When social media became the next big thing, many firms wrote off email marketing as a thing of the past. However, email marketing can still be a powerful tool for your law firm that can bring in new clients, build brand awareness, and boost your law firm’s online reputation when done right.

Since you might be a little rusty on your email marketing tactics, there are several tips listed below that can help you reignite your law firm’s email marketing campaign and turn it into a successful vehicle for your company goals.

Subscriptions Matter
Focusing on gaining email subscriptions is just as important as focusing on the emails themselves. But before you hire a hot designer and a lead writer to create the best email newsletters the law industry has ever seen, you need to do something about your email list. Signing up for your firm’s email newsletters should be a simple and straightforward process. Try creating brightly colored and legible buttons that link to a subscription page across your website. Be sure to advertise your emails on social media platforms, your blog, and any other chance you get. Even including a link at the bottom of your employees’ email signatures can increase your email list. Finding new ways to gain subscriptions can only better your email marketing campaign, because it’s the readers that matter most.

One Awesome Subject Line
It’s not uncommon for people to trash or spam an email because of a poorly written subject line. Just like a newspaper or magazine headline, a subject line can grab someone’s attention from the get-go and persuade them to at least open the email. Therefore, make sure your email subject lines are both catchy and a summary of the contents of the email. Informing your readers will make them much more likely to enjoy getting your emails and less likely to send them straight to trash. Avoid using abbreviations and writing in all capital letters. Your firm’s emails should be as professional as any other email you would normally send. Don’t butcher your reputation by including one too many exclamation points.

Be Consistent, Not Harassing
When someone signs up for your email list, they will undoubtedly have certain expectations. Getting two emails a day, every day for the rest of their lives is definitely not one of those expectations. Don’t abuse your pathway of communication by sending too many emails, or people will be clicking on the “unsubscribe” link faster than you can send another annoying newsletter! Keep your emails to a minimum, once a week if you’re on the trigger-happy side or once or twice a month if you’d like to give your followers some space. By reducing the amount of emails you send out, you can ensure that every newsletter is nearly perfect, includes great content, and will keep subscribers happy, not harassed.

Whet Their Appetites
A good email newsletter shouldn’t give every bit of information away. While your newsletters should be rich in content, your ultimate goal is to get readers back to your website, onto your blog, or liking your Facebook page. Therefore, make sure your newsletters offer the right amount of information that leads readers to click through to your links. You can try including headlines and snippets from your latest blog posts, links to your new employee biographies, or an invitation to check out your new Facebook contest. A strong call to action within an email newsletter can take your campaign from “just another piece of junk mail” to a successful, converting marketing campaign.

Think Mobile
If you want to give your email marketing campaign the best chance its got, you have to consider the type of readers you’re marketing to. You can safely assume that a large portion of your subscribers will have smartphones in their pockets and/or tablets in their briefcases. Ignoring the platform of choice most people read their emails on would be a huge mistake. Talk to your designers about creating mobile-friendly emails that conform to a screen’s particular resolution and speed. The bottom line is that you might have a very interested reader, but if they experience frustration in loading or viewing your newsletter, they probably won’t hesitate to send you to the trash. Get a mobile-friendly email to capture as much attention as possible.

Reinvigorate your law firm’s email marketing campaign to branch out your brand awareness in a tried-and-true but often overlooked way. Carefully crafted emails that send strong messages and entice readers to visit your website, social media, and blog is a success by any marketer’s standards. Don’t think of email marketing as a lost marketing cause when in fact, it can be doing wonders for your firm with every new email newsletter.

Written by Pete Wise for the Douglas and London Law Firm; whom represent clients across the entire US, taking on cases noone else will. They have decades of experience as an law firm in New York and it translates into the courtroom.