The Return Path blog recently listed some email marketing "best practices" that B2B email marketers can learn from their B2C brethren.
Perhaps the most important was integrating social media with your email marketing program. For example, if you publish a blog, are you repurposing some of that content for your email marketing campaigns? How about content from LinkedIn discussions?
Similarly, many email service providers (including yours truly) now offer a feature called social forwarding that allows recipients of law firm email alerts and newsletters to easily forward the content in those emails to their social networks on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. Are you taking advantage of this feature?
A second tip was extending greater efforts to make clients aware of your email newsletter subscription form (you should have one on your website) at all of the various electronic touch points where your firm engages with potential clients.
Examples of tactics here would include displaying email subscription forms on your blogs (in addition to the website, of course), as well as asking attorneys to include a one-line link to your email newsletter subscription form in the signature line of their emails (e.g., "Sign Up for Our Email Newsletters" with link). Remind your attorneys that repeated brand "impressions" is what leads to new business, and email marketing - done discretely and professionally - increases positive contacts with prospective clients until an opportunity to do business arises.
The final tip was adding some personality to law firm emails - perhaps in the form of stock photos that are contextually relevant (e.g., in a real estate alert about a new construction regulation, add a photo of a construction scene; of course, avoid any cliche images like "scales of justice."). This tactic may seem a bit hokey, but remember that photos can add visual interest to text, and human faces can always foster a stronger "connection" with readers.
Of course, this last bit of advice must be tempered by the need to ensure that your key calls-to-action in every email communication are rendered as text at the top of the email so they display properly even if image blocking is turned on for some subscribers.
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