Law Firm Email Marketing Guide For Beginners
Email marketing lets you keep in touch with audiences even after they leave your law firm website. Just getting regular emails from you will maintain their awareness of your law firm, so they remember you when they need a lawyer.
That said, law firm email marketing isn't just about sending emails to people. For it to be an effective lead-generating tool, you must take several steps to ensure it's set up for success. You need to optimize the emails, decide on the look and feel, and come up with content that grabs attention and provides value to the audience that receives it.
So, how should you implement an email drip? How can law firms use email marketing to their fullest potential? Let's talk about it:
Is Email Marketing Still Effective?
Despite the slew of instant messaging apps and social media, emails are still an essential utility for internet users. This is because your emails are linked to your social media accounts, subscriptions, online banking, online shopping, and many other day-to-day tasks and transactions.
In other words, yes. Emails are still widely used, even by young people. So if you're worried about finding an audience for your email drip, there's a lot of traffic and attention you can get from sending regular emails. Of course, you're still competing with other emails people are getting, but that's why you need to optimize it to ensure you're catching people's attention.
Can Small Law Firms And Newbie Law Firm Marketers Implement Email Marketing?
Email marketing is surprisingly accessible. Like legal blogs, you can technically run them on your own, provided you have the right tools and strategies.
Most email marketers will use an online service to help them send out scheduled emails. In some cases, you can even use tools to personalize emails. This is how you get emails directly addressing you or delivering content specific to your niche, as these personalizations can be done through email clients.
Many email marketers use Outlook and similar accessible applications to get the job done. So regardless of the available resources you have at the moment, there is a way to start lead generation through email lists.
5 Essential Tips On Email Marketing For Law Firms
We've been talking about how a lot goes into an effective email marketing strategy, but what are they? Although there are many ways to implement your law firm email marketing, a few vital tips have always significantly affected the success of email marketing campaigns.
Here are some of the following essential steps you need to take:
1. Figure Out How To Present Them In Your Landing Pages
Before you even send out emails, you need people subscribed to your email list in the first place. This is often done through landing pages, a crucial point that can affect the potential client's decision.
If the offer isn't enticing, you wouldn't even get that many email list subscribers in the first place. So, make sure you optimize your landing pages with the right links, page design, relevant keywords, and a good user experience.
2. Pay Attention To The Presentation And Design
Your emails don't have to be overly fancy to attract users. However, you still need to pay attention to how it looks and is formatted, especially considering the user experience.
If your emails are crowded with too many elements, have unreadable font styles, or are slow to load up. Then, people aren't going to perceive as much value from it. After all, if the email is hard to read or it's bugging out, it's not going to help or entice subscribers to consume your content. So, make sure you're optimizing for readability and user-friendliness.
3. Send Out Valuable Legal Content
When you convince someone to sign up for your email list, they perceive some potential value in what you have to send them. You want to make sure you're delivering on the promise of your offer or landing pages. If you don't match the promised quality or value of the content people signed up for, your emails aren't really going to help your law firm marketing plans.
Email content with little to no value will get ignored or cause enough disappointment for people to just unsubscribe entirely. So whether it's a listicle, law firm updates, or legal news, you must ensure it's relevant or helpful to the type of audience subscribed to your email list.
4. Compose Catchy Subject Lines
As mentioned, you're competing with all the other emails your subscribers are getting in their day-to-day. Subject lines are the first thing people see when browsing their emails. So, you must make sure yours stand out enough to attract their attention.
The best way to do this would be to highlight the value of the content you're sending them. Basically, you want a preview of the content and emphasize how it will benefit the subscriber. Additionally, you want to ensure you're not writing subject lines that are too long, as most people don't have the time to read a long subject line when several other emails catch their attention.
5. Be Ready For Potential Conversions
The whole point of running a law firm email marketing campaign in the first place is to find and generate leads. So, when someone converts or responds to your emails, you need a set process to facilitate the conversion. Otherwise, you're just sending emails while missing out on the crucial generated leads you've worked so hard on.
Of course, all this includes quick responses. For example, if someone sends you an inquiry, you must ensure you respond within the day. Ideally, as fast as you're able to respond.
Bottom-line
Of course, there is no one way to implement email marketing for law firms. Instead, you need to adjust your strategy depending on who's receiving your emails, which cases you want to get, and what kinds of tools are available to you.
However, the above tips can apply to almost every email marketing strategy. You only need to add a few things to fully tailor-fit it to you and your law firm.
Author’s Bio
JC Serrano is the founder of 1000Attorneys.com, one of the few private enterprises certified to process lawyer referrals by the California State Bar. His marketing strategies have continuously evolved since 2005, incorporating ever-changing SEO strategies into lawyerleadmachine.com.
Why More Law Firms Are Implementing Digital Marketing
Law firms are getting up to speed when it comes to tech. This is an area that is panning out well for the industry. More firms are making use of high-impact digital marketing. The reasons for this move are as diverse as the methods that are being used. Here are some tips that law practice owners need to be aware of.
