Setting Up Email Marketing For Personal Injury Firms

To celebrate our integration with MailChimp, this is the second in a three part blog series about email marketing for personal injury law firms.

In our first post in the series, we talked about why personal injury firms should be using email marketing. Given its high ROI and low cost, personal injury firms not using email marketing are missing an opportunity.

Some law firms don’t start email marketing because they don’t know where to begin. We want to change that. Here is a step by step guide to get you started on the right foot.

Step 1: Get Your Law Firm’s Domain Email Address

If you want to be perceived as a more credible business, you need an email address ending with your domain name. Would you rather be thesmithfirm@gmail.com or joe@thesmithfirm.com? Clients can tell the difference, and the change is worth the improvement to your reputation. If you are worried about the cost – don’t be. Setting up an email address for your law firm’s domain can be very inexpensive: as low as $5/month.  Here’s a guide on how to set up your own domain name email account.

Step 2: Sign Up For An Email Marketing Service

There are many email marketing services available for law firms. If you have some specific features in mind, do some research to see what solution is right for you. If your law firm is jumping into email marketing for the first time, we recommend Mailchimp. It will likely have all the features you need at the lowest price. CASEpeer’s integration with Mailchimp also makes it fast and easy to manage which email campaigns your clients are subscribed to.

Step 3: Create Email Lists

The contacts you’re marketing to make up your email list. It can include people like:

• Referral partners
• Current clients
• Potential clients
• Past clients

Your email marketing service will store your contacts in its database as one or more lists. While you can have one general list for all contacts, it helps to separate your contacts into different lists. Creating multiple lists up front is advantageous in situations where you have different types of emails you want to send to each type of contact. While all your contacts could receive a monthly or quarterly newsletter, you don’t want to send a potential client an email asking for a review. Segmenting helps ensure everyone gets the right email at the right time.

If you have an existing email list, upload it to your email service provider before moving to the next step.

Step 4: Put a Signup Form on Your Site

You can start email marketing with your existing list of contacts, but over time, you want your email list to grow. One of the easiest ways to grow your list is by adding an email signup form to your website. Email signup forms that sync with your email marketing service will automatically add new contacts to your list. If you don’t have a signup form already, ask your web developer to add one to your site.

Many law firms use a lead magnet to encourage people to sign up for their email lists. A lead magnet is free resource you provide to people in exchange for their email address. For law firms, this often comes in the form of a checklist, worksheet, or eBook. As long as the resource is something your audience wants, it will encourage them to sign up. Some examples of lead magnets for personal injury firms are:

• “What to do after a car accident” checklist
• Case study with a successful verdict
• “How to choose a personal injury attorney” worksheet

Congratulations! You’ve successfully set up email marketing for your firm. There are many routes you can take from here. Like anything else, the more strategic you are with email marketing, the more your firm will get out of it. In our next post, we’ll give you some ideas on how to use email marketing to improve your firm’s relationships with its contacts.