A recurring dream — you wake up, phone buzzing every couple of minutes as clients reach out to you to ask for your help. While you slept, an assistant contacted all of your potential clients, categorized them, sent them information relevant to their cases, and tracked those who replied positively.
And it cost you nothing.
Email drip campaigns are the perfect choice to keep in touch with your clients without constant effort. By using technology and a preset collection of rules and designs, you can build your client base and enhance your customer service without spending too much time managing lists, emails or phone calls.
Specifics: How a Drip Campaign Works
A Drip Campaign is a pre-designed email campaign that uses automatic triggers to send each email in the series to a client or prospect. These emails are slowly sent out over time (drip, drip, drip) in order to encourage the recipients to engage with your firm.
You might have noticed these types of emails hitting your inbox. Let's say you're looking to build a new fire pit in your backyard. While searching a bit on Google, you come across a website that will send you a PDF of blueprints for a low-cost stone solution to enjoy the summer nights. You quickly receive an email describing the plans for the pit and the sender promises to teach you a bit more tomorrow about how to stack your bricks.
About 24 hours later, sure enough, another email pops into your inbox describing a pattern that leaves a hole in your pit so the air can move. At the end, it mentions that tomorrow you will receive an email outlining what types of bricks you should be buying. About 24 hours later... they deliver on the promise.
Software for Automated Law Firm Email Marketing
There are several reasons that you would want to send a potential or current client a series of emails, such as to encourage them to call for a consultation, to offer additional services your firm can provide, or to educate them about how your practice works. There is software that makes this easy; email management platforms such as Active Campaign, MailChimp, and more have made billion dollar businesses from making it easy to automatically send out these emails.
Tracking and Time-Saving
Online platforms allow for a greater ability to track and automate your marketing. For example, the email management software The Modern Firm uses has the ability to change the text of an email dynamically, send an email in response to someone (who has previously given us their email address) browsing our site, and even to text our clients. And after setting it up once, the process all happens automatically.
It would be a tremendous effort to send out emails to batches of leads and contacts each day, keeping track of who is scheduled on what day. Luckily, software has made it exceptionally easy to send, track, and manage email campaigns. After building a drip campaign, the software takes care of the rest. It will:
- Add and remove customers at their request
- Send emails based on time or user interaction triggers
- Record user open rates, click-through rates, items purchased, etc.
Low Cost!
What makes email such an excellent tool for marketers is that the marginal cost is extremely low (essentially zero). It costs the same to send an email to 2 clients as it does 200, since the software and servers take care of all of the heavy lifting for you; once you create all of the designs, content, and rules you can leave your drip campaigns alone and they will flow on without you.
You may well become this happy and handsome because of your drip campaign
Drip Campaign Set-Up
That leaves the set-up of your campaigns. Much like building a website, all of the upfront cost and effort pays off once it is completed. You, or a marketing professional, use your email management platform to build your campaigns by:
- Designing a template that your emails will use
- Writing the content that populates the emails
- Designing the rule structure to decided how your emails will be sent
- Connecting your campaign to your website for easy client addition
Then, like your website, your email campaigns go "live." Turning on the drip campaign is as simple as pushing a button, and the outreach to your clients will become automatic.
What About Attorney Advertising Rules About Direct Client Contact and Solicitation?
Of course, you will not be surprised to learn that there are a few additional considerations that attorneys should look into when it comes to directly sending emails to potential clients. Rules of professional conduct governing client solicitation regulate how a law firm goes about contacting prospects, in particular. Most states' rules are not prohibitive, however. For example, many RPCs are relatively unconcerned with mailings to existing clients and colleagues, as well as to folks who have voluntarily opted in to receive information. Others require direct contact with prospects simply to include certain disclaimers or notices, like: "Attorney Advertising." A few are more stringent, however, and may limit the type of information you send or require pre-approval by your bar of your intended text.
Your best bet? Take a careful look at your jurisdiction's RPCs before you design your campaign. They will help you properly word your emails and categorize your contacts so everything your software sends out is appropriate. You might also wish to give a quick call to your attorney ethics hotline, if your jurisdiction has one: as new technologies become available, the rules don't always catch up quickly, but there may be helpful formal or informal ethics opinions to which your bar association can direct you for guidance.
Finally, we also recommend that you ensure your website, itself, include a privacy policy that makes visitors aware of your site's use of cookies to collect data such as the Internet Protocol (IP) addresses of visitors.
The Modern Firm's online marketing team for law firms has built extensive email campaigns for clients to use with their customers. If you think automated email outreach would help your firm provide better assistance, you can schedule a marketing call with one our specialists by emailing marketing@themodernfirm.com.
