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Email Marketing for Attorneys

How attorneys can grow their email list, close more clients, and collect more referral money with email marketing.

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Nothing can improve the marketing health of your law firm better than email marketing.

Not billboards, bus stop ads, paid digital ads, or your social media account (even if you have 100,000+ followers). The reason I can assert this so confidently, is because email marketing is the only digital marketing method that enables you to build an audience, keep it, and control it.

The prospect life-cycle for attorneys is longer than many other types of businesses, due to the complexity of the law–which requires more upfront education before a prospect pays for your services.

Also, the high price tag on attorney services often requires more time to persuade a prospect to decide to hire.

That’s why when push comes to shove, if you had only one marketing choice to make, email marketing for attorneys is the best choice–hands down.

But the “proof is in the pudding,” so let’s first take a look at a huge problem the majority of law firms face in digital marketing, then I’ll show you how email marketing is uniquely tailored to solve this problem most effectively.

The Problem: Most Law Firms Are Letting Easy Money Slip Through the Cracks

Let’s take a look at one of the biggest problems most attorneys face: getting more clients.

Try to throw out all assumptions about digital marketing, and apply “first principles thinking” to the problem of getting more clients.

When marketing your firm on the internet, what’s the best way for attorneys to get more clients? The go-to response for most attorneys is usually one of the following:

  • Get more website traffic
  • Get more social media followers
  • Spend more money on digital ads

But these are actually not the best way to get more clients–at least not at first.

If you had a faucet of drinking water with a leaky pipe, you wouldn’t pump more water through the pipe until something came through the faucet–you would shut off the main valve, fix the leaky pipe, then open the valve again to allow the glorious water to flow to your thankful mouth.

In the same way, you don’t want to pump more traffic to your website or landing page, or seek more attention on social media, before you’ve tried to capture a bigger chunk of the attention you already have coming to you.

Because if you don’t:

  • You’ll have to work harder on social media to make up for the attention that already came and left.
  • You’ll water-down all the hours and/ or money spent optimizing blog posts and website pages for SEO.
  • You’ll have an email list that grows at a much slower rate, if it grows at all.
  • You may be tempted to spend (aka waste) more money on digital ads, just to get more eyeballs on your website or landing page.

The Reason The Majority of Law Firms Have this Problem: Your Website Isn’t Optimized to Catch “Leaking” Prospects

The overwhelming majority of law firms today are all saying the same exact thing on the internet: Book a Free Consultation Today!

It’s not a bad offer–but is it the best offer you could give your online prospects?

No, it isn’t.

For one: do you really want to make the same offer every other attorney under the sun is making, or would you prefer to stand out with something unique?

More importantly, Book a Free Consultation Today! is an extremely generic offer.

It’s not an offer that conjures up the “gotta have it” feeling in your prospects.

There are a variety of other ways many law firms are letting good website traffic slip through the cracks:

  • They don’t have an email opt-in form to collect email addresses.
  • If they have an opt-in form, there are one or more major problems with it, such as:
    • It’s placed inconspicuously in the footer of the website.
    • It’s not paired with a free information product that persuades visitors to opt-in.
    • It’s not supported by persuasive sales copy that makes prospects want to take action.
  • Law firm websites often look like an urban traffic jam, with multiple offers, links, photos, and messages–all of this confuses your prospects, which results in inaction.
  • Law firm sites are stuffed with attorney accolades, certificates, “vanity awards” and so forth, without ever identifying and discussing the problems that plague their niche. (Pro tip: your prospects don’t care about you, they only care about their own problem, whether you understand it, and if you can fix it.)

Good news is, each of these problems can be fixed by taking steps to optimize your site for success.

How to Optimize Your Website for Success

You can tell how well your website is converting by checking the “bounce rate” in your website analytics dashboard.

The bounce rate measures how many visitors engage with your website.

Your visitors have “bounced” if they spent less than 10 seconds on your site without visiting any other pages or taking any other action, such as clicking a link or opting in to a form. Every website has visitors that bounce, for various reasons. But when your bounce rate is too high, you know there’s a problem.

Bounce rate is contextual, but if it hovers around 50%, that’s usually considered normal.

But there’s no reason to stop at “normal” either (how about we shoot for amazing?), and if you execute the following action steps, your bounce rate should decline–and inversely, your conversions should significantly increase:

Step 1: Practice One Area of Law, Serve One Niche Audience

Many attorneys already practice a niche area of law, because it’s operationally difficult to stay up to speed across multiple areas of law.

But fewer attorneys market their law practice to a niche audience.

When you write content for a specific niche audience, you magnify the power of your emails, blog posts, website pages, landing pages, and social media content.

That’s because you can write hyper-specific specific content for your audience that elicits the “holy sh*t this was written just for me” feeling.

