Your Guide to Lawyer Email Marketing (Including Tips and Tools)

Lawyer email marketing holds tremendous possibilities for law firms—from significantly boosting brand recognition to improving client relationships and attracting new clients. Best of all: email marketing software makes it easier than ever for lawyers to send targeted and personalized content.

If you’ve set your sights on lawyer email marketing, you’ll be glad to know that you don’t always need a dedicated marketing team to create successful campaigns. With the right knowledge and tools, you can send tailored messages to your legal clients today. 

In this blog post, we round up the best lawyer email marketing software, unpack the top features to look for, and reveal proven email marketing best practices for good measure.

Which lawyer email marketing software is best? 

With the sheer number of lawyer email marketing software options available, choosing one can be daunting. The best fit will depend on various factors—including your firm’s size, budget, and feature preferences and needs. You may opt to use a dedicated email marketing solution or a legal client intake and CRM software with email drip campaign capabilities (in other words: automated emails delivered to clients who take a particular action). 

Here is a list of the most popular lawyer email marketing solutions to get you started. To learn more about each tool, check out these in-depth reviews.

Mailchimp: The most popular and user-friendly option that doesn’t require technical expertise.

Campaign Monitor: A solid all-around option with the core email marketing features small to medium law firms need.

ActiveCampaign: A robust option for law firms wanting to execute complex drip campaigns and targeted advertising. 

AWeber: An affordable but basic option for smaller law firms that only need simple automation features.

SendPulse: A quality option with exceptional phone, email, and 24/7 live chat support for all subscription plans.

MailMunch: An affordable choice for law firms that primarily need lead capture forms.

Moosend: A solid solution with a free plan that includes up to 1,000 subscribers and unlimited email sends. 

Smartwriter.ai: Their different plans offer affordability with capabilities of up to 15 personalized lines per lead.

HubSpot: A robust tool for sophisticated marketing needs, but more expensive than others on this list.

Mailshake: An excellent tool for cold email outreach to generate leads. 

GetResponse: A fully-featured solution with powerful email testing tools.

What are the top lawyer email marketing software features?

Email editor and templates

Since you are a lawyer—and not a designer—you shouldn’t need to worry about learning HTML to create beautiful, user-friendly emails. 

The best lawyer email marketing software has:

• A drag-and-drop email editor. This feature lets you quickly build emails with little technical expertise.
  
• An extensive library of email templates. This feature allows you to create professional-looking emails faster.

Automation

Once you’ve crafted your emails, it’s time to send them to your clients. 

The email marketing solutions above boast automation features—which let you automatically deliver an email or series of emails to the right clients at the right time.

The benefits of doing so are numerous:

• You’ll save time by not having to manually send email newsletters.
• You can create multiple drip campaigns that deliver targeted emails based on client behavior. 
• It’ll be easier for your clients to stay in the loop and receive information about your firm.

Automation can make a profound difference in helping lawyers gain time to focus on legal work. This additional time is key to improving profitability, especially since lawyers record an average of only 2.6 hours of billable work each day, according to Clio’s 2022 Legal Trends Report. 

You can learn more about email automation from Mailchimp.

Deliverability

Once you send your emails, you want to ensure they successfully reach your clients’ inboxes. The best lawyer email marketing software options have solid reputations for deliverability—in other words, the success rate at which your emails get delivered.

Here are a few questions you’ll want to ask:

• Can you automatically remove email contacts that experience hard bounces? This occurs when emails permanently fail to deliver to a subscriber’s inbox.
• Can you send emails through a dedicated IP address? This is typically better than a shared IP, as your firm won’t be negatively affected by the poor marketing habits of other companies.
• Is there dedicated click tracking? You want your domain to appear on click-tracking links—instead of a default domain offered by your email marketing solution, which could cause your emails to be marked as spam.
• Can you analyze performance? Many solutions include reporting and analytics to help you boost the success of your lawyer email marketing efforts.
• Can you include a double opt-in in your emails? When recipients subscribe to an email list, they receive an additional email confirming their subscription. This helps ensure better engagement.

Analytics

Most lawyer email marketing software includes various tools to measure tyour campaigns’ performance. As we’ll cover shortly, there are several key performance indicators (KPIs)—like open and click-through rates—you should consistently monitor. 

