Five benefits of email marketing in the legal sector

Email marketing is used across a range of business sectors and is part of most legal marketing teams’ playbook. It is a cost-effective marketing tool that can reach target audiences in an impactful and personalised way.

Five benefits to using email marketing in the legal sector are:

 

1) Tailor-made content

Preparing timely and topical updates for existing and prospective clients is a good way to stay relevant and to start a conversation that can lead to ongoing engagement. Email marketing can be a way to elicit questions around the content you are sharing as well as an effective platform for distributing invitations to in-house events or webinars relating to that content. Emails can also drive prospects to your website, enabling you to share further content, attract sign-ups and capture data, which you cannot achieve through social media.

 

2) Targeted audiences

Platforms for email marketing have tools to create target audiences or ‘segments’, ensuring your news gets to the right people. Personalisation is key – clients want to know that you are speaking to them. A well-timed, personalised email can help lead to new business. The worst thing you can do is send a generic, un-personalised email to a group that isn’t engaged.

 

3) Increase brand awareness

Email marketing is a great way to gain new contacts and increase brand awareness for your firm. Seeing your firm’s name attached to a newsworthy email marketing campaign will remind clients to think of you and encourage them to visit your website or set up an initial meeting – they may also keep your firm’s name front of mind for a potential referral.

 

4) Opportunity to be positioned as a thought leader

See each email ‘blast’ as an opportunity to position your firm as a thought leader. Demonstrating timely expertise in your practice area(s) will build your firm’s reputation and voice, and your content may be picked up by contacts who refer you on for speaking engagements or opportunities in the media.

 

5) Analytics help improve campaigns

Take time to browse and select the best email marketing software for your needs. There are many out there eg: MailChimp, HubSpot etc, so identifying the analytics that are most important to you is essential. Most law firms track metrics like open-rates, click-through rates and user engagement. This useful data can evaluate the success of a particular campaign and can help identify areas of improvements for future campaigns. Consider tweaking emails by adjusting subject lines, links and headlines to improve analytics.

 

A few other things you may want to consider:

– Customisable designs: have the software create a design template unique to your firm;

– Contact management: look out for the option to create multiple audiences, tags and demographics tailored to your specific email ‘blast’;

– Automation: it may be useful to have automation features such as scheduled email releases and personalised email introductions. WIth software such as HubSpot that we use, you can trigger particular emails to be sent to a user depending on their search behaviour.

Writing effective personalised, high-conversion emails takes time and experience but the potential upside makes it worth it, boosting lead generation and encouraging increased engagement.

 

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash