Research Highlights the Importance of Segmentation and Campaign Frequency in Law Firm Email Marketing

New research from MarketingSherpa highlights the importance of making sure your law firm email alerts are properly targeted to client interests, and that you adhere to a reasonable frequency.

Email newsletter subscribers were asked: "If you have unsubscribed or simply stopped reading emails from one or more businesses this year, what were the primary reasons?"

• 58% responded that "the emails weren't relevant to me."

• 44% said they "received too many emails from the sender(s)."

• 31% was "simply receive too many emails from all sources to pay attention."

See the full chart here.

As MarketingSherpa notes, the top two answers highlight the importance of the individual relationship between senders and recipients to a successful email marketing program.

With recipients identifying relevance and campaign-level frequency as the top two reasons for opting-out or simply ignoring a sender’s email, the lessons for law firms are as follows.

First, if your emails are relevant, clients will read them, notwithstanding all the "clutter" in their inboxes (as MarketingSherpa puts it, subscribers "are able to identify relevant quality content regardless of the white noise surrounding it.").

To make sure your emails are relevant, use segmentation "best practices" to ensure that email content is aligned with client interests. That is, send alerts about new environmental regulations only to clients you reasonably believe are interested in environmental law developments, alerts about new tax regulations to clients interested in tax issues, etc. Sometimes you can get even more granular (e.g., targeting an alert at clients operating in a particular industry in a particular state). 

Point is, once you have the alert content ready to go, think carefully about which clients would be interested in receiving it. Then use list segmentation tools to narrow down the distribution list to those clients. Also, use descriptive subject lines to further help clients determine whether to read an alert once they have received it (never use vague subject lines to boost open rates - maintaining a relationship of trust with your clients is much more important than how high the open rate was).

Second, don't overdo it. If you are properly segmenting your client distribution lists, then even if you send numerous alerts a month, most clients should not receive more than 1-3 alerts/month from you.