Email Marketing - Part 6 - Advanced Strategies for Lawyers

Welcome to Legal Marketing 101. I'm Toby Rosen. Welcome back to our Thursday Deep Dive series, where we are again talking about email marketing, an active campaign, and this is unfortunately the last episode of this part of the series, so let's get to it. We've covered a bunch of the basics of active campaign and email systems in the last few weeks with this series and hopefully that has given you a bit more clarity on what's going on in your account or how to start interacting with your account. But most of what we have talked about has been fairly basic. We've talked in more detail about some of the automation and things, but there are three more things I do want to talk about before we move on to our next topic, and while each of these probably deserve actually their own episode at some point in the future, I think we can do them a bit of justice pardon the pun in a few minutes with each. So first we're going to talk about reengaging inactive subscribers and nurturing long-term client relationships. I think most attorneys know this is something they need to be doing if they're doing some form of email marketing. Both processes, I guess, seem a bit daunting to most here in the legal universe. When it comes to nurturing long-term relationships. This is actually way easier than you think. If you're not already creating some kind of monthly or quarterly newsletter that you can share with previous clients to maintain that relationship, it's really not hard to create one. Use the templates in your email system to create your design and use chat GPT to help you pick out the topics and maybe even write some of the content that you need for your email and then pull all the links and images from your website. For everything else, the content you're sharing on your website is theoretically pretty valuable to your clients. So repackaging it a bit to deliver it once a year or every other year becomes a pretty easy task once we reframe our view of things a bit. Long-term nurturing doesn't have to be this weekly battle, and people don't want a barrage of newsletters from a lawyer they hired two years ago. So this reworked content format may be, with a current twist, related to new legislation or an update about the firm from a recent event, maybe an office change or a cool new team member, or maybe a new team member that's a dog. This can easily satisfy clients and remind them that you exist. It reminds them of your brand and that you're personable and that you're a good option for any future legal needs.

And then there's reengaging your inactive subscribers, which again is actually pretty simple. When we're talking about a system like active campaign, automation is going to do most of the work for us. So let's go through how we implement that, because the technical side is a little more complex. So once we're logged in, we're going to navigate over to our automations in the menu on the left and we're going to create a new blank automation and then we're going to need to select a starting point or a trigger that initiates our automation when a subscriber in the account meets our criteria for reengagement. So, for reengagement specifically, maybe we could use a trigger like subscribe to list and then choose a list that contains some subscribers who might be inactive. Then we're going to set up some conditions to filter people in the list we've selected to make sure that we're sending to the right folks and that we're sending them the right content and we're not trying to reengage people who are already engaged. We'll come back to content in a minute, but at this step we could create a condition that will filter everyone out, except for subscribers who haven't opened any emails in the last, say, six months, but they have been sent emails. We want to make sure we're checking both of those conditions and then, after we set that, we're going to start creating our action steps. We've filtered out who's in it potentially inactive. We were using the system's power to check if they've opened emails. Now we're going to do some action. These are the part of our automation workflow that is actually going to do the heavy lifting for us.

So first let's create a reengagement email that will design to be personal and maybe even offer an incentive. This email can seem more like marketing and it doesn't have to allude to the fact that you're trying to gauge what part of your subscriber list is still paying attention to you. And after that email, we're gonna have what's called a wait step. That will wait a few days to give your subscribers some time to engage with the email. How long you wait is gonna depend a little bit on your audience and what you know about them, but less than one day and more than five days is typically outside the norm here.

And once that wait is over, we're gonna use a conditional If-slash-else-step to then check if our subscribers have opened that first email. If they've opened it, we can move them somewhere else, tag them as re-engage and even send them some different content. But if they didn't open the email, we're gonna send a follow-up email and we're gonna test some new content. That could be a new headline, new body copy, a different offer or all of the above. If we didn't even get an open the first time around, we really have very little information to base a test off of, other than you know they didn't like the first one. So it doesn't necessarily need to be a single variable change here, although technically that is a more scientific method.

But once we've sent that email, we're gonna do another wait step. We'll add this wait step and give the subscribers some more time to open up that new email. And then you guessed it we're gonna add another if-else condition to check if our subscribers have opened that new email. If they did open it, we will again move them somewhere else, and if they didn't, we're gonna send one more email. The last re-engagement email here should be ultra, ultra clear that you have something to offer to the user and that you're going to Remove them from your list if they don't open the offer. It's really important to make the call to action stand out here. So less is more when it comes to design and writing your final re-engagement letter in the series. And Once we've sent that final email email 3, we'll go through that wait and check process one more time and then we're gonna end our workflow. If we want to remove subscribers, at the end we can use a step to unsubscribe or delete the users from our account automatically. So once that process starts, once you've set people into that automation, be careful if you automate deletion, you need to keep your users engaged. This kind of automation is very much a last-ditch effort or an account cleaning measure. You definitely don't want to implement this if you're not actively sending email from your account, because it will end up deleting users you want to keep.

Now, like I mentioned at the start of this episode, there are three things I want to talk about today, and that means we have one more, and that is integrating More technology into your marketing stack. With active campaign is the hub or the brain of your operation. Of course, in this series I have tried to keep things a bit more broad when it comes to email marketing systems, because Active campaign is not the only good option. There are others. But when it comes to great automation in email system, the list becomes a lot narrower. It's hard to find what you're looking for and the platforms You're thinking of are probably not on my list either. So I'm gonna talk specifically about active campaigns integration. And that's not to say that others don't have a great amount of versatility with their integrations and that you can't do a lot with Zapier, but in my view, there's nothing that holds a candle to what active campaign can do for us at its price point.

So, to avoid this becoming completely an ad for active campaign, I'm gonna talk about an integration I've used pretty frequently to create a very powerful type of automation, and that's active campaigns integration with form stack, specifically form stack documents. Now, form stack documents was previously known as web merge, and they Basically what they do is they provide an application for automated document generation or PDF merging, and it's insanely powerful. With Active Campaign and Formstack, we are looking at this end-to-end solution for completely automating so many potential processes in the legal world. Just off the top of my head, we can essentially completely automate uncontested divorce, immigration petitions, a bunch of elements of estate planning and even some parts of bankruptcy. With the world of AI quickly encroaching upon the legal field and the document merging field. I suspect we're going to see more and more firms and startups implementing not only these technologies but things that are way more advanced than what we're seeing now.

So, as we wrap up our email marketing series and we're going to transition to a new series soon let me leave you with this Centralizing your customer information, whether in something like Active Campaign or legal software, even like Clio or Laumatics or MyCase this is fundamental at this point. We've talked about some advanced data strategies today and some advanced things you can do with email, but the simple data collection, analysis and automation that we've talked about in the first few episodes of this series this is fundamental. We are no longer in an era where only the big companies can afford to create a complete client experience for their customers. We can all be doing this. That's it for Legal Marketing 101. Check out rosanadvertisingcom for more Thanks.