Technology in Marketing: The State of Law Firm e-Mail Marketing

Law firms are heavy users of e-mail marketing, and with good reason. E-mail marketing offers law firms a professional way to proactively remind clients and other contacts about a firm's experience and expertise so those individuals will think of the firm first when an opportunity to refer new business arises. The campaign tracking tools available with e-mail marketing software also offer unique insights into the interests of individual clients based on their click-through activity.

How to Measure Good Results

The law firm e-mail newsletters, alerts and invitations that get the best results are those that follow “best practices” in terms of design, copy, and so forth. But what is a “good result” for a law firm e-mail marketing campaign? What is a good “open rate”? A good “click-through rate”? A bad “bounce rate”?

Until now, there were no benchmarks for the legal marketing community in identifying average open, click-through, bounce and unsubscribe rates for law firms. Legal marketers had no way to measure how their e-mail marketing campaigns were performing against their peers. To address that dearth of data, eLawMarketing recently released a report ' The State of Law Firm Email Marketing: Benchmarks, Trends and Best Practices ' documenting benchmarks for law firm e-mail marketing campaigns for five key performance metrics (e.g., open rate, click-through rate) based on campaigns totaling 6,896,610 e-mails distributed by law firms of all sizes from July 1, 2008 through June 30, 2010.

The report can help legal marketers:

• gauge and improve the performance of their e-mail marketing campaigns;
• discover how their campaigns are performing relative to the campaigns of their peers; and
• learn more about “best practices” in the creation, distribution and tracking of e-mail marketing campaigns.

The full report is available for download at: http://bit.ly/eLmReport. Briefly, it identifies the following trends for law firm e-mail marketing campaigns:

• Open rates have dropped steadily from a mean of 27.94% in the second half of 2008 to a mean of 21.42% in the first half of 2010. This decline is primarily attributable to increased use of image blocking by default in e-mail applications, which prevents opens from being recorded. Law firms can maximize open rates by using short, but descriptive and compelling subject lines.
• Conversion rates (i.e., the percentage of subscribers who click links in law firm e-mails to read more about particular topics) have increased slightly over the past two years from a mean of 17% in the second half of 2008 to a mean of 17.47% in the first half of 2010. This trend indicates that clients remain interested in the content being provided by their law firms in e-mail newsletters and alerts.
• Bounce rates have dropped slightly from a mean of 3.68% in the second half of 2008 to a mean of 2.27% in the first half of 2010. This demonstrates better adherence by firms to “best practices” in list hygiene.
• Unsubscribe rates have increased very slightly from a mean of 0.13% in the second half of 2008 to a mean of 0.17% in the first half of 2010, which reflects the effects of growing “inbox overload” in recent years from e-mails generated by social media and e-commerce sites, among others. Individuals are cutting back on what publications they allow to be delivered to their inboxes.

The full report also discusses issues to investigate when the results of a firm's e-mail marketing campaigns fall below industry benchmarks. For example, if a firm's open rates are substantially below legal industry norms, it may be because the firm is not following “best practices” for subject lines. Or, the firm's e-mails may not be sufficiently targeted. However, a sudden and dramatic decline in open rates may signal a deliverability issue at particular domains.

Click and Conversion Rates

Click and conversion rates for law firm e-mails are heavily driven by e-mail design “best practices.” For example:

• Are your key “calls to action” also rendered as text (and not just as images, which can be “blocked”)?
• Are your key “calls to action” persuasive, and conspicuously positioned throughout your e-mails (top, middle and bottom)?
• Are you making good use of the most valuable real estate in your e-mail template (i.e., the upper lefthand corner)?
• Are your banner graphics appropriately sized?

If a firm's average click or conversion rates are substantially below legal industry norms, then it should consider an audit of its e-mail template designs to ensure compliance with “best practices.”

Social Media

The intersection of e-mail marketing and social media is also explored. Pundits have been predicting the demise of e-mail marketing for years. Culprits have included, at various times, spam, RSS feeds, blogs, texting, and now, social media. But to paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of e-mail's demise have always been greatly exaggerated. For example, the 2010 MarketingSherpa E-mail Marketing Benchmark Report found that an increasing number of marketers plan to leverage social media to grow their e-mail lists. And an October 2009 MarketingSherpa study found that e-mail was still the most popular method for sharing a link on the Internet with friends or family.

In short, e-mail and social media are not mutually exclusive options. So the better question to ask is: How can I integrate my social media efforts with my e-mail marketing program to achieve optimal results in both channels? The answer: Consider strategies like including social sharing buttons in e-mail campaigns. Or distribute periodic e-mails highlighting top blog posts as a method for building awareness of, and traffic to, firm blogs.

Conclusion

The State of Law Firm E-mail Marketing report now provides law firms with a valuable resource to compare the success of their e-mail marketing campaigns against their peers, and identify areas for improvement in terms of better adherence to “best practices.”

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Joshua Fruchter, a member of this newsletter's Board of Editors, is president and co-founder of eLawMarketing, a provider of online marketing services to law firms and other professional service providers. He can be contacted at 866-833-6245 or at [email protected]. The firm's Web site is at www.elawmarketing.com and its blog is at http://www.lawyercasting.com/.