With a solid understanding of these KPIs, you can see what is and isn’t working in your lawyer email marketing efforts. These analytics can also inform your strategy for future campaigns. 

Integrations

You should look for an email marketing solution that seamlessly integrates with the other solutions in your legal tech stack. Most importantly, your lawyer email marketing software should integrate with your legal practice management and CRM platforms. This ensures you’re not wasting time transferring data back and forth between tools.

Mailchimp is one of Clio’s many third-party integrations. Integrations like these offer the flexibility to use the solutions you have already or wish to implement with greater ease. 

How to send effective lawyer marketing emails 

In addition to choosing the right software, top-notch law firm marketing requires an understanding of best practices for strong email campaigns. While there isn’t a single playbook that applies to all firms, keep these in mind as a starting point:

Have a clear goal for each email marketing campaign

Resist the urge to send one-size-fits-all emails to every client in your contact list—as this could land you in their spam folders. The most successful lawyer email marketing campaigns send targeted and personalized emails to relevant client segments. 

A large number of lawyers are already doing this. The ABA 2022 TechSurvey Report found that 31% of firms send individual, personalized emails to clients. If you’re just getting started, check out this webinar covering strategies to create impactful email campaigns. 

When it comes to the type of content, educational pieces like published articles, blogs, and podcasts are great as they deliver real value to readers—as are announcements around noteworthy news, such as new hires or charitable initiatives.

The next step to creating personalized emails is to securely collect client data and store it in your lawyer email marketing solution. Information can include their:

• Name
• Phone number
• Location
• Last interaction date
• Last case date
• Position in matter pipeline
• New or existing client

Once equipped with this information, you can import the contacts into your lawyer email marketing solution. You can also segment your contacts to create different email lists based on the data you have. For example, you could create a separate list for new leads, old leads, new clients, one-off clients, and recurring clients. 

Keep each email clear and concise

According to the Nielsen Norman Group, people don’t read emails like they read books. They read in an “F” pattern, scanning your emails for call-to-actions and skipping over the copy. 

This means that it’s vital to create concise emails and keep content focused on one call to action. Here are general rules to follow for the ideal length of various email elements published by Campaign Monitor: 

• Subject line: 28 to 50 characters
• Preheader text: 40 to 100 characters
• CTA: two to five words
• Email copy: 50 to 125 words

Pay attention to the user experience

Emails will appear differently depending on the device your client uses to view content. That’s why you need to preview emails on both desktop and mobile devices before sending them—which most lawyer email marketing solutions let you do.

Also, emails can appear differently depending on the email service provider used (Gmail, Yahoo, etc.). Therefore, you must optimize your inbox display before you begin your email campaign. Solutions, such as GetResponse, have built-in testing tools that allow you to view how emails appear on five popular email service provider inboxes. 

Always monitor and measure results

As we mentioned above, consistently monitoring analytics is necessary to understand the performance of your marketing efforts. Here are some of the most important KPIs to track. 

• Open rate: How many clients opened the email you sent
• Click-through rate: How many clients clicked on links in your email
• Conversion rate: How many people clicked on a link and performed a desired action
• Bounce rate: How many clients didn’t receive your email
• Number of unsubscribes: How many clients unsubscribe to your automated emails
• Spam complaints: The number of clients that mark your emails as spam

You’re all set to start your lawyer email marketing journey 

Lawyer email marketing is a powerful tool in any marketing strategy and can help firms of all sizes elevate their businesses. A variety of solutions offer useful features for executing a successful law firm email marketing campaign.

Keep in mind that email marketing takes practice, and learning how to use these software platforms effectively can take time. However, these solutions and strategies can add immense value to your firm’s marketing efforts and deliver a positive ROI.

Why is email marketing for lawyers important?

Lawyers can use email marketing to generate leads, build relationships with prospective clients, secure referrals, and build brand awareness. By sending regular emails to a targeted audience, your firm and expertise remain top-of-mind for those who may need your services in the future.

 

Why do lawyers use email drip campaigns?

Lawyers can use drip campaigns to seamlessly walk clients through automated processes such as onboarding and payment. Lawyers can also create a schedule of emails to check in with clients as their case progresses.

We published this blog post in April 2021. Last updated: March 15, 2023.

Categorized in: Marketing