehensive guide and find what suits your firm best based on your clients’ issues and preferences.
4. Choose Appropriate Email Types
Once you’ve taken care of the first steps, it’s time to create campaigns that will lead to high open rates and conversions. Here are the main email types:
Email newsletters
They can include different email content types, such as blog content, upcoming events, insights, or important information about your law firm. You should schedule them regularly with consistency to bring maximum results. They usually aim to increase brand awareness and customer retention.
Here’s an example from the law firm Davis Polk:
Transactional Emails
These emails are triggered when a transaction with a subscriber has been completed, including valuable information regarding this action. For example, you can send follow-up emails when a new client books a consultation session or registers on your email list for the first time, the well-known welcome emails.
Promotional Emails
You can use these emails to promote new services to clients and prospects and increase your ROI. You can also share incentives to prompt subscribers to take action faster, such as a webinar for people interested in your new services.
Survey Emails
If you want to collect feedback from existing clients to improve your services over time, you can create a dedicated survey campaign and send it at a critical time during collaboration, e.g., after the first session. First impressions matter, so by delivering an optimal experience, you secure retention.
Drip Campaigns
These are a series of automated workflows you can schedule for different purposes, such as onboarding. You send them out at specific dates and times, aiming to address one of your client’s pain points.
Consequently, select the email types that make more sense to your law firm and create different email touchpoints with subscribers to meet your conversion goals.
5. Segment Your Audience
Email segmentation is one of the popular techniques email marketers use to deliver personalized messages to their audiences. Segmented campaigns receive 100.95% higher click rates than regular ones, so it’s worth adding them to your priority list.
Briefly, you can divide your subscribers into segments based on common characteristics. For example, you can send different email content to prospects and clients to cover their individual needs. The main categories are demographic, geographic, psychographic, and behavioral segmentation.
Most email service providers like Moosend or Mailchimp have segmentation and automation features to help you streamline your audience management and deliver relevant and successful campaigns.
6. Design An Effective Campaign
So what elements should an email campaign include to become successful? Here are some tips to ensure that your campaign attracts your audience’s attention:
- Write a captivating and relevant subject line to increase open rates.
- Create a design from scratch using your brand colors or customize a pre-made email template.
- Craft clear copy using a trustworthy tone of voice with simple language.
- Share useful content based on the email type, such as podcasts, eBooks, or free services.
- Design a smart call-to-action to motivate your reader to engage more with your firm.
- Create an email footer that includes useful links such as social media and an unsubscribe button.
Rocket Lawyer’s Email Example
Let’s see a campaign by Rocket Lawyer that checks all the essential boxes to inspire you!
Subject Line: Need help with your Car Bill of Sale?
Why it works: This email aims to ping prospects that have already shown interest in a specific service to continue where they left off. They have three orange call-to-actions (CTAs) that invite customers to take three different steps based on their needs.
The copy starting from the subject line captures the reader’s attention, with a high probability of increasing click-through rates. At the footer, they’ve included an important note for prospects, social media links, and buttons to download the app to invite clients to additional platforms.
7. Monitor Analytics To Optimize Your Campaigns
Last but not least, to ensure that your campaign performance will improve over time, you should keep track of important email marketing metrics, such as:
- Open rate
- Click-through rate
- Email bounce rate
- Spam complaints
- Conversion rate
When you start spotting valuable patterns that work consistently, stick to them or search for ways to uplevel them. As with other features, most email marketing services have analytics and reporting capabilities that can lead you to safe conclusions.
Best Software To Nail Email Marketing For Law Firms
Let’s explore four exceptional email marketing platforms that will help you enhance your law firm’s marketing strategy:
1. Moosend
Pricing: Paid plans start at $9/month, 30-day free trial (Sign up here)
Top feature: Advanced email automation
If you’re looking for a cost-effective, all-in-one email marketing solution with amazing capabilities, then Moosend is a great choice for you. You can create responsive campaigns in no time using ready-made templates or the intuitive drag-and-drop editor. You can also add elements like videos and GIFs to increase your CTR.
Moosend has great automation capabilities, providing pre-made recipes to build flexible automation workflows that convert. It also has an advanced audience management feature to target your audience at the right time. Through its reporting, analytics, and A/B Testing tools, you’ll be able to monitor your campaign performance and optimize your campaigns over time.
Moreover, Moosend offers additional tools such as landing page and online form builders to help you streamline your email marketing process end-to-end. Lastly, its email sender score of 98% makes it an efficient option for your campaigns, as well as the various integrations with powerful marketing tools like Salesforce.
Pricing: Moosend’s pricing starts at $9/monthly, including all the features for unlimited emails. Sign up for a 30-day trial today.
2. Mailchimp
Pricing: Paid plans start at $20/month, Limited free plan
Top feature: Multi-step automation workflows
Mailchimp is one of the most popular email marketing platforms, with advanced features and tools you can use to build an effective email marketing engine. It’s well-known for its multi-step automation workflows, which enable you to reach your target audience at the best time possible.
Like similar platforms, it has an intuitive editor and premade templates to design perfect emails without needing HTML or CSS knowledge. You can also build custom sign-up forms that suit your brand and segment your audience to bring maximum results.
Finally, with Mailchimp, you get access to detailed insights and analytics to know at any time if you’re on the right track. You’ll also be able to run cross-device testing to ensure a top-notch UX for all your subscribers. You can use Smart Recommendations and Content Optimizer, among other tools, to make better campaigns.
Pricing: Mailchimp has a free plan but with limited capabilities. Paid plans start at $20/month, with access to data-driven optimization tools.
3. Hubspot
Pricing: Paid plans start at $50/month, Free plan
Top Feature: CRM and lead generation
If you’re looking for a holistic marketing platform where you can keep everything in one place, including your emails, then Hubspot should be on your list. It has a free CRM solution that lets you keep track of your client’s moves and know exactly what you should offer to convert them.
Besides that, Hubspot has all the features you need to thrive in email marketing, such as a drag-and-drop editor, marketing automation features, landing pages, and signup forms. Moreover, it has a smart time zone sending tool and A/B Testing functionality to deliver timely and relevant campaigns.
Pricing: Hubspot offers a free plan with limited marketing features and 2,000 emails per month. Paid plans start at $50/month for 1,000 contacts.
Ready To Win More Clients?
In a nutshell, law firms can reap many benefits by introducing email marketing to their agenda. Sit down with your marketing team to set smart goals and discuss how you can nurture your subscriber base to bring winning results. In addition, keep in mind that this channel helps you understand your client’s needs, pain points, and behavior.
If you’re ready to take the next step, sign up for a Moosend account today and test our excellent features!