Sponsored statement: E-mailing efficiency

By David Gilroy, sales and marketing director, Conscious Solutions

Why e-mail?
Some people think that because the majority of our business is designing and hosting websites for law firms, that we would only ever recommend e-mail newsletters. However, I completely understand why some firms still feel the need to send out printed newsletters and if it’s the only way to communicate with clients or prospects then so be it, but personally I’m not sure I can live with:

a) Contributing to the deforestation in Brazil;
b) The whole Royal Mail ‘large letter’ thing that they have going on; but more importantly,
c) Not knowing whether anybody actually reads it. I assume you can’t see into someone’s office when they open their post?

So, what makes an effective e-mail newsletter? The key thing is that any newsletter should be a valuable marketing tool for your firm. It should, of course, keep clients up to date with key legal information, promoting your firm as knowledgeable and strong on client relationships (showing that you want to stay in touch with them, for example). In this age of ‘switching’, the continued loyalty of existing clients cannot be taken for granted, particularly as your competitors become more aggressive in their marketing techniques.
Your newsletter is a way of retaining an existing client during times when that client is not using your service.

The client experience
Table 1 shows the statistics for a large number of e-mail newsletters we have sent out recently for clients.
As you can see the number of recipients varies between different clients, yet the ‘open rate’ (the number of people who open the e-mail when it’s received) is very consistent.
The industry average for e-mail newsletters is around the 30 per cent mark so these statistics are right on target. However, despite this the statistics do show that around 70 per cent of these firms’ existing clients did not read the newsletter. Not great, but then it takes time to build a readership.

Timing of newsletters
We recommend a quarterly e-mail frequency for private clients. This is often enough to let them know that you are still around and to keep in touch with them.
For commercial clients we recommend a monthly e-mail frequency. There is enough going on each month, particularly around the area of employment law and in a business-to-business relationship a monthly contact frequency seems more appropriate.
However, the frequency with which you choose to prepare and send out newsletters must be in proportion to the amount of time you spend preparing and dispatching the newsletter. In our minds, this is one of the key advantages of e-mail over printed newsletters. No printing, folding, stuffing in envelopes and no 36p or 52p stamps.

Data quality
What’s the old adage, ‘quality over quantity’? Well it’s just as true when it comes to the quality of your e-mail addresses as it does with anything else in life.
Recording and entering e-mail addresses correctly is paramount to ensuring that you can run an effective e-mail newsletter campaign in future. So what are the keys to data quality? Consider the following:

When someone gives you an e-mail address over the phone, make sure you read it back to them;
When you type it into your CRM/practice management system check it looks correct;
Send a quick follow up e-mail address when you enter it to make sure it arrives (it may save cleaning up a bounced e-mail later);
Ensure your CRM/practice management system only allows you to enter e-mail addresses in the correct format, like most web forms do, for example, there is an @ sign and at least one full stop.

Some of the most common mistakes we see when clients send us data to use for their e-mail newsletter campaigns are as follows:

Not including e-mail address – yes, they really do send us a list of contacts to receive an e-mail newsletter that do not have an e-mail address;
Sending duplicate e-mail addresses – it’s really easy to check for duplicates in Excel. Imagine you have e-mail addresses in cells D2 & D3, then the formula in E3 will be =IF(D3=D2,”duplicate”,””). Just copy this cell down column E;
Sending addresses for dead people – one client sent us a load of records where ‘deceased’ had been appended to the client’s surname. Great if you are manually looking at records in a CRM system, but not if you are exporting all records with an e-mail address;
Not checking for correct e-mail formatting – here’s another tip, when you have compiled a column of e-mail addresses in Excel, use the ‘text to column’ function to split the e-mail addresses at the @ sign. Then sort the resulting data in the column after the @ sign. It is then easier to spot any errors by scanning down the column.

Cleaning up bounces
Keeping your client database up to date is vitally important. If you send out 500 e-mails, expect around 10-15 per cent to bounce the first time. It’s vital that you have someone spend the time to clean up the bounces.
This does mean making around 50 phone calls (if 10 per cent of a 500-recipient mailshot bounce, for example). However, it’s worth doing to:

a) Maintain your list; and,
b) Find out if the client has truly moved from the address that you have on record.

What to write about
This is key. If you write about the wrong things, your audience will very quickly drift away and stop engaging with you. You will become aware of this by your open rate drifting slowly downwards.
There are a number of providers in the legal sector who will sell you pre-prepared newsletter content. This is the route we think most firms should go. It’s much more cost effective for you to earn another couple of hours’ fees than it is to spend the same time writing your newsletter.
However, should you choose to do it yourself, then here’s a tip. Create an Outlook folder called ‘newsletter snippets’ and any time you see something of interest, e-mail yourself about it and just file the e-mail away. Then when the time arrives to write the newsletter you will have an array of subjects to refer to. It is important to note that this may take a while. Don’t think you will create your newsletter in a couple of hours, however good you are. The fastest I’ve ever written one was half a day.

What’s our experience
As a business that is mostly involved in web design, as you might expect we are quite active when it comes to e-mail newsletters. It’s one of the key tools we use to ‘connect’ with prospects, clients and partners.
Figure 1 shows our three key target audiences and we make sure we have three different newsletters that go to each group.
Some people get all three newsletters. Even clients get the prospects newsletter and there is good reason for this. Each newsletter contains different content.
Here’s how we break down what we aim to communicate in each one:

Prospects – this is a teaser. We try to concentrate on things that will be of value to the readers yet demonstrate our capabilities and how ‘connected’ we are in the world of websites and marketing for the legal sector. It’s not supposed to be a sales piece;
Clients – this one is full on, all about us. What we can do for our clients, how we can help them and again communicating value;
Partners – these are people that we know around the sector, the legal software companies, publishers, heck, even our bank manager is on this list!

One of our most recent prospects newsletters (visit http://www.conscious.co.uk/lmm3) went to 2,570 named individuals in law firms. This was the result:

269 views of the PDF scan of the ‘missing postage letter’;
One reader took the time to phone up to make a joke with me about the grammar on the letter above asking for the £1.24 postage. She observed that a lawyer should know better than to end a letter addressed to ‘Dear Sirs’ with ‘Yours faithfully’ rather than ‘Yours sincerely’. Bear in mind the person who phoned I barely know;
I had 61 requests for the free copy of Legal Marketing magazine, including one from a reader who sent me an e-mail asking for a free copy and added a postscript. saying “forgot to mention, if there is a spare magazine, can you please put a stamp on the envelope........”;
One client phoned to tell me that the newsletter did not say enough about us and what we did. I had to explain that as it went to prospects it was supposed to be ‘balanced and informative’ not just a PR piece for Conscious;
196 e-mails bounced;
Six nice people e-mailed me to tell me about my deliberate mistake (I did not link in some presentations as the newsletter implied).

So, all in all, a pretty successful newsletter with good quality and quantity of engagement with our target audience.

In summary
We firmly believe that e-mail newsletters are the long term future of ongoing client communication. Printed newsletters still have their place, but as firms are trying to be more environmentally friendly, and with ‘large letter’ postage only going one way, e-mail seems to be the most sensible solution.