A complete guide to email marketing for lawyers

Email marketing for lawyers can be a potent channel in their overall marketing strategy. It’s an effective communication and engagement tool. It helps lawyers connect with clients, build relationships, and grow their practice. When used strategically, it can give legal firms a competitive edge in the market. 

However, most people rarely need legal help. You may wonder how well email marketing works for lawyers. Especially since it’s mostly about lead nurturing and long-term marketing.

In this post, we’ll discuss how lawyers can successfully conduct an effective email marketing campaign. We also suggest email marketing tools to consider and provide examples or inspiration.

Let’s get started! 

How can email marketing benefit lawyers?

Email marketing helps lawyers build trust among their existing clients and prospects. Here’s a list of the top benefits of a well-researched email marketing strategy for law firms.

• Nurture client leads: Email marketing helps law firms attract and convert potential clients. You can nurture client leads by sending personalized emails and informative content. This can establish you as an expert law firm that prospects trust. 
• Boost client engagement: Email marketing involves continuous communication with your customers. This includes answering to common legal questions, comments on the new legal updates, thank you messages, and other useful information your audience may like.  This helps build lasting relationships with your existing clients.
• Establish brand presence: Email marketing helps lawyers communicate with their audience periodically. Regular emails help keep you or your law firm at the top of their minds. Through that, you can also get referrals and gain more clients.
• Build trust and credibility: Lawyer email marketing is one of the ways you can showcase your legal expertise. You can establish your business as an authority in your practice. This will build credibility. For instance, you can use your newsletters to explain legal jargon in a way that your audience can understand. 

Practice areas that benefit the most from email marketing

Email marketing can be a great addition to a lawyer’s marketing strategy. But, it comes with challenges due to the nature of legal practice. Some legal practices can benefit extensively from email marketing more than others. 

These include:

1. Estate planning lawyers

This stream of legal practice caters to people looking to manage their assets early. Estate planning lawyers can utilize email marketing for various lead-nurturing functions.

Educational blog posts, curated content, and informative newsletters can be sent explaining what estate planning involves. Email marketing can be used as a powerful tool to educate readers about estate planning, tax laws, probate, and trusts.

2. Immigration lawyers

Immigration law is another practice that can benefit extensively from email marketing. 

Besides handling immigration cases, people can use the services of these lawyers when seeking advice. Whether they’re planning to apply for a visa for work, travel, get a green card, etc. Immigration lawyers can guide them through the process. 

If this is your practice area, legal email marketing provides helpful tools for nurturing leads. These tools help you win and retain clients throughout their immigration process.

3. Real estate lawyers

In the real estate practice, lawyers get many opportunities to work with clients and build relationships. With the law being so complex, readers would definitely appreciate an attorney’s perspective on these matters.

So they can use email marketing to:

• Provide buyers and sellers with tips
• Draft property transaction contracts
• Provide property law updates

Different email campaigns can be designed to showcase your expertise, build your brand reputation, and nurture leads to grow your business. 

4. Intellectual property lawyers

This is a very unique branch of law and email marketing can be used effectively to educate and nurture relationships. Intellectual property lawyers can send regular emails to:

• Share updates on copyrights, patents, and trademarks
• Share tips to protect intellectual property
• Update clients on developments in the creative industry 

To guarantee better results for your email campaigns, you should invest in segmentation and quality content creation for this niche. 

5. Tax lawyers

While everybody pays taxes, the tax laws can be difficult to understand. That’s where tax lawyers can use email marketing to achieve multiple goals. 

You can create an informative newsletter for quality engagement. To build trust and establish yourself as a subject matter expert, you can write educational posts, share your opinion, and discuss updates in tax policies. 

Seven steps to mastering email marketing for lawyers

Mastering email marketing for legal firms involves being clear on your email marketing objectives and picking the right tool. This simple step-by-step guide will help you get started.

