A Law Firm Newsletter: Getting More Leads Easily

79% of marketers have chosen email as one of the top three most effective channels, according to a survey of email experts polled for the Litmus 2021 State of Email Report.

There is a straightforward explanation for why so many marketers use email: it is effective. Any size business can afford it, and it raises engagement, conversions, and income. Law firms email marketing is still unmatched in terms of the ROI it delivers – a whopping $36 for every dollar invested, Litmus research revealed.

In this post, we’ll go over everything you need to know about attorney newsletters, such as how to build a law firm email list and what your newsletter should contain.

If you want to learn more about the importance of having a periodic legal newsletter, watch our podcast episode with Janet Falk.

Why Start a Law Firm Newsletter Campaign?

Regardless of whether you have a start-up company or a long-established company, each of them still needs customers, because they are the ones who make a profit. That's why you need a legal newsletter. By offering up-to-date legal information and numerous pieces of advice to your clients in your newsletter, you will attract both past clients and new ones.

Even well-established law firms such as Earley Law Group recognize the value of newsletters for attracting new clients.

Law companies may accomplish many significant email marketing goals with the use of highly targeted campaigns:

• Establishing and fostering trust through ongoing communication
• Establishing credibility using knowledge-based content
• Providing prospective clients with the most recent, pertinent legal content
• Keep current and future customers in the spotlight
• Encouraging communal service

All this is achieved effortlessly with the help of law firm newsletters.

How to Write a Law Firm Newsletter

Before you sit down and start writing, you should have a fundamental idea of what goes into creating and promoting a successful email. For producing your first legal newsletter, follow these seven simple steps:

• Define your target audience for your law firm newsletter.
• Write a catchy headline to grab the customer's attention.
• Write valuable content that interests your audience.
• Add pictures, photos, or infographics to your lawyer newsletter.
• Link to relevant articles, attorney videos, and other content on your law firm website.
• Add a call to action to your legal newsletter.
• Highlight law firm's social media and provide contact information.

Although the main points for writing a law firm newsletter have been listed, you may still have questions, such as how to determine the target audience or why you need to answer the FAQ. So that you do not have such questions, let's take a more in-depth look at some points:

Determine Your Target Audience

No matter how much time and effort you put into creating the ideal law firm's marketing strategy, you cannot persuade uninterested people to use your services. That's why you need a smart strategy that ensures your law firm captures the right audience.

For example, Rosenburg & Gluck publishes legal newsletters on a wide range of topics for a wide range of readers. Topics covered range from traffic accidents and construction accidents to medical errors.

Without understanding what exactly to rely on when determining the audience, it can be quite challenging; therefore, to make it easier for you, we have identified several factors that are important in defining it:

• What types of legal services is your audience looking for?
• What legal problems cause them the greatest difficulty?
• What questions might people have about the legal system?
• What do they want to achieve by working with a lawyer?
• What areas of law and legal system are readers interested in learning about?

Once you've answered all these questions and defined your audience, you might want to hire someone to write your law firm newsletter content and start sending it to your customers' emails. Before you start doing this, you must be aware of the CAN-SPAM Act. This U.S. law regulates that advertising messages comply with rules. Naturally, if you do not comply with this law, you can be fined up to $46,517 for each email sent, so you should familiarize yourself with the rules of this law.

Create a Customized Template for Your Law Firm Newsletter

There is plenty of email marketing software out there that provides plenty of pre-designed templates to help you create a professional-looking law firm email newsletter, but you need to choose one. Let's break down the best of them:

• Moosend differs from other email marketing software with its feature whereby you can segment your list based on your customer's behavior. For example, if the majority of your clients are more likely to read real estate newsletters, then more attention should be paid to writing those topics.
• MailChimp provides the largest number of templates, so you are sure to find the best one for you. If it is difficult for you to choose a template design, the Creative Assistant feature will help you. Creative Assistant will collect images, fonts, logos, and colors from your website and landing pages. It will then use these components to create various templates that match your design style.

Once you have chosen the perfect template for your business design, start personalizing it for your law firm by adding your logo, changing the color scheme, then adding images, videos, text boxes, various buttons, and other content elements. Here's a look at one of the pre-built Moosend templates to get an idea of what features newsletter editors have and what they look like.

Law Firm Newsletter Ideas

When creating content, uniqueness is undoubtedly essential. So it's worth experimenting with different types of emails, layouts, and content to choose the most pleasing-to-eye template. Let's take a look at the best law firm newsletter ideas for content writing:

1. Use Your Most Popular Blog Entries as New Content

Provide readers with a summary of the law firm blog posts that generated the most traffic and links to the original posts so they can read the entire article. As a result, clients can now receive a wealth of information about the latest news in your legal industry, which adds value to your law firm's newsletter and enhances your firm's credibility as more qualified than others.

2. Give Answers to the Frequently Asked Questions of Your Target Audience

By focusing your newsletter on FAQs, you will save yourself and your employees the time and effort involved in answering inquiries and questions you often receive from customers. Additionally, your clients will value that they won't have to look for the solutions to these often-asked questions. It’s also worth noting right off the bat that you shouldn’t include every possible question your customers might ask, but only the most important ones.

