It’s not just law firms, but most most businesses are fixated on acquiring new clients rather than cultivating those they already have.
It goes without saying that if you’re a law firm that has the capacity to offer complimentary services to clients, than a good part of your strategy should be both maintaining contact with them and potentially shoehorning them into other services.
The most obvious way to do this is through email marketing. Despite email being somewhat of a dinosaur when considered alongside other marketing tactics, it still is considered the most effective form of relationship marketing.
If your firm has a database of past and current clients, here are some ways to re-ignite the relationship:
1 For historic client relationships, simply asking people to update their email information can have surprising results. This strategy gives the client the opportunity to enter their new email address if changed and potentially sign up to new law alerts, offers etc. It’s also a gentle way of re-igniting the relationship without force feeding content that they do not wish to receive and consequently unhappily unsubscribing.
2. While segmenting your database into practice areas is essential to effective email marketing, initially attempting to warm up your list through other channels can be both less intrusive and more effective. Facebook custom ad structure via their Power Editor, allows you to upload an entire list to Facebook and instigate a campaign aimed at your email list.
3. The rhythm of your email marketing strategy is fundamental. Plenty of firms get it wrong by simply thinking that their content will be that awesome that their past clients will enjoy hearing from them every week. While sending a fortnightly campaign is generally the rule of thumb, one great way to re-engage is to go to your list with a compelling reason why they should receive your email, along with a question as to how often they would like to receive such information. We recently did this with a commercial firm that works within a niche industry and the response from the list was close to unanimous, “bi-monthly.”
4. If you’re simply going start re-engaging by jumping in and starting an email campaign to your database, firstly segment your list based on practice area and ensure that your first campaign offers great content without the sell. Even by deploying this strategy, anticipate a relatively high number of unsubscribes