Define your email marketing objectives

You’ll need to outline clear goals to realize any results with email marketing for lawyers. Without these, you’ll collect contacts and send generic updates, an approach that may not get you any significant results.

Instead, be clear on why you’re choosing email marketing for your marketing strategy. For law firms, some of your goals may be:

• Keeping in touch with previous clients for future opportunities and referrals
• Generating leads 
• Building a strong network
• Establishing your brand as an industry expert

Build your email list

Once your objectives are in place, you’ll now need to build your email list. You can do this in many ways depending on your resources. Here are a few places to get you started building your email list as a lawyer.

• New customers: As you land new clients from different places, they’ll fill out their details when submitting their paperwork. You can take this opportunity to ask them if they’d be open to joining your mailing list, and explain to them what to expect from your newsletter.
• Official website: Besides building your credibility, your website is one of the top ways to build your list easily. To collect customer details, you can use signup forms, popups, chatbots, and landing pages. It also makes it easier for your site visitors to join your newsletter.
• Social media pages: The main way to collect emails on social media is by sharing engaging posts, offering lead magnets, and running paid ads. 

  Building a network by being active in relevant groups can also help you engage with new audiences and grow your list.

Segment your audience

Audience segmentation refers to dividing your subscribers into segments based on specific criteria. These include:

• Practice area: This is mostly relevant for larger firms that offer different legal services. 
• Client type: Segment your clients based on your client types e.g., past clients, referrals, and prospects. This way, you can tailor your emails to their specific needs. For instance, sending feedback request emails to existing clients.
• Level of engagement: This includes active subscribers, new subscribers, inactive subscribers, etc. 
• Client sources: This involves segmenting your list based on where your existing clients are from. This includes referrals from existing clients, online leads, signup forms, etc.

With such segmentation criteria, you can send your audience more relevant and personalized emails. As a result, your subscribers will be more satisfied with your email newsletters and will likely want to receive more emails from you. 

Clients and prospects tend to get annoyed when you send emails that are not useful to them, and this may lead to:

• Low engagement
• High unsubscription rates
• Spam reports
• Emails that keep ending up in subscribers’ junk folders

Create valuable and engaging content

Your emails need to be engaging and valuable to your customers. This includes the type of emails you decide to create, as well as how you present your content. You’ll have the option to send:

• Promotional emails to create brand awareness
• Informative newsletters to inform and update
• Transactional emails for crucial communication with existing customers

Knowing how to switch between these email types helps you find a balance when providing value to customers. 

Informative emails can be your nurture emails that help you build a long-term relationship with customers. Here’s how you can use these emails to provide value.

• Answer common questions your audience often has.
• Share your perspective on current events that are relevant to your client. This can be a great way to showcase your knowledge.
• Simplify complex legal concepts for your clients: You can use simple infographics or images to illustrate legal processes for your customers.

Promotional emails can achieve two goals for you: engage your customers and generate leads. Here’s how to leverage them for the best results:

• Include powerful CTAs
• Craft compelling subject lines
• Tailor your promotions to target audiences

Choose the right email marketing tool

For the above efforts to be successful, you’ll need ideal email marketing services for lawyers to tie it all together.

As a lawyer, you’ll need a tool to help you design eye-catching emails, effectively manage your list, and track your performance all from a single platform.

Here are some key items to look out for when choosing the right email marketing tool for your law firm.

• Modern-looking email template designs: To create attractive emails, you’ll need a platform that provides visually appealing email templates as well as an easy-to-navigate email editor.This way, you can draw inspiration from professional email designs and edit them to fit your brand. A drag-and-drop function makes editing easier, so that’s important too. Email marketing tools such as Flodesk and Mailerlite are known for their aesthetically pleasing email designs.

