Unfortunately, there are many mistakes you can make when it comes to emailing, and for a law firm, reputation is often key. Below Lawyer Monthly benefits from expert insight from Helen Cox, a highly-experienced, CIM-qualified (Chartered Institute of Marketing) marketing consultant with MCIM status. Helen delves into the key mistakes ot avoid, and steps you can take to improve your emailing campaigns.
Getting a client to subscribe to your mailing list is just the first step in what can potentially be a long-term relationship, and strengthening that relationship should be one of the top priorities of your marketing campaign as well as generating new leads. However, this is hard to do if you keep repeating the same mistakes, like everyone else in the legal industry. Here are several tips that will help you dodge mistakes that can potentially ruin your email marketing campaign.
Choose Your Email Address and Your Words Wisely
Communicating your marketing messages to the subscribers to your mailing list is difficult enough and there is no need to complicate it further by using a no-reply email address. Instead of shutting down the communication through email, you should do everything in your power to encourage it by responding to all queries submitted through this channel in a timely manner.
Furthermore, sending unsolicited commercial messages to your clients can be interpreted as spamming. Don’t be a spammer, because it may reflect negatively on the reputation of your law firm. Adopting a more responsible approach and providing the subscribers with the information they need will deliver a better return on investment.
Test the Email Service Before Going Live
Before you can hit the send button and distribute your marketing messages to your contacts, you must first make sure that every little detail is as it should be. Check the grammar and spelling, make sure that the images are loaded properly and comb the text for broken links. Several services can help you review each marketing message you send, so you can detect HTML code errors that trigger spam filters and much more and helps you to test different versions of the same message on a small sample of subscribers and see which variation has the highest open or click-through rates. Platforms such as EmailVerifier.com automate much of this, using unique algorithm to perform syntax checks, email mail server checks and a number of other real time proprietary checks, the software confirms that the email account exists, dramatically decreasing redundant and invalid/undeliverable email addresses. This can help make sure that you’re GDPR compliant too.
Handle Unsubscribers with Care
Respecting your clients is the best way to show them your legal practice cares about them, which is why you should do everything in your power to make the unsubscription process as simple as possible. This means that subscribers to your law firm’s mailing list should be able to unsubscribe from the list in just two clicks. If you choose to make the unsubscription process needlessly complicated, people who subscribed to your mailing list may respond by blocking you or by flagging the messages you send to them as spam.
Use the Statistics to Your Own Advantage
Tracking the performance of your email marketing campaign is important for a wide array of reasons. Open, click-through and unsubscribe rates indicate how well the subscribers to your law firm’s mailing list are responding to marketing messages you are sending to them. In addition, each of these statistics can help you improve the promotional content your legal practice sends out through this marketing channel. Discovering the best frequency and time for your mailings or tracking the percentages of active and inactive readers are just a few among the countless benefits of closely monitoring the statistics of your email marketing campaigns. High unsubscribe rates may be a sign of a failing communication strategy, and monitoring this statistic regularly can provide you with valuable information your law firm can use to improve the marketing messages it sends via email.
Ensuring that your email marketing plan is producing the results you want requires you to understand who the recipients of the promotional content your legal practice distributes through this marketing channel are and how they think. By doing so you’ll enable your marketing team to create content that is perfectly optimized for the target group you’re trying to reach.
