Email newsletters are an irreplaceable marketing tool used to communicate with your clients and spread the word about your law firm and its accomplishments.
An email newsletter can demonstrate your expertise in an area of law, which not only reassures your current clients, but can attract potential ones.
Keeping email newsletters informative and personal to your law firm is key. Whatever your area of law, keep your newsletters and content relevant, and utilize these tips to create and keep an effective law firm newsletter.
Ask yourself: is your law firm’s newsletter easy to read and does it keep your client interested? Do you send out your newsletter weekly, annually? Thinking about your firm’s newsletter and how to brighten it up, make it more accessible to potential clientele? We’ve compiled a few tips and tricks to streamline the process and show your clients how reliable and experienced you are.
Use Simple, Understandable Language
The best way to get your point across is to say it, and say it simply. While you may know the ins and outs of the legal system, it is important to remember that not every client has the same knowledge. Explaining in a clear, concise way, like how you speak in person is important, especially when communicating electronically.
Writing straightforward articles is the best way to share your expertise as a law firm. Think less school paper and more conversational. As someone who has read many types of legal writing, you know firsthand how important decipherable and concise writing is. If you want people to read it, you must write it well. When in doubt, read it out loud and see what it evokes.
Be Consistent with your Email Newsletters
As with most things in business: consistency is key. Once you have decided to send out a newsletter, set up a plan, and stick with it. Of course, some tweaks and adjustments will have to be made, as with any creative process, but it is important to stay consistent.
Creating interesting content and putting it out on a consistent basis is what keeps your clients interested in what you are doing and keeps them coming back.
Stay motivated and focused with each newsletter, and remember it is a marketing tool as well. Treat these deadlines as seriously as you would court dates and other legal filing deadlines. Planning is important to establish your newsletter. Decide whether your newsletter will be sent out weekly, monthly, quarterly, or even annually. Identify your audience, decide if you will have a specific theme, and then get to writing. Be consistent in sending the newsletter to your readers on a timely basis, and they will begin to look forward to it.
Email newsletters for law firms need to be concise
No one wants to read a wall of text. Break up the paragraph spacing and indents where needed, and keep the margins consistent for a clean look. Besides basic text formatting, adding media, like images or supplementary videos that add value to the newsletter are always encouraged.
In email newsletter design, the 3 Cs are considered highly impactful to your readers.
Consistency (within your page layout, for example with font size or margins) is important.
You should also practice Conservation by not wasting too much space. For example with layout mapping, it is important to not waste space with boxes that are too big or unnecessary graphics. Pictures and videos are a great addition to keep newsletters interesting, but they need to be handled and applied with care.
The third C, contrast, is to create visual interest throughout the newsletter. You can play with font size and color, the shapes of images and graphics. The creative options are limitless with the technology available.
Take time to experiment with the layout and play with the layout and images to find what will catch the reader’s eye. Conserving and contrasting the content you have will make for a more interesting and cohesive newsletter.
Stay Relevant
Make sure to write about things that are interesting to people other than lawyers. While the nuances of the latest appellate court rulings can be interesting to you, the public isn’t as knowledgeable on the subject, and needs to be informed.
Case summaries are not to be included. Think more of what the case summaries lead to, and use them as a springboard to write about and discuss the broader issues that affect your clients and potential clients. Push it a step further by asking a question that would be relevant to your clients, then answer it for them in the newsletter.
Let your client testimonials do the selling.
There’s nothing like reading a great, thought-provoking sentence only to start the next with a sales pitch. Successful email newsletters for law firms provide information to readers on practical issues that affect their lives.
Client testimonials are great way to soft sell your legal services to potential clients. Try to feature testimonials which are relevant to whatever you are discussing in your newsletter. This will increase your conversion rates.
If you write interesting content about the work that you do, the cases you have participated in, your law firm will shine through with expertise and experience. Educating readers and demonstrating expertise draws more clients in for your law firm.
Email newsletters for law firms need to have some substance so that people have a reason to read it, share it, and save it. It can be effective to include some salesy lines but be careful – don’t overdo it. People are always more responsive to someone who is trying to educate them than to someone trying to sell something.
Make It Easy To Get in Touch
As with any marketing tool, online or not, every law firm newsletter should have their contact information prominently displayed. An invitation for readers to call or email for more information is heavily suggested as well. A call to action will prompt clients to act now — no need to wait and think about calling your office, the number is right there!
Lawyers who invite the readers to contact them for more information typically get a bigger response than those who don’t include the offer.
Remember, the main purpose of a law firm email newsletter is to gain new clients, so make sure that the readers know that you really want to talk to them, and that you are ready to do so!
