Get a Custom Domain For Your Law Firm's Email Marketing and Eliminate the Risk To Your Law Firm's Day-to-Day Email Domain

Many law firms engage in email marketing - primarily by sending periodic email newsletters and alerts to clients covering emerging legal trends and developments, or email invitations for upcoming seminars and other events. This is great. Don't stop.

But most firms use their "core" domain in the reply email address in the header of their email newsletter or alert. What does this mean? For example, for day-to-day email, your firm might use the domain "mylawfirm.com." So an email from attorney John Doe to his client might have an address such as [email protected]. When the law firm distributes its latest email newsletter to, say, 2,500 clients, they'll use the reply email address [email protected] - the same domain as was used by Mr. Doe to communicate with his client.

The problem is that it is conceivable at some point that one of the recipients of the firm's email newsletter -- for example, a prospect who forgets that he once met a lawyer from the firm at a tradeshow over a year ago (which lawyer then added this contact's name to the firm's CRM system) -- might complain about the firm's domain to an anti-spam organization. Over time, too many complaints might compromise the reputation of the mylawfirm.com domain with organizations that publish lists of domains suspected of being used by spammers, thereby affecting the deliverability of even the firm's day-to-day email from lawyers to clients at companies that use those lists to filter emails.

The solution to avoid this risk is to work with an email services provider that can provide the law firm with a custom domain for its email newsletters and alerts such as "mylawfirmnews.com" tied to a unique IP address so that the domain used in the email headers matches the domain associated with the IP address of the mail server. In this way, the firm does not put its core "mylawfirm.com" domain at risk, but is still able to use a domain with its email newsletter that matches the law firm's brand.

And if there happen to be periodic complaints about the domain used in the email newsletter headers, at least the reputation of the firm's core day-to-day domain will not be affected.