LawyerCasting

Preferred Day to Send B2B Email

We previously blogged about the best time of day to send law firm emails. Recently came across this chart on the ClickZ.com website which provides guidance on the best day of the week to distribute emails. While the table is a bit dated (2006), our clients' experience shows that it is still accurate (not surprising - human nature hasn't changed much in 2,000 years, let alone 2 years).

The B2B table at the top of the page is relevant to law firms who market to business clients. The B2C table provides guidance to lawyers who market to individual consumers (for example, personal injury attorneys).

Not surprisingly, Friday and the weekend are really BAD times for law firms to send email newsletters and alerts to business clients. In particular, when a law firm distributes an email alert on a Friday, the weekend intervenes after only one day of exposure. Anyone who was out of the office on Friday would only find that email on Monday below a pile of (probably junk) email that came in over the weekend.

Conversely, Friday and the weekend are good choices for lawyers working with consumers (who often read their email over weekends). Although, contrary to popular wisdom, the weekend is less effective than earlier in the week even for B2C emails (probably because some people may not like to be disturbed over the weekend with marketing messages).

Email Design Tips for Outlook 2007

When Microsoft first rolled out Outlook 2007, HTML email designers raised concerns about the changes made by Microsoft to the way HTML emails would be displayed in the latest version of its popular email application. At a technical level, previous versions of Outlook used Internet Explorer as the engine for rendering HTML content. This meant that if your HTML looked good in Internet Explorer, it would look good in Outlook. Then, for Outlook 2007, Microsoft began using Microsoft Word to render the HTML.

With the passage of time, it now appears the alarm was unwarranted. The good news is that the changes to Outlook 2007 did not affect most of the core design techniques (such as tables) used to create HTML emails. However, law firm email marketers need to be aware that the following commonly used HTML tags and techniques are no longer supported in Outlook 2007, and redesign accordingly:

background images

forms

Flash and animated GIF's

replacing bullets with images in unordered lists