Digital Marketing Will Help You Raise Awareness
The main reason for you to make use of modern law firm SEO services is to raise your public profile. You can do so using methods that cut response time down to a very few seconds. These are modern techniques that cost a fraction of what advertising in the traditional manner used to entail.
You can use digital marketing to catch the eye of people in your local area. The methods that you employ are guaranteed to be far more effective than running ads on your local radio, TV, or newspaper. The internet is the place where people search for legal services. It makes sense for you to be in the same place.
Digital Marketing Helps You Keep Past Clients
You should also keep in mind that digital marketing will help you hang on to your past clients. Suppose that they run into a new problem that requires the help of a legal expert. In such a case, they will likely consider who they have worked within the past. A perusal of the web will bring back all of your info.
Not only will they remember your name, but they will also recall how you helped them. If the case was a success, this will give them all the impetus they need to call on you again. They will also be happy to refer you to family members and friends who can use your help. Marketing is the key to keeping the memory fresh.
Digital Marketing Helps You Gauge Your Impact
Making use of local digital law firm marketing will help you gauge the impact you are making in your local area. You can measure how long it takes for people to respond to your ads. You can also gauge the type of responses that you are receiving from the info you share.
This is crucial data that will help you shape the direction and content of your next series of marketing ads. If people are slow to respond, it may be that you are not sharing the right kind of message. Knowing what to alter will be the key to making sure that your ads target the right people with the right content.
Digital Marketing Can Locate Your Prime Demographic
One of the biggest benefits that digital marketing can give you is the ability to zero in on your target audience. These are the people that will be most likely to respond in a positive manner to your marketing efforts. They will be people in your area who need the exact kind of legal services that you offer.
Your prime demographic will most likely be made up of people who fit a certain age and income group. They may be business owners or people who need help with filing their worker's comp claims. It will be up to you to mold your marketing strategy to appeal directly to these people in order to secure their business.
Digital Marketing Helps You Build Your Brand
If you have trouble building a positive public brand, the cure is to increase your presence on the web. You can do your firm a great deal of good by getting on all of the major social media pages.
Once you do so, you can begin to respond to all of the questions, comments, and concerns that your viewers post. Direct interaction will help you build your brand.
Digital Marketing is the Key to Success
As a law firm owner, you have many rivals in your local area that can easily siphon off all of your clients. The method that they will use is superior digital marketing skills. The way for you to hold your own is to use the same strategy. These are skills an expert marketing service can easily teach you.
Why Your Law Firm's Google Search Ads Aren't Working
Google Search Ads (formerly Google AdWords) has become the place to advertise for many different types of businesses - large and small - looking to show up on the first page of Google’s Search results. Although Google Ads is the largest global online advertising platform (projected to account for $103 billion in 2019), many small businesses fail to see a positive return on investment from it.
In this article, we’re going to discuss 3 reasons why your law firm’s AdWords (now known as Search Ads) might not be working. By the end, you should be in a position to take this information and start diagnosing for yourself.
1. You’re Overpaying for Your Ad CPC
When you bid to have your ad displayed on the search results page, your ad isn’t likely going to be the only one. If this is the case and you’re new to AdWords, then you likely won’t have the top ad position either. It’s a common misconception that the bid determines your ad’s position and ability to show up on the results page. However, it’s more important to have a high Ad Rank Score.
Improve your Ad Rank
Remember that Ad Rank is calculated by multiplying Quality Score by the Bid amount. The ad in an auction pool with the highest ad rank gets the top ad position. The table below illustrates an example of how the positioning of ads on a results page is determined by Ad Rank.
In this example, Ad #2 would be the first ad displayed on the page. Although it isn’t bidding as much as #1 and #3, it has the highest Ad Rank and therefore wins the auction for the top position on the results page.
Ad #3 is a good example of how having a higher bid, doesn’t necessarily give you an upper edge. Instead, it would be the last ad displayed on the page - or it may not be displayed at all. Having a top position ad is highly dependent on having the right bid and improving the quality score.
A compelling copy and accurate keyword targeting are also essential for a high-performing ad, according to this Google Ads quality score guide. The guide cites factors that impact your quality score, including your click-through rate (past and present), usage of relevant keywords in ad copies, landing page quality, and performance by device type. They provide you with valuable insights on how to improve your quality score.
2. Your Site Isn’t Optimized to Convert
Once a person clicks on your ad through Google, you have been charged for that click. There are no two ways about it. So it’s imperative that you maximize your odds of generating a return from that click - in the form of a client or lead.
Check your Bounce Rate
To understand how well your ads are running, you should check how they are performing within your Google Analytics account. Primarily, you should look at the bounce rate to see how high it is. If it’s abnormally high, then this is a strong indicator that something is wrong with your landing page’s user experience. There are a few things you can do to improve your landing page.
Make Sure Your Landing Page Loads Fast
Before your ads are up and running, make sure that the page you’re going to send users to loads fast, especially if you are running your ads on mobile search. A fast site will help you squeeze as much out of your ad budget as possible. Use Google’s free tool to check the speed for yourself. It will give a score for both the mobile and desktop versions of your page and also tell you what needs to be improved.