Psychologically speaking, you’re pulling on that group’s desire to belong–a biological need of all humans, and a highly effective method of persuasion.

A fear that comes up with choosing a niche audience is that you’ll limit your opportunity for more business. But as marketing goes, the reverse is actually true: when you choose a niche, you actually still attract many clients outside of that group, because the thinking goes, “Well if this lawyer can help that particular group of people, then surely they can help me as well.”

Then, if you’re truly hurting for clients (which will be less of a problem because niching actually helps you convert more of the specific group you’re targeting), it’s up to you if you want to accept clients outside your chosen niche audience or not.

Your niche doesn’t necessarily have to be a group of people in a single locale (although it could be).

Especially since COVID–when many courthouses and their dinosaur technology finally got their crap together and created the ability for attorneys to appear in court remotely, attorneys are more and more frequently practicing statewide.

This makes email marketing and blogging even more effective for reaching large volumes of clients statewide, which still won’t preclude you from serving a niche audience.

There are more ways to niche than serving a specific location, such as representing only men (or only women) in divorces, or DUIs only for repeat offenders, etc.

Step 2: Create an Information Product for Your Niche.

An info-product is just information your niche wants to know–something of high value, packaged as an asset.

How to Create an Info-Product

To create an info-product of tangible value for your niche, you need to answer burning questions your prospects have, by:

  • Identifying and describing a problem they have (so they agree with you).
  • Explain the reason they have it (to establish credibility that you know wtf you’re talking about).
  • Inform them of your solution (so they know you can fix it).
  • Describe the tangible ways your solution fixes the problem (so you become the one they trust to solve the problem for them).

When you unveil content in this way, it creates that rabid “gotta have it” feeling in your prospects.

If you aren’t currently offering an info-product in your email opt-in, you’re basically guaranteed to increase your conversions significantly once you do.

Examples of Info-Products

Here are some examples of info-products you could create for your niche audience:

  • Take a blog post or an email you’ve already written; expand it with additional tips, stories, examples, action steps, etc.; put it into a Canva template; and package it as a PDF e-book.
  • Using the same content from your e-book, read it aloud in front of a camera, and put it up on Youtube as an exclusive access video.
  • Take that same video, chop it up into 3-5 videos, and package it as a video mini-course.
  • Do an audio-only version of the video examples above.
  • Create a 5-day educational email course–an email sequence that educates your prospects over the course of 5 days.

Step 3: Trade Your Info-Product for an Email Address

Next, you trade your info-product–your asset of extremely high-value–for your prospect’s email address.

Essentially all email service providers (ESPs) have a feature that helps you easily create an email opt-in form that automatically delivers your info-product to your prospects after they opt-in to your form.

If your ESP doesn’t have that feature, or if you don’t yet have an ESP and are looking for one, I personally use Kit to deliver my own info-product to attorneys. If you want to try out Kit for free, you can use my affiliate link here.

Step 4: One Page, One Offer, One Choice

This solves the “urban traffic jam” vibes that many attorney websites give off, which is extremely distracting for prospects and difficult to navigate.

The homepage of your website (or dedicated landing page from your social media accounts and digital ads) should include one single offer, for example:

“Subscribe below to get my free video explaining the 5 biggest mistakes people make after being injured in a car accident.”

Your offer should have only one choice to make: to opt-in to the form and receive your free info-product.

This is basic sales copywriting knowledge that most attorney websites and landing pages fail to implement, but if you do it, you’ll see your conversions increase.

Step 5: Email Your Niche at Least Once Weekly

Steps 1-4 above create your email list builder, which will repair your “leaky pipe” and start qualifying and converting prospects automatically, once you set it up.

But the 5th and final step–emailing your list at least once weekly–is the whole reason you created your email list builder.

Now your email list is growing on auto-pilot, and you have a captive audience you can continue to nurture and qualify with consistent, weekly education.

Some prospects buy after the first email you send, while others will buy 2 years later (even the email marketing pros expect to send between 10-20 emails to a prospect before he takes any action).

The good news for attorneys is that each person in your audience is a double-dip of opportunity: not only a potential client, but also a potential referral source.

This is why attorney email lists are such a great asset, which only grows, matures, and pays you more as it ages.

Not only that, but your email list is a lead/ referral engine that you control, own, and a resource you can tap at any time–regardless of the economy, the hot new social media platform everyone is talking about, and without regard for wtf AI is doing.

Email marketing has been around since before the internet, and remains a powerful tool used by successful businesses all over the world.

And it ain’t going away any time soon.

For Attorneys Who Don’t Have the Time–Hire a Ghostwriter

If you’re ready to start converting more online prospects, but too busy managing other aspects of your law firm, I can help you out by ghostwriting your info-product for you.

I ghostwrite 5-Day Educational Email Courses for attorneys, and if you need one, send me an email at paul@desertstreamswriting.com, and we can set up a call to talk.