Your clients love you to death and are grateful for all that you’ve done for them. But once their case is over, you are ancient history to your clients. That’s right, your clients won’t even remember your name and there’s virtually no chance they will refer new cases to you.
You have to stay “top of mind” with your former clients and referral partners. You’re super busy and with your hectic workday, staying in touch with your fans just isn’t realistic…or is it? An email newsletter puts you top of mind with thousands of your friends and followers with a click of a button on your laptop.
The people who subscribe to your email newsletter are your most loyal fans. They have given you permission to send content to them. With email, you know who your subscribers are. Every new article is sent to the reader’s inbox. Send a press release, send a newsletter or article to the list or send a podcast. Have a new podcast? Tell 5k of your fans.
Driving Crazy Traffic to Your Website
Marketing guru, Mike Dillard, has an email list of 400k with no employees or office and he can do it from anywhere in the world. An email newsletter is why Neil Patel gets 200k+ website visitors a month to his website, Quicksprout.com.
“Having a large list and a tribe of supporters is the ultimate advantage in business.”
–Mike Dillard
If you have 5k email subscribers and an open rate of 27%, you get 1,350 persons to your website with every email newsletter that you send. If you send 4 email newsletter in a week, your website gets 5,400 visitors/week just from the traffic generated by your email newsletter. In a month, this translates to over 20k website visitors!
There are a bunch of benefits of an email newsletter, including:
- Improving website traffic,
- Having thousands of raving fans within your reach,
- Filling events and webinars,
- Getting clients (and making $)
An email newsletter gives you speed—if an important news event takes place, you can send an update/press release the same day to your fans. You can communicate with your fans frequently and cheaply. Email is much cheaper than any other form of marketing–the cost of sending an email is virtually nothing. The low cost of email means you can communicate with your fans as much as you want.
Measure, Track and Analyze
With email, you can monitor, in detail, the reaction of your fans to the emails. The “open rate” shows the % of your email subscribers who clicked the link in the email to read the full email. If you are not tracking and analyzing, you’re wasting your time.
Open Rate: How many people opened your email divided by the number of emails sent. This lets you know if your emails are getting opened.
Bounce Rate: How many emails are returned divided by the number of emails sent. The bounce rate is important to measure the quality of your list.
Mail Chimp is a list management service that is the best at sending emails and making sure the emails get delivered (MailChimp.com).
How to Build a Tribe of Raving Fans
Send an invitation to join the email newsletter to your email list. With your list of clients, you have hundreds, if not thousands, of email addresses. You can publish a weekly, “Newsletter from Joe”, in which you talk about recent news in your practice area, recount war stories and give your best actionable advice.
“If you’re not doing any kind of email collection, you’ve just lost them.”
–Laura Roeder
Segment the list so you can send detailed messages that are unique to each individual subscriber. You can do this by collecting specific information during the opt-in process, including whether the person is a lawyer, where he/she practices law and her practice area, i.e., “Please tell us more about you”.
Getting Your Fans to Sign Up
Add an opt-in subscription for the email newsletter on every page of your website and your Facebook fan page. Your specific Call to Action must promise your fans that you will send your email newsletter on the same date and time of every week:
“Want more of our cutting edge tips about marketing and management for lawyers? Sign up for John’s weekly email newsletter, Lawyer Alert, that will be delivered to your inbox every Monday at noon EST.”
“Those who sign up for our newsletter will also get John’s monthly newsletter, Lawyer Alert, and his ebook, “How to Get Your Law Firm’s Website on the First Page of Google.”
Add an email sign up box that pops up after a visitor has been on your site for 45 seconds. This allows the visitor to read your content and see the value for themselves before making the decision to sign up. A free bonus, such as an ebook, should be offered for those who sign up.
4 Tips for Engaging Your Tribe
#1: End posts with a question. Ask open-ended questions, respond to comments, try to initiate conversations with your readers, create incentives, i.e., if you refer a friend to our email newsletter, you’ll get a free book.
#2: Recognize commenters publicly. Share something valuable—point readers to helpful resources and be generous. Allow readers to reply to other readers and host a conversation. Use Disqus.com.
#3: Participate in the conversation—this is the most important tip! Make your responses stand out by highlighting them in a different color.
#4: Thank people when they subscribe to your email newsletter.
Post or Perish
#1 Mistake: Sending junk email! Crappy email newsletters that have no actionable advice and waste the reader’s time. Don’t do this!
#2 Mistake: You have no plan and post whenever you feel like it. Your email newsletter is doomed! You must post your emails/blogs at the same time and same day of every week.
#3 Mistake: Don’t post only once—the majority of your audience won’t see it. Save posts and post them at different times to maximize the exposure. Remember the axiom, “People need 7 touches before they buy.”
Don’t Mess with The Anti-Spam Law
Due to anti-spam laws, it is illegal to send emails to people who have not “opted in” to receive them. In 2003, the United States enacted the first law regulating unsolicited commercial email. The Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act, a/k/a the “Can-Spam Act”, requires that:
- All emails should have an unsubscribe option.
- You must include a full postal address at the foot of your email, and any removal request sent by postal mail to that address must be honored.
- The addresses of people who opted out of your list shouldn’t be sold to marketers.
To avoid the anti-spam law, you must get permission to send emails. This is called permission marketing.
A Long-Term Asset for Your Law Practice
An email newsletter is about building long-term relationships. Send out your email newsletter several times a week and most importantly, be consistent in sending your weekly email newsletter. Always make sure you give much more than you get.
With an email marketing campaign, you’re in charge—you can contact your list whenever you want to and there is almost no cost. An email newsletter is the best way to stay “top of mind” with your former clients.
photo credit: Weltkugel auf Tastatur via photopin (license)