Law firms are heavy users of e-mail marketing, and with good reason. E-mail marketing offers law firms a professional way to proactively remind clients and other contacts about a firm's experience and expertise so those individuals will think of the firm first when an opportunity to refer new business arises. The campaign tracking tools available with e-mail marketing software also offer unique insights into the interests of individual clients based on their click-through activity.

How to Measure Good Results

The law firm e-mail newsletters, alerts and invitations that get the best results are those that follow “best practices” in terms of design, copy, and so forth. But what is a “good result” for a law firm e-mail marketing campaign? What is a good “open rate”? A good “click-through rate”? A bad “bounce rate”?

Until now, there were no benchmarks for the legal marketing community in identifying average open, click-through, bounce and unsubscribe rates for law firms. Legal marketers had no way to measure how their e-mail marketing campaigns were performing against their peers. To address that dearth of data, eLawMarketing recently released a report ' The State of Law Firm Email Marketing: Benchmarks, Trends and Best Practices ' documenting benchmarks for law firm e-mail marketing campaigns for five key performance metrics (e.g., open rate, click-through rate) based on campaigns totaling 6,896,610 e-mails distributed by law firms of all sizes from July 1, 2008 through June 30, 2010.

The report can help legal marketers:

• gauge and improve the performance of their e-mail marketing campaigns;
• discover how their campaigns are performing relative to the campaigns of their peers; and
• learn more about “best practices” in the creation, distribution and tracking of e-mail marketing campaigns.

The full report is available for download at: http://bit.ly/eLmReport. Briefly, it identifies the following trends for law firm e-mail marketing campaigns:

• Open rates have dropped steadily from a mean of 27.94% in the second half of 2008 to a mean of 21.42% in the first half of 2010. This decline is primarily attributable to increased use of image blocking by default in e-mail applications, which prevents opens from being recorded. Law firms can maximize open rates by using short, but descriptive and compelling subject lines.
• Conversion rates (i.e., the percentage of subscribers who click links in law firm e-mails to read more about particular topics) have increased slightly over the past two years from a mean of 17% in the second half of 2008 to a mean of 17.47% in the first half of 2010. This trend indicates that clients remain interested in the content being provided by their law firms in e-mail newsletters and alerts.
• Bounce rates have dropped slightly from a mean of 3.68% in the second half of 2008 to a mean of 2.27% in the first half of 2010. This demonstrates better adherence by firms to “best practices” in list hygiene.
• Unsubscribe rates have increased very slightly from a mean of 0.13% in the second half of 2008 to a mean of 0.17% in the first half of 2010, which reflects the effects of growing “inbox overload” in recent years from e-mails generated by social media and e-commerce sites, among others. Individuals are cutting back on what publications they allow to be delivered to their inboxes.

The full report also discusses issues to investigate when the results of a firm's e-mail marketing campaigns fall below industry benchmarks. For example, if a firm's open rates are substantially below legal industry norms, it may be because the firm is not following “best practices” for subject lines. Or, the firm's e-mails may not be sufficiently targeted. However, a sudden and dramatic decline in open rates may signal a deliverability issue at particular domains.

Click and Conversion Rates

Click and conversion rates for law firm e-mails are heavily driven by e-mail design “best practices.” For example:

• Are your key “calls to action” also rendered as text (and not just as images, which can be “blocked”)?
• Are your key “calls to action” persuasive, and conspicuously positioned throughout your e-mails (top, middle and bottom)?
• Are you making good use of the most valuable real estate in your e-mail template (i.e., the upper lefthand corner)?
• Are your banner graphics appropriately sized?

If a firm's average click or conversion rates are substantially below legal industry norms, then it should consider an audit of its e-mail template designs to ensure compliance with “best practices.”

Social Media

The intersection of e-mail marketing and social media is also explored. Pundits have been predicting the demise of e-mail marketing for years. Culprits have included, at various times, spam, RSS feeds, blogs, texting, and now, social media. But to paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of e-mail's demise have always been greatly exaggerated. For example, the 2010 MarketingSherpa E-mail Marketing Benchmark Report found that an increasing number of marketers plan to leverage social media to grow their e-mail lists. And an October 2009 MarketingSherpa study found that e-mail was still the most popular method for sharing a link on the Internet with friends or family.

In short, e-mail and social media are not mutually exclusive options. So the better question to ask is: How can I integrate my social media efforts with my e-mail marketing program to achieve optimal results in both channels? The answer: Consider strategies like including social sharing buttons in e-mail campaigns. Or distribute periodic e-mails highlighting top blog posts as a method for building awareness of, and traffic to, firm blogs.

Conclusion

The State of Law Firm E-mail Marketing report now provides law firms with a valuable resource to compare the success of their e-mail marketing campaigns against their peers, and identify areas for improvement in terms of better adherence to “best practices.”

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Joshua Fruchter, a member of this newsletter's Board of Editors, is president and co-founder of eLawMarketing, a provider of online marketing services to law firms and other professional service providers. He can be contacted at 866-833-6245 or at [email protected]. The firm's Web site is at www.elawmarketing.com and its blog is at http://www.lawyercasting.com/.