Email Marketing Dos and Don’ts

Wouldn’t you love to be the first thing that prospective clients think about when they wake up in the morning, before they get out of bed?  Lawyers might seem like a unique breed, but for the first few moments after we open our eyes in the morning, we are not so different from our clients.  Lawyers, their prospective clients, and hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people around the world begin their day the same way, namely by looking at our smartphones and reading the most recent communications that arrived while we were asleep.  All lawyers in the United States, with the possible exception of the ones who are already so successful that they can afford to retire even though they love their work too much to retire from it, start their day by reading their email on their phones.  Law firms have the opportunity to connect with prospective clients first thing in the morning, long before the prospective clients search for anything on Google, by adding email newsletters to their content marketing strategy.  Here are some ways to get the most benefit out of your legal marketing content in email newsletter form.

Don’t Beg for Clicks, Because They Will Turn Into Unsubscribes

The biggest problem with email newsletters is that a lot of small businesses mistakenly assume that there is only one kind of email marketing.  Some businesses email out short-term promotional offers.  If you are a local restaurant, emailing out coupons every morning is fine.  Among the customers who open your email, some will come to your restaurant to get the free milkshake that is only free today, while others will wish they had time to.  Law firms do not have free milkshakes to give away.  If you send an email every day, it will sound like spam, and recipients will delete it quickly.  Likewise, your email content should not merely be a series of invitations to click on your website, because this will only make readers want to unsubscribe.

Do Satisfy a Craving for Reading Material in Just the Right Dose

If you don’t want your email newsletters to get consigned to the Promotions tab, they should not sound salesy.  Instead, they should sound like the kinds of think pieces that news hounds like to read first thing in the morning before they even turn on the TV and tune into the 24-hour news cycle.  If your website is full of engaging blog posts, don’t make your fans navigate to your site before reading the new ones.  Instead, send your new blog content directly to the current and prospective clients who have already subscribed to your newsletter.  A piece of content that is the right size for a blog post is also the right size for a reader to read it from a phone screen in an email inbox first thing in the morning.

Do Count on the Pros to Help With Email Marketing Strategy and Content

The professional law firm content marketers at Law Blog Writers, LLC, create blog posts, marketing emails, web page content, and more for law firms.