It's hard to determine which ones are really important, so invite readers to write down any questions or comments they might have and identify the most popular ones. By segmenting your attorney newsletter to specific audiences, it will be easier for you to reach their attention. 

3. Share the Most Recent Essential Legal News

Your newsletter is a great way to keep your readers updated on any recent developments or upcoming legal changes. This news is especially essential for people doing business, since any change in the legislation may lead to a change in the company's business development plan. It will show your clients how well your law firm keeps up with changes in legislation and that it can provide the highest level of professionalism. To make it easier for people to follow changes in the law, include a summary of them in your law firm's newsletter.

4. Law Firm News

Humanizing law firms and attorneys and developing strategies to make sure prospective clients understand how approachable they can be are priority tasks in the legal industry. While discussing current instances and client testimonials is a fantastic way to demonstrate your expertise, it may also be helpful to share firm news about promotions, job postings, internal events, PR campaigns, new hires, etc. Users can get to know lawyers better by sharing these brief insights into the daily law firm life in your office.

5. Case Studies

People love to read real stories, so sharing a successful or unusual case your company has worked on is a great way to grab their attention. By demonstrating how comparable challenges have been overcome, potential customers can build trust in your business.

What's more, you can convince a client to contact you if they didn't know you were practicing in a particular area of ​​law. Finally, be sure to protect the client's confidentiality by omitting any details that could be used to identify the cases you choose to highlight.

6. Guides and Informational Downloadables

More in-depth information that readers can use now or later is always in demand. Include download links in your law firm email newsletter for long articles written by your company. It can be a guide, checklist, e-book, etc. To attract the attention of potential clients, it is worth briefly describing the material. Your readers will appreciate an unexpected freebie in the form of an e-book download or a guide that covers topics of interest in more detail.

7. Video Content

Not every article in your newsletter has to be in text format. Short videos are simple for your viewers to comprehend in the digital era. Instead of sending out a text newsletter, you can make videos answering the most frequently asked customer questions. If you have sufficient funds, it is also possible to outsource video content production to a third party to ensure the best possible result.

8. Share Information About Company Employees

Present your employees not only as professional lawyers, but also as ordinary people. Write about the interests and hobbies of your employees in the newsletter because this can win over a client with similar interests. Clients will more often turn to your company over another whose employees they know nothing about, except for their professional merits.

• Highlight company events with photos of your employees celebrating holidays like Halloween or Thanksgiving together.
• Find out why your employees chose to become lawyers, and then write their stories in your newsletter. 
• Share photos of your employees involved in volunteer activities such as helping in animal shelters or soup kitchens.

9. Share Consumer Reviews and Information About Their Cases

Customer reviews are a fantastic way to promote a business; they should be used with care so as not to scare off readers. It is a good idea to include a testimonial block at the beginning or end of your newsletter to win over readers of your business or leave them with a positive impression of the firm. Keep this in mind, and never put a testimonial block in the middle of a newsletter because this usually will not result in the desired effect.

Some reviews are confusing to readers due to a lack of context. People mostly leave comments without mentioning the case itself, something like: “Law Firm X did the hard and long work of researching my case so that I could eventually win it. Thank them for this!” It is not clear for which particular case the company is being praised. That's why it's a good idea to include approved case information before a customer testimonial.

10. Share Your Expert Opinion

All that content produced for the lawyer newsletter costs money in one way or another. For many firms, this is indeed what stops them from creating their newsletter. Therefore, for such firms, there is a solution - to write their own expert opinion about the articles of non-competitors. It will allow customers to assess the level of professionalism of your employees and gain crucial knowledge about the nuances of the law.

11. Let Others Know About Your Charitable Actions

If you value philanthropy and put a lot of effort into it, then clients will respond positively. As a result, not only will your company's loyalty and respect grow, but it will also attract new customers who value companies that support charitable activities.

No matter how often you contribute to charity, no one will believe you are doing it if you don't share it. It's always worth sharing photos, and it would be even better to hold a charity event. During the entire preparation process for the event, advertise it in your newsletter and invite customers to the charity event.

12. Bring New Life to Your Old Content

As much as we do not like it, old content loses reader growth over time. Instead of putting up with it, there is a way to re-engage people with this content. To do this, all you need to do is write a short post where you will highlight a few of your old articles. For example, you can create a newsletter like "The 5 Best Articles on the New Tax Regulations." It will spread the word about older articles you have written that are still relevant but have gained fewer views as of late.

13. Create Helpful Lists

Most readers don't read the entire article, instead skimming through it. Therefore, it is essential to grab the attention of the reader, and lists are the best way to do this. Catchy headings attract readers' attention, and if the amount of information in the articles is limited, subscribers won't need to spend much time reading it. A simple email newsletter like this can be a big hit with readers.

