The Intersection of Lawyer Blogs and Email Marketing

At eLawMarketing, we take a "holistic" approach to Internet marketing that stresses synergy between our clients' various online marketing tools. A good example is the use of email marketing to promote blogs, and vice versa.

Many law firms and attorneys publish blogs, which have emerged as a superb tool for promoting expertise and developing a reputation for thought leadership. Yet, if they polled their clients, many lawyer bloggers would undoubtedly find that a large percentage of their clients are not subscribed to their blogs for various reasons, including lack of familiarity with RSS (the primary mechanism for receiving blog updates), lack of time to read all the new posts (especially if they are subscribed to other blogs already), or lack of awareness of a blog's existence or the blog's value to their business decisions.

This is unfortunate since, as noted, blogs demonstrate expertise, and it is beneficial from a marketing standpoint for a lawyer to regularly remind clients about his or her expertise (so the clients think of that lawyer first when new legal business arises). Clients also lose out since lawyers typically use blogs to provide insight on breaking legal developments germane to clients' businesses. Clients could certainly benefit from those insights.

A simple solution that many bloggers overlook is to send periodic HTML email alerts to their clients with links to the latest and most important blog posts. Lawyers already communicate on a day-to-day basis with clients via email, and periodically send email alerts to clients covering breaking legal developments. Thus, it is a good idea to add "blog updates" to the mix to ensure that all of an attorney's important clients are aware of the blog and then regularly updated (e.g., monthly) concerning new blog posts of possible interest and value. One can use a free analytics tool like Google Analytics to measure the impact of email updates on blog traffic in terms of page views and other metrics.

An added benefit is that clickthroughs on links to blog posts in email alerts are trackable down to the individual subscriber. This technology lets lawyer bloggers gain insight into which clients are interested in which blog posts (thus identifying possible business development opportunities as in, "Hey, I'm noticing that John Doe at Peoria Energy is an avid reader of my posts on new energy tax credits, maybe I should give him a call about that issue."). In contrast, because the common subscription mechanism for blogs - RSS - is anonymous, it does not allow attorneys to tell which subscribers are reading which posts.

That's how email alerts can be used to promote blogs. On the flip side, blogs can drive subscriptions to email alerts and newsletters. A simple subscription box positioned at the top of the the lefthand or righthand column of a blog can pick up new subscribers for a law firm's email alerts from prospective clients, journalists and other visitors who find the blog through the search engines. Why not try to pick up these blog readers as email alert or newsletter subscribers as well by encouraging them to opt into your email publications?

In short, use email alerts to promote blogs, and blogs to promote email alerts - that's the synergy you should be aiming for to get the most out of all of your Internet marketing tools.

Comments

[Meredith Hamilton]

I must respectfully disagree with your statement: "...since lawyers typically use blogs to provide insight on breaking legal developments germane to clients' businesses."

I too frequently see lawyers who stray from using their blog to communicate with clients and prospects and instead direct their posts to other attorneys.

[Joshua Fruchter]

Meredith - hi, I don't think we disagree. What you are saying is true. However, the same insight can be valuable to both a client and another attorney (in fact, the "clients" are often other attorneys working in-house at businesses). In any event, what we are recommending is that lawyers who blog should use email to maximize the number of clients (as well as referral sources) who are aware of their insights.

Josh

[Lisa Solomon]

Josh, what do you think of publicizing a blog using FeedBurner's Headline Animator in your e-mail signature (among other methods, of course)?