Building the Ultimate Drip Email Sequence

This episode of Legal Marketing 101 is brought to you by Thumbs Up Survey. Build better online surveys faster with Thumbs Up Survey. Mention Legal Marketing 101 when you request access to the beta at thumbsupsurveycom to get access to features and discounts first. Thank you to our partners at thumbsupsurveycom. Welcome to Legal Marketing 101. I'm Toby Rosen.

Today we're going to talk about building the ultimate drip email sequence, otherwise known as an auto responder sequence or automated email sequence. There are probably a bunch of different variations of how this is actually referred to, depending on the platform you're using. But what we're talking about today is building an email sequence where one email after the other goes out to a contact and that's typically triggered by a timer of some sort. But before we dive deeper, I want to offer a little bit of an advisory. Do not just go out and buy some new software to accomplish this. I'm pretty sure I've actually verbatim said this on the podcast before. But do not go out and buy some new software to create a drip sequence, because you're not sure if your current email system does it. Check your current systems, check what their higher subscription levels offer, etc. Again, do not just go out and buy a new thing for this, however tempting it may be, do your research first. So now back to the drip sequence. We're going to talk about a few specific things today. We're going to talk about three parts of the strategy that will help you get started on the right foot and make it easy to complete your drip sequence, and we're going to talk about three key elements of drip sequences that help increase engagement and generate more clients. But what we're not going to talk about is how to write your content, because it's going to vary quite a bit depending on the stage of the intake process or the relationship that you have with the client. We're not going to talk about how to implement your automation, because it should be fairly simple, and we're not going to talk about testing and optimization in this episode. We may talk about these things in the future, but right now, the goal is to get you started on the right track.

When lawyers come to me with pre-written autoresponders, consistently the ones that do well are the ones who have already asked for my advice or the ones who are just magically good at marketing. And if you think that's you, then it's not. Not a single one of those lawyers who wrote a good email sequence told me that they thought the sequence was good. They usually told me to go crazy with edits. It's those of you who think you've spun gold that have really spun, never mind. So let's get started on the right track, and let's talk about getting started on the right track. It's really quite easy.

There are three things you need to be doing to start creating great, engaging content for your potential clients and to start generating a legitimate baseline for testing your systems with marketing channels like Google and Facebook ads. So number one is to identify your target audience for each sequence and then craft client personas. These are similar to your client's story, but they're a little bit more clinical. The client story is going to give us some of the information we need, though. If we know that our potential family law client let's call him David who is considering a divorce from his wife of 20 years, he has two teenage children in the house, one in college. He works at nine to five jobs Then there are probably going to be a few key times where he's likely able to look at his email. If we know what type of job he has, we know whether he's going to be able to look at his phone during his lunch break or at a lunch meeting, or if he's going to be able to look at it, maybe even during work hours, or maybe if he's not going to be able to check his phone until he gets home. In the latter case, he may have to wait until his wife and kids are settled in for the evening and then check his email. This could all be true, even if he's checking his email on his phone. So not only are we going to be able to start creating a plan for how best to reach David within the content itself, we can also think about our rules for our automations that prevent David from getting email notifications from a divorce lawyer during a family dinner. But I digress. What we're really doing at this first stage is trying to figure out who the client really is, how we can reach them, and then we're going to start creating some brief descriptions of that and some potential rules for how the interactions should take place.

Thing number two and, by the way, these are in order, thing number two is to start creating a map for your automation. And in stage two here we are really going to be managing three sort of sub things, which are defining our campaign goals, mapping out our customer journey and segmenting our audience and our automations. So, first off, we have the fun part defining our goals, and in this sense, we're really just defining the end objective of the campaign. Usually for us that's going to be some retainers hitting a bank account, or ebook downloads or signups of some sort, but there are plenty of other reasons to create automations like this for your practice. So this is still a really important step to take, albeit a fairly simple and straightforward one. And then we need to start mapping out the customer journey. I said we'd be creating a map for our automation and, by and large, it should be based on your customer journey. When I create automation plans, yes, I do map these two flows out separately, but I do actually do it in the same document most of the time, and I map them out side by side as your automations grow more complex.