14. Recommendations for a Healthy Lifestyle

Health has been one of the most popular topics for many years and is essential for both your client and your employees. Good health is critical for lawyers since they are unlikely to defend clients well in court if they're sick and don't have time to get acquainted with new case materials.

Since this topic is essential to everyone, it is worth writing about. For example, share healthy lifestyle tips related to the current situation in the world. Describe the safety measures you should take to avoid getting sick with COVID-19. Even though many people are tired of hearing about it, it is still one of the most pressing health issues confronting society. 

15. Funny Legal Stories

Writing on vital topics is crucial, but occasionally readers also need a break. For this reason, you should consider publishing a lighthearted newsletter every Friday. On the Internet, you can find many funny stories about silly court cases or eyewitness statements that made the news.

Here is an example of a joke from a list compiled by Reader's Digest:

“Attorney David Reischer, founder of LegalAdvice.com once had a client who was not into wearing business clothing. Not even business casual. This doesn’t always go over so well with judges, so Reischer tried to convince the man to at least wear a tie. Just this once. The client obliged…he showed up the next day wearing a huge clown tie!”

16. X Legal Niceties You Wish You Could Tell Yourself From the Past

Many people love this style of article as they are heartfelt and evoke memories of when you knew less about the many legal nuances. Additionally, those who are unfamiliar with these intricacies might gain new knowledge by reading about other people's experiences rather than by trying it out for themselves.

Preview the Law Firm Newsletter Material

When you've finished creating your newsletter in any of the previously mentioned email marketing software, click on the preview button. This option is required so that you can ensure that your law firm's newsletter looks good on a variety of devices.

One company that is concerned about how their newsletter is displayed on different platforms is Vaagelaw. Here is how one of Vaagelaw's videos shows what their newsletter looks like on tablets:

Having made sure that your newsletter is written and formatted correctly, you should use an email test to identify various grammatical mistakes and typos. Once you've corrected any mistakes, you should start sending out your law firm's newsletter to your existing clients.

Send Your Emails at Regular Intervals

Once you have completed the template and added the required content to the newsletter, double-check that everything is displayed correctly and that there are no grammatical errors. When everything is done, you are finally ready to schedule your email, which means that everyone selected from your list will receive a copy of your newsletter.

How to Grow Your Law Firm Newsletter Email List

Now that you have a law firm newsletter, you will need an audience to send it to. It’s worth mentioning right away that you don’t need to resort to buying email subscribers. Of course, this is an easy way to get some kind of audience, but believe me, you don't want these subscribers. Most of these subscribers are dead accounts or people who are not interested in your services.

Like many other companies, you'll need to gradually but steadily build the number of email subscribers who are interested in your business. Let's look at how you can grow your law firm newsletter email list:

• Make it so that when someone visits your site, a window pops up with a form for subscribing to your email.
• Create informative blog posts to get traffic from social networks and search engines. As a result, people who only follow you on social media will also subscribe to your email.
• Offer people the opportunity to download certain useful materials, such as infographics, guides, and PDFs, only after they subscribe to your email.
• To make your articles more than just useful for website promotion, use email marketing software with the ability to insert forms into articles (for example, Mailchimp). Thus, people who liked your articles will subscribe to your email.

Measuring the Success of Your Law Firm Newsletter Campaign

Every marketing effort should have specific goals that are clear, achievable, time-bound, and relevant. Without any way to track the effectiveness of your consistent newsletter marketing strategy, you can't just start sending it to your subscribers.

Most companies that start with newsletters want to expand their customer base. An example goal for companies looking to acquire new clients can be:

"In five months of using the newsletter, attract ten new customers."

To gauge the effectiveness of this campaign, it's worth tracking the number of people who contacted your company via email or phone while being an email newsletter subscriber. One of the best tools for tracking various metrics of your email campaign is Google Analytics.

As you can see, the email marketing company report from Google Analytics contains a lot of different information. Despite the number of metrics, not all of them are valuable, and only a few of them contain important information. Let's take a look at the most useful data you can get from Google Analytics:

• The number of attracted new subscribers, as well as existing subscribers.
• Demographic Information, including the user's location.
• Email Open Rate, which counts the number of subscribers who open an email newsletter
• Email click-through rate determines how often your email recipients click on a link or button. A high CTR means that your call to action is effective.
• The browser and operating system data.
• Email deliverability, this indicator will help you know the number of delivered emails. It will also help you troubleshoot issues if not all emails have been delivered to customers.

Conclusion

By having a clear idea of why you should create a law firm newsletter and what content should be in it, you can be sure to create something that will appeal to new people attracted to your newsletter. Follow the guidelines above, and you are sure to build your firm's brand, gain credibility, and showcase who your company is from the inside out.

Now you know how to quickly and effectively promote your company with a law firm newsletter. To learn more about the different ways you can market your company online, visit our high-performing law firm digital marketing agency's website. In addition to quality information about promotion methods, you can also utilize the services of our marketing company. When you take advantage of our attorney SEO services, you'll no longer have to think about how to attract clients because professionals will deal with it for you!