When I first started in marketing, people told me “email marketing is dead!” However, over the past three years, I’ve found that not only email marketing not dead – it’s thriving! You just have to know how to address your audience.
One of my firmest critics and email naysayers was a legal client. They were concerned about advertising laws and client confidentiality (legitimate concerns!), but most of all they didn’t want to be seen as “spammers.”
We all receive hundreds of emails a day, easily – lawyers often receive twice as many, which can make them understandably leery of being one more email in someone’s inbox.
So I sat down with the client to discuss their concerns and addressed them one by one. We discussed the merits of personalization, useful content, and legitimately cultivated email lists. To make sure we were in compliance with their state marketing laws, we focused only on guiding people to our website and offering them links to helpful resources rather than promoting their services directly. To ensure the privacy of their existing clients we only sent the e-newsletter to people who had specifically signed up to receive their newsletter on the site and let the attorneys forward it to their existing clients as they saw fit.
As for avoiding “spammy” emails, there are entire books devoted to email marketing best practices, but I’ve found that three simple practices go a long way towards legitimizing your newsletters:
-
Personalization
Always use their first name! If you don’t have their first name, they didn’t give it to you, and you probably shouldn’t be emailing them.
-
Send the email from a real email address
Please don’t send a newsletter from a donotreply@lawfirm.com address! It’s so uninviting and makes it feel like there are no humans to talk to at your firm. The point of marketing is to have people reach out, so make sure there’s a human name in the email for them to connect with!
-
Provide real, useful information
Segment your email lists by practice so you’re sending information to people who care about the subject. Don’t send personal injury articles to your SSI clients. Don’t send updates for criminal defense law to your bankruptcy list. The more you’re able to segment your lists into relevant buckets, the less likely you are to be marked as spam, because people want to read about what’s relevant to their lives.
Now my greatest critics have become my greatest advocates – they love the responses they get to their newsletters! And, most importantly, they’re able to reach the people who need their help with useful, quality content.