While these tips are not the end all be all, start creating and stay consistent, and the rest will fall in line. An email newsletter will help spread the news about your law firm. Keep offering interesting content — and then back it up with your law expertise.
Law firm newsletters help you communicate with your clients and even reach new potential ones. Often over-looked as a marketing tool, newsletters are a great way to keep in touch with your client base and show them what their hard-earned money is going to.
By maximizing your law firm’s newsletters, you can reach a larger, more diverse audience, and share your expertise with clients and potential clients.
Hi Taylor,
Thanks for pointing out the obvious! It is important to write newsletters from law firms to an audience that is not familiar with all the legal jargon or legal knowledge specific to your firm. Keeping up with the newsletters is so important! I have received one newsletter from business which comes out to be great, but then no other newsletters, so I am left wondering if I have missed them or they just gave up. Either way, it isn’t a good way to leave an audience. Keeping newsletters short and concise is also important, because not everybody is going to spend their entire time reading a really long article in a newsletter, as they want to get to the rest of it if they are even interested in the newsletter in the first place, so do not lose their attention when you’ve already got it.
This was a well done post, and without a doubt, many law firms could benefit from this advice. In my home state of Florida, it seems that we are bombarded by legal ads on billboards, TV, and wraps done on nearly every city bus.
As you explained in this article, a well-done email newsletter can be very impactful, and a great opportunity for your firm’s attorneys to showcase their knowledge on topics that your recipients may be interested in and possibly seeking some legal counsel for sometime in the future.
Law firm’s newsletters should be frequent and very informational because their clients may be looking for answers to the problem they are having. You gave some good information on newsletters for law firms and how they should be consistent.
I am a big fan of quarterly newsletters. I believe quarterly is not too frequent but is frequent enough to gain interest. I believe that newsletters from law offices should inform and educate the reader, which would keep me interested in the law office, and I would be more likely to share it with others. It defiantly needs to be in easy-to-understand language; I can not stand when I start seeing specific law numbers without explaining what the law entails. If it isn’t easy to understand, I’m just going to delete it and move on. Consistency being a key to newsletters is not something I have thought about before, but I see where that would matter. I get a newsletter from an association I am part of, and I look forward to reading them. They are short, colorful, and relays the information I need. While I am not in law, I can see how this could benefit all types of marketing.
This is some good advice, offering a free consultation in the email, can also go a long way. Be sure to let them know that they can pass the email on to someone else they know that may need it.
You were so right about the language used, as some legal e’s fly right over the heads of some people and it makes it say to hit the delete button.
I tend to read more from testimonials myself so that was a great thing to point out. People can usually relate them to events with them or friends.
As someone who has worked in a law firm and written many a newsletter, I think these tips are good guidelines. However, being clear. concise, and organized is not enough. One of the most important qualities a law firm can have is relatability. Many potential clients hesitate to hire lawyers because it is such a daunting task. Showing your clients that you have real human beings working for you who can relate to you on a more personal level will be the difference between someone choosing you over a competitor. You can highlight these qualities in your newsletters by using employee of the month blurbs and empathetic language. People are more likely to come to you for help if they see a smiling face.
I think that many people who are in certain professions sometimes forget that their terms they use at work are complete jargon to someone who isn’t as versed as they are. Consistency is absolutely key when creating newsletters for clients. It is always good to make sure that content is relevant, clean, and catchy. I do agree that client testimonials are necessary when selling to potential clients. Many consumers like to read how you were successful and what you can do for them. I would also recommend staying with the trends of what is catching the eyes of consumers but be careful of being cheesy. Great advice all around! Thank you so much!
I never really considered an email marketing strategy for law firms simply because most people aren’t looking to hear from a lawyer unless they really need one. However, the suggestions in this post have made me think that maybe getting some cool videos or compelling content with statistics could be an interesting read.
I would add that any law firm that is sending email campaigns better work hard on those subject lines if they want to prosper from the open and click rates.
Speaking as a marketing professional and JD, I’m glad to see someone else shares this thought process!
Lawyers have always had to deal with extra precautions in advertising their services, so the prospect of taking on a new medium like email can be daunting.
But what you’ve laid out here – testimonials, short videos, newsworthy items -those are all pretty approachable pieces of content that law firms naturally generate as part of other marketing initiatives. It’s all about the MVP’s – minimum viable content pieces.
And, of course, the real point of the email is to remind your audience to keep in touch.
Great work!
Excellent explanation on how to run a successful email campaign for law firms. Email newsletters are most beneficial for me, where I can ultimately have a one-on-one conversation with a law firm client via email. I try to avoid auto-answers as much as possible since I despise receiving automated responses myself!