• Automation feature: Building emails from scratch and sending them to each subscriber on repeat sounds like an uphill task for any lawyer.Tools such as Privy and ConvertKit have automation features that allow you to send emails when they are the most relevant. For example, welcome email, feedback email, thank-you email, etc.
• Segmentation and personalization: As your email list grows, it gets harder to keep track of each user and their needs. Segmentation and personalization features then become important.Segmentation will help you send relevant emails to your customers based on set criteria. Personalization features, such as adding a name to your email, help clients feel seen. All these help your law firm build lasting relationships with your audience.
• Analytics and reports: Good email marketing software should allow you to track your key performance metrics so you can improve your performance. For instance, you’ll know which design performs better if you can track your click maps. Or, which headers are more catchy if you can conduct an A/B test, etc.
• Responsive designs: Your email marketing tool should provide mobile-friendly email designs that adapt across different screens. This way, your viewers can get the same experience whether they’re reading your emails from a tablet, phone, or desktop computer. 

Optimize your email campaigns

The next step is ensuring your email campaigns are optimized for your readers. This includes the following.

• Use a responsive email design. Make sure your readers can easily view your emails on their mobile phones and desktops. 
• Use an easy-to-read font and font size. 
• Break your email body into smaller chunks and utilize subheaders, especially for informative emails. 
• Don’t include difficult legal jargon. Your email should be simple and concise.
• Include your business logo in your email header and footer. This helps identify you and add credibility to your business.

Measure success and adjust your strategy

The final email marketing step for lawyers is to measure your performance and adjust your strategy accordingly. As mentioned earlier, most email marketing tools provide an analytics tool to help track your most crucial metrics.

Here are some key metrics to pay attention to:

• Open rates: A high open rate can indicate that your preheader and subject lines are compelling. The opposite is also true, so if your open rates are low, you may need to improve your preheaders and subject lines. 
• Click-through rates: These help you measure how engaging your email body is and what clients like. While your subject line may be compelling, if the content in your email isn’t as engaging, your clients may not end up reading through it. 
• Conversion rates: this measures the overall success of your email marketing strategy by telling you how many of your subscribers actually end up booking a consultation. 

Five examples of email marketing for lawyers

Here are some real-life examples of email marketing for attorneys to inspire your next campaign.

1.Win-back email example

In this re-engagement example, Rocket Lawyer shows you how to win back a prospect based on their activities on your website. It uses a clear CTA to get customers to finish their car bill sale.

Rocket Lawyer then includes social proof to reassure customers of their credibility and why readers should use their services. They also provide their contact details so prospects can reach them for further assistance.

Image source: Really Good Emails

2. Informative newsletter example

The email below shows how you can use your newsletter to inform your audience.  

As a family law specialist, this firm uses the newsletter to educate its readers on diverse topics, including divorce. The example also shows how emails can be used to establish your authority.

Image via Pinterest

3. Promotional email example

Here, Legal Paige offers a discount for their legal services, which is one way that lawyers can use their email marketing strategy. The email is well-designed, minimalistic, and concise. The color coding also makes it aesthetically pleasing.

A clear CTA also links back to the business’s official website. 

Image via Flodesk

4. Newsletter update email example

This law firm email marketing template shows how lawyers can provide their customers with helpful updates every now and then. 

Take this email from Haliburton Isaac and Lawson for example. The first article in the newsletter cautions clients to be careful during the skiing season, citing a skiing accident case they’re working on.

Image via On The Map

5. Lead nurturing email example

This email example shows how you can use email marketing to provide relevant monthly customer updates. 

You can then include clear CTAs to help nudge them to sign up for your services in the future.

Image via Really Good Emails

Email marketing for lawyers: Wrap up

Email marketing for lawyers helps land prospects and keep in touch with existing customers. It’s also a great way for law firms and private practice lawyers to establish their expertise and build their brand.

As part of your digital marketing strategy, email marketing can help grow your audience and legal business. Always provide value to your clients and constantly track your performance to improve your strategy.  

As long as you have clear goals in mind and choose the right email marketing software, you can come up with a solid strategy that will take your legal practice to the next level.