Lawyers get twitchy when you tell them to give away information, but educating your clients or prospects is in no way doing a knowledge dump of your expertise – give them enough information for them to know the pit falls and to realise when they need to call your law firm for help.
There are various online channels you could use to educate your contacts (what I really mean here are your prospects and clients), from blog posts, Facebook, your website and your email newsletters, but for simplicity we will stick to the email newsletters.
Don’t for a second think that because you have a law firm newsletter service, you are prohibited from doing these education marketing campaigns – ask them to assist in compiling and distributing them.
Some quick points to remember when sending your prospects an education email newsletter:
- Plan well
- Your end goal
- Who you are targeting
- How often
- Staff to handle contacts’ questions along the way
- All content must be written, checked and “email friendly” before you start
- Write in simple layman’s terms
- Time between emails must be the same – at a guess 1 week
- Make sure you measure the campaign.
The idea of the educate campaign is to educate your contacts on a certain aspect of the law that will illustrate the issues enough for them to realise that they need you law firms’ services.
Your subject line should be very descriptive and should include your educational series name as well, for example if you are doing a series on the memorandum of incorporation and how it affects their business, your subject line could be, “Your business and MOI – What is a Memorandum of Incorporation?” Make sure the series name stays the same throughout the series.
Your first email in the series should introduce the topic, tell them how long the series will be and why this topic is important to them. Also at the bottom of the first email tell them how they can share your educational series with other people. While on that topic make sure you include links to where people can subscribe to your newsletter, how they can get hold of you and offer links to your social media if you have active accounts.
In three to four email broadcasts, tackle a specific element of the law and explain why these are important.
The last email in the series should wrap up, telling them what a huge risk they are taking by not getting help, if possible use an example of where something went pear-shaped for a business. If you can offer a special rate for something like a MOI, do so, but push for the reader to take action. You could offer to read through their existing MOI for nothing and offer a 10 minute telephone consult to inform them of the short falls. 80% of the time, people will ask you to redraft their documents, getting you the business – so you are not really giving that much away for nothing.
This education type of newsletter will increase your exposure, bring your law firm back to “top of mind” status with your contacts, will educate your contacts and if you are imparting good information may bring you new subscribers. To top it all, you are bringing in new business.
The downside of any newsletter is that when you send email to a bulk list, you will have drop-offs where people unsubscribe. Although it hurts the ego, it helps weed your contact list garden – no use having people on your list that don’t want to hear from you, rather nurture the people who want to interact with your firm.
You are knowledgeable people, educate your clients, they will like you more because of it.
