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Newsletters are a popular way for people to interact with their favorite brands, and that includes law firms. A law firm newsletter adds value for legal clients and establishes trust, positioning your firm as a leader in your local market.
From defining goals for your law firm’s newsletter, choosing content, and segmenting your audience — continue reading to learn how to effectively start a law firm newsletter that builds strong client relationships, defines your firm’s brand, and generates new business.
Are Law Firm Newsletters Necessary?
Law firm newsletters offer cost-effective marketing that can build your brand over time. You can easily reach your target audience without the noise of social media or outdated methods like mail or phone calls. These clients also specifically signed up for your newsletter, so you already have an audience that’s interested in what you have to offer.
How Do I Create a Newsletter for My Law Firm?
The basic steps to create affirm newsletter include:
Create a Template
Email marketing platforms like Mailchimp offer simple and professional email newsletter templates that you can customize for your needs. Work with an existing template and customize it with your color schemes, logos, images, text boxes, and videos to make it personal and engaging.
Include Relevant Content
Your template will be reused over and over, but the content should be unique each time. We’ll cover the specifics for content creation in the next section, but follow best practices with short blocks of texts, images, or graphics to break the page up visually, and links to your website and social media accounts.
Test Functionality
With software like Mailchimp, you can preview your newsletter with a test email to make sure there are no technical glitches or mistakes. There’s also a feature that shows you how the newsletter appears on different devices, including smartphones.
Send To Recipients
If your test email looks good and you’ve proofread it, it’s time to go live! Send it out to your recipients.
Tips to Write a Law Firm Newsletter
Define the Purpose
What are you hoping to accomplish with your newsletter? Do you hope to attract leads, promote brand awareness, or establish yourself as an industry authority? Once you have the goal in mind, let it guide your content and audience to achieve it. Ultimately, the newsletter should align with your law firm marketing plan and defined goals.
Choose Relevant Content
The content in your firm’s newsletters should be varied and relevant to your audience. Otherwise, you may not hold their interest. Think about what your audience may find useful.
For example, if your subscribers are new clients, you may want to provide case studies to showcase your practice area and how you’ve helped clients succeed. If you’re targeting existing clients, focus on industry news and legal updates or firm milestones.
Here are some content ideas:
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Case studies highlighting real stories (without identifying details about clients)
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Listicles on trending topics in the legal industry
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Attorney and staff profiles
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Q&As or interviews
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News updates with your own professional input
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Curated content like content roundups
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FAQs about your practice area
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Educational resources
After brainstorming some ideas, plan your content at least a month in advance and organize your topics to keep the content varied. Also, be sure to include a disclaimer that you’re not providing legal advice in the newsletter.
Be Consistent
Consistency is important for virtually all of your law firm marketing efforts, including email marketing. Decide on a schedule for your newsletters, such as monthly or quarterly, and stick to it. Your audience will eventually come to anticipate your newsletter’s arrival, so it’s more important to be consistent than prolific.
Remember to keep your expectations realistic. You want to produce high-quality content, and someone will need to write it. Consider how much time or resources you can devote to your newsletter, whether it’s outsourced or you keep it in-house and base your schedule on that.
Get Firm-Wide Feedback
Ask your lawyers and support staff for feedback on your topics, ideas, and content strategy to make adjustments. You can also solicit ideas from your staff to keep things fresh and gain new perspectives on the topics your audience may want to read about.
Who Receives a Law Firm Newsletter?
Marketing should always be targeted. Even with something of broad interest like a newsletter, it’s important to define your target audience to ensure that you’re delivering the content they’re most interested in.
You can define your audience by asking the following questions:
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What types of legal services are they interested in?
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What legal issues do they struggle with?
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What questions do they have about your practice area or the legal process?
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What are they hoping to gain from working with a lawyer?
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What do they want to know about the law or legal system?
You probably have an idea of how to answer these questions, but your staff can be a gold mine for detailed audience information. For example, the staff members handling client inquiries have likely heard a lot of the same questions over and over, which you can use to inspire your content.
Avoid the temptation to put all your email contacts on one email list, however. Your law firm newsletters should be based on specific audiences and interests. If necessary, segment your audience to create tailored content for different client groups.
For example, if you work in multiple practice areas, it makes sense to break up your audience into these different segments to provide more relevant content.
It’s also important to work with email subscribers, not purchased email lists. These lists contain recipients who may have never been in contact with you, don’t know anything about your firm, and don’t want your emails – if they’re even in your jurisdiction. Sending a newsletter to these recipients puts you at risk of ending up in the spam folder, or worse, violating the CAN-SPAM Act.
Automating Your Law Firm Newsletter
Maintaining a consistent newsletter for your law firm is easier when you leverage tools like a legal CRM. Using legal CRM software, your firm can create email lists for your newsletters using custom tags, simplifying the process of segmenting your newsletter recipients. You can create tags for hot leads, cold leads, current customers, vendors, and more.
Get Started with Law Firm Newsletters
Law firm newsletters can help build a stronger connection with clients and boost your firm’s brand. With a strong email strategy and law practice management software, you can provide valuable content to clients in a simple and streamlined manner.
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