Having these maps can be a really useful way to both help with re-engineering things and to help with troubleshooting when things inevitably do go wrong. So we're mapping out our customer or your client's journey from a marketing source all the way through to retention. In David's case, from our previous example, maybe he has been thinking about divorce and one day he did a Google search for property division in his state, which, let's say, that's Michigan. He quickly skimmed through the pages of three different attorneys who had content of the subject, after accidentally clicking on an ad that led him to a landing page that had a video that automatically played with the sound on. After that he waited a few weeks because it was a little jarring, and then he did another search and this time he filled out a form and he signed up for a free ebook and then he started receiving a free e-course by mail and so on and so forth. We want to map out every touch point the client has, every action they take and, ideally, every feeling they have and at what point they have it. There will be some things we can use in our automations and auto responders to take action on, and there will be some we won't be able to do anything about. But by having more detail in your customer journey map, you'll be able to see opportunities to engage potential clients and help them sooner.

Now part three of thing two is segmenting your audience and your automations, which in and of itself is kind of two things, but one is a little bit harder to talk about because contact management varies so widely from platform to platform and the other. We can kind of do in conjunction with our automation planning, so it doesn't entirely deserve its own status as a part or a thing. Quite simply, segmenting your audience is just moving contacts from one audience to another or adding or removing tags from a contact based on their interest or other relevant information about them. This is so much easier to do today than it was even five years ago and, whenever possible, I do really highly recommend segmenting as much as possible. Basically, we're segmenting our audience based on their interests so that we deliver the most relevant content possible and thus generate the most conversions possible. This could mean delivering content about child custody to users who have viewed multiple child custody pages on our website, or delivering financial information or a link to a calculator for things like alimony child support to someone who has entered their information on a landing page about, let's say, how to avoid paying child support. It can really be just as simple as this, or you can get much more complex with it and do things like make the content in your emails dynamic, based on what a user was looking at. The sky is really the limit here when it comes to what we can integrate. The important thing, though, especially in the planning stage, is to now start seeing the different paths that users are going to take, often based on practice area or on process, and then start planning for those eventualities.

And part two of part three of thing two segmenting your automations is really kind of similar, but instead of segmenting things based on the type of content or the interest that the user has, which is probably already going to happen I like to create some segments of automations that are a little bit like Legos the more segmented things are, the easier it is to reuse automations and then build them into existing systems or create new systems. We're going to talk about this a lot more in a future episode, so I'm going to move on, and we're going to get to thing three in our little list of things that you need to do when first creating an auto responder or drip sequence and this is maybe the most important, but I said these were in order, so it's in order of chronology, but that's content planning. Now. Content planning is definitely the least fun part of this entire process, even when we include actually writing the content. Planning the content is not fun, but it's important, and here's why your plan is going to do two major things. One, it's going to keep you on track, which is absolutely critical if you want to accomplish the goal of generating clients, and two, it's going to give you a finish line.

Yes, it's easier than ever to create content now with all the AI stuff and all these tools we have access to, but that doesn't mean that lawyers as a whole are actually creating more content. Yes, I'm surprised as well, and no, you can't fact check me on that. Just do what I say. It's easier. So, with our customer journey and our automation map in hand, pull up a word doc or a Google doc and start creating some topics and outlines.

Yes, you can, and probably should, use chat GPT to help with this, and you can even have it write the subject lines and preview text for your emails. You'll, of course, you want to review everything, but chat GPT does a pretty good job of creating some really strong starting points. But before you write a single email, I strongly suggest you write your subject lines, your sub headers and at least a few bullet points for the email that you're writing, including a bullet point for the specific objective and call to action for the email. I'm not going to stay on this topic for long, because I shouldn't have to tell you why planning is important. You just need to do it, as Google says. Ben Franklin said by failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail. That's it for legal marketing 101. Check out rosanadvertisingcom for more Thanks.