Tools for Email Marketing
Whether you want to start an email marketing campaign or an email newsletter, there are a variety of tools for the job. According to the Content Marketing Institute’s 2020 B2C Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends report, email newsletters are some of the highest performing content types for securing and nurturing leads. Once you get into a cadence, and with the right tools, email marketing is a terrific way to educate and inform clients, as well as stay top of mind with former clients and contacts.
Campaign or Newsletter?
Are you actively seeking business or interested in delivering content/news/updates? An email campaign typically accomplishes the former, with touch points to potential, current, and former clients/contacts. An email newsletter focuses on the latter – sending a regular informative update to subscribers. Your firm may do both.
Whether a campaign or a newsletter, it is important to use a tool designed for email marketing versus sending out email BCCed from your inbox. Why? You need to be able to track subscriber lists, provide unsubscribe options and comply with CAN SPAM, send simultaneous HTML and plain text messages, do A/B testing, and track opens, clicks, and bounces.
Your decision-making process for choosing an email marketing tool will be determined by price and integration with tools you already use.
Email Marketing Campaigns
Email marketing campaigns focus on trying to persuade someone to take action, whether that is to contact you, download a white paper, fill in a form, or get in touch. SendGrid provides examples of marketing emails including welcome, promotional, retention, and nurture.
There are a plethora of technologies and services on the market to help firms with email marketing campaigns. In addition to the big names like Salesforce and Hubspot, there are plenty of other products with fewer bells and whistles (and lower price points) like GetResponse, Drip, Mailchimp, Constant Contact and dozens more. These tools include features for automations, behavioral targeting, analyze patterns, and much more. If you would rather get some help, many law firm marketing companies will help set up and send email campaigns. Services like Levitate can help set up “top of mind” campaigns.
Interested in tracking leads through a “sales” lifecycle with targeted follow-up and communication? There are many newer CRM products focused on the legal profession, like Clio Grow, Lawmatics, Lead Docket and Law Ruler. These tools let a firm track potential clients, launch target email follow-ups, provide analytics, and much more. They help you to create intake forms, online retainer agreements, and automation journeys such as appointment confirmation, intake forms, and post-consultation retainers. What makes them unique are tools like ‘pipeline forecasting’ and integrations with your calendar or case management platform. Features like these are also cropping up in practice management applications like Zola Suite, PracticePanther, Centerbase, ActionStep, Lawcus, and many more. If your current practice management application does not have CRM features look for integration with popular email marketing products like Constant Contact and MailChimp.
Email Newsletters
While products like MailChimp and Constant Contact work well for email marketing, they are also great for email newsletters. Email newsletters are considered “content marketing” – a communication that asks for nothing in return with no defined call to action other than to share information.
If possible, develop a cadence for your newsletter so people look forward to it, whether that is weekly, monthly, or quarterly. It will also help you to schedule it and make it a regular practice. What to write about? What would you want to read about? News you can use, community activities, firm comings and goings, and anything that would be of interest to your target market. For instance, do you represent HOAs and condominium associations? A newsletter could reflect changes in the law, pending legislation, and FAQs like “does an HOA qualify for non-profit discounts?” or “what happens when a Board member resigns in the middle of her term?”. If you blog, you can compile that content to send out in an email newsletter.
If your email newsletter consists of curated links to news and information of interest to your clients, there are tools that can make this easy to compile. One example is Goodbits, which makes it easy to collect links you see into collections. Then annotate and organize the collection and either use Goodbits or your preferred email marketing tool to send to your subscribers. Goodbits has a browser extension so you can collect the links you see without having to copy/paste or save them to your bookmarks, Edge collections, or in tools like Pocket or Evernote. You can also use Goodbits to collect and curate your Twitter tweets or Facebook posts or gather content you save in Pocket or from RSS feeds. Goodbits has attractive templates and layouts and makes compiling a newsletter easy.
Social Media Newsletter Tools
Newer email newsletter tools let you leverage your social media platforms. Revue by Twitter is a free email newsletter tool that you connect with your Twitter account. Your newsletter subscription is promoted on your Twitter profile. You get unlimited subscribers, CAN-SPAM compliance, and some analytics to see how you are doing. If you already invest time in Twitter this is a fantastic way to start a newsletter with a built-in audience. Yes, you can share it through Tweets. When composing a Tweet, add the link to your Revue profile, and Twitter will automatically generate a link preview for you. If you want to show a specific issue of your newsletter instead, just add the link to the issue you want to show, and Twitter will generate a link preview of the issue.
LinkedIn has rolled out LinkedIn Newsletters. Simply go to “Write an article” at the top of the home page and click “Create a newsletter”. By default your connections and followers will be invited to subscribe to your newsletter once the first article has been published. You can share your newsletter on other social accounts as well. If you have a firm page on LinkedIn you can create the newsletter as a Page (you’ll need admin rights). One downside to LinkedIn newsletters is that they remain accessible only to LinkedIn members. While many people have a LinkedIn subscription, this offer is best for lawyers and firms that are focusing on leveraging this social platform to the max.
Capturing Contacts
For your email marketing campaigns you will collect email addresses through your CRM, website form, or other methods. Decide where to keep and manage these email addresses, whether it is a marketing tool, a spreadsheet, shared Outlook or Google Workspace contacts, or your practice management application. Add intelligence like notes, anniversaries, birthdays, where you met, etc. You will want to segment the email addresses into contact types, like current, potential or former clients, referrals, etc.
There are a few tools to help you gather the email addresses of contacts so that you can leverage them for email marketing and newsletters. Evercontact works with Gmail, Google Apps, Outlook, Office 365, and you can export the contacts to MailChimp or Constant Contact. The software automatically creates and updates contacts from email signatures and sends them to your address book (or a firm database) An additional one time service, Contact Rescue looks at your email for the past two or five years and collects the contact information (that is, if you hang on to email that long) for a one-time cost of $99 (2 years) or $199 (5 years) of analysis of your email archives. Evercontact will show you what it is adding and give you the chance to accept or reject it — so it is not so automatic that it fills your contacts with people you do not want there.
By collecting email addresses in your contacts manager, like Outlook or Google Contacts, you can then export them to other applications to make use of the intelligence and send marketing messages. If you want to tag them, be sure to capture the notes field in the export, which indicates the information was collected with Evercontact.
Copy2Contact, which has been on the market for since 2001 (and the website still mentions Palm Desktop ?!?!?!), is a similar tool. You can get the Copy2Contact email add-on and browser extension, and capture information from email signature blocks, documents, and websites to put directly into MS Outlook contacts or Salesforce. Unlike Evercontact, to add a contact with Copy2Contact you will need to remember to select the text and click Ctrl + C + C to add it to your contacts. They have an app for your iPhone as well, though the install only works with Outlook on a Windows PC.
Do not forget to scan those business cards you collect at meetings and events into your contact manager. You can use Office Lens, Evernote, Google Lens, or others from your smartphone.
Conclusion
Make sure to check your success! Are people opening your emails? Taking action? Clicking? Subscribing? Unsubscribing? Email marketing and email newsletters are only successful if you are carefully measuring and monitoring your progress. What can you change to get more interaction? Like any other marketing effort engaging through email will be an iterative process, it will be necessary to refine and tweak to see what works.