Keep Your Ad’s Messaging Consistent
In order to retain the user’s engagement after clicking on your ad, it needs to be clear to them that they have found exactly what they were looking for when they performed their search in Google. Make sure that whatever is written in your ad also appears on your landing page as well. Not verbatim, but they must be highly relevant. Otherwise, this could be what’s leading to a higher bounce rate, as discussed above.
Tips to Consistent Messaging
- Use captivating headlines that entice them to click the ad
- Choose relevant photos and imagery for your landing page
- Position the benefits and features of your service above the fold
- Include matching or similar keywords in your ad and on your landing page
A good example of matching your ad also stated some sort of promotion or offer, such as Free Consultation, then make sure that this is present and above the fold on your landing page.
Choose Your Landing Page Wisely
Building off of the last point, in many cases, it’s not a good idea to send people from your ad to your website’s homepage. If you’re trying to promote a particular service for your law firm, then your homepage isn’t likely to focus on that specific offering.
You can do one of two things in this scenario:
- Send ad traffic to your service page
- Build and design an ad landing page for the service
While these seem fairly similar, there’s a significant difference. Your service page likely already exists on your site. A landing page for your offer, however, is designed not only with the intent to inform users but to market and convert them into a lead on the spot.
So be sure to have a landing page that is designed to convert your ad traffic into new cases and clients with clear call-to-actions. This will increase your conversion rate and reduce your cost per lead.
3. Your Competitors Are Costing You Clicks
One of the most unsettling things you may discover going through your ad campaign results is that you may suspect that your competitors are clicking on your ads. There are usually several reasons why they do this.
Remember that your Google Ads works based on an average daily budget. By clicking on your ads, they deplete your budget. They may even have a strategy of spending your daily budget early enough in the day so that your ads won’t appear during the prime periods of the day. Once you have run an unsuccessful ad campaign for several months or more, you may cease to use Search Ads altogether. That results in one less advertiser bidding for the keywords in your competitors’ eyes and more market share for them.
How to Tell if Competitors or 3rd Parties Are Interfering with Your Ads
While it may be tempting to blame a poorly performing campaign on your competitors and click fraud, it’s important to understand whether it actually is click fraud or not. AdWords campaigns can perform poorly for a number of different reasons. So it’s important to know how to properly diagnose what is going wrong with your campaign before jumping to conclusions.
Check for Invalid Clicks in your Google Ads account
In your Google Ads account, you can customize your Search Ads report to include Invalid clicks, Invalid Interaction rate and Invalid click rate. This is what Google considers an invalid clicks through its classification algorithms. Google will automatically refund you for these invalid clicks. You can verify this in your billing.
Check your Clicks, Impressions and Click-Through Rates
While Google does classify and refund you for invalid clicks, there are other ways to identify suspicious, click-fraud activity occurring within your Google AdWords campaigns is by looking at these 3 metrics.
Naturally, you will have many more impressions than clicks. Above is a screenshot is taken from a campaign where we can see fairly high, but still natural CTRs. PPC for law firms would also work in the best ways nowadays.
In campaigns where competitor tampering or click-fraud is occurring, you can tend to see a lot of your ad’s keywords receiving a high CTR (Click-Through Rate). It’s difficult to say just how high should be considered alarming, but the average CTR for search ads is 1.91% across all industries and legal services average 1.35%. It will depend heavily on your ads and keywords. It’s not uncommon to have high single-digit and low double-digit click-through rates. However, the higher the CTR, the more suspicious you should be.
Above is a screenshot of a campaign I personally audited (no, I didn’t manage it) where 60% of a law firm’s clicks were spent on keywords that had a 100% CTR. This is not normal. To be clear, a 100% CTR means that your ad was clicked on every time it was served in the search results for that keyword. What are the odds that 60% of the campaign budget was spent on clicks where that search keyword was only queried once, and your ad was the result that got clicked on - the first time – every time?
Protect your PPC Spend with Click Fraud Software
Fortunately, there are SaaS products that safeguard against competitor tampering and click fraud. The software hooks into your Google Ads account and gets data from every click that you get charged for through AdWords.
By grabbing metadata from ad clicks (e.g. users, devices, IP addresses, locations, etc.), the software determines if the same device or user is searching for keywords where your law firm’s ads may appear and click on them. Once it discovers a potential threat, it then automatically passes this information back to your Google Ads account and blocks the user or IP address this is coming from. In the future, your ads will no longer be displayed to that searcher.
Start Improving Your Campaigns
There can be many reasons that your ads might not be working. However, if you tighten up your processes by safeguarding your budget against click fraud, optimize your ads and landing pages to reduce your CPC and cost per lead, you’ll be in a much better position to turn a healthy profit from your campaigns.
Author Bio: Jared Kimball is a blogger and digital marketing consultant from Nova Scotia, Canada. He is the owner and lead strategist at Zahavian Legal Marketing, an agency that works with small law firms and solo practitioners - handling all of their SEO, Web and PPC Ad needs.