Law Firm HTML Email Communications
Our email marketing solutions range from core features that will meet the email marketing needs of most law firms to enterprise features that add sophisticed modules to address the online marketing challenges of larger law firms with multiple offices spread across the country or even the world. Read below to learn more about our email communication services, then visit our sample email portfolio to see what we've achieved for some of our law firm and legal industry clients.
CORE FEATURES
Email Marketing Strategy
Template Design
Campaign Creation and Distribution
Deliverability - Getting Past Filters
Campaign Analytics
List Management
Online RSVP and Surveys
ENTERPRISE FEATURES
Integration with Interaction and other CRM
Integration with Webtrends
Centralized Brand Management and Compliance
Email Marketing Strategy (back to top)
eLawMarketing offers more than great technology -- as legal marketers (and former lawyers), we understand that technology must serve the business needs of the firm, and not vice versa. Accordingly, before clients embark on an email communications program, we offer the option of a confidential strategy session (lasting anywhere from one to several hours) to:
- Identify the client’s target audiences, and assess what types of email content will deliver the highest value to each audience, and promote continued, loyal readership
- Analyze how various forms of email communication - newsletters, alerts, invitations, etc. -- will advance the client's business goals
- Discuss the structural aspects of the client's email marketing program - centralized or decentralized
- Plan how campaign statistics will be leveraged into new business development opportunities
- Assess how email marketing will integrate with other online marketing initiatives
- Review the business case for various email marketing features from both a business development and cost standpoint
The outcome of the strategy session is a roadmap that will guide subsequent design, development, and content decisions.
Template Design (back to top)
Using an appropriate layout, and the right mix of graphics, colors, and font styles, our professionals will design and code an email newsletter template that:
- Projects the proper brand image and business focus
- Promotes loyal readership and high response rates
- Is optimized for readability and deliverability
- Matches the look-and-feel of your website
We offer a full spectrum of flexible templating options ranging from automated stock templates to completely custom HTML templates.
Click the thumbnails to the right for a full size view of a sample custom template (top) and stock templating options (bottom).
Campaign Creation and Distribution (back to top)
Individual campaign creation and distribution can be outsourced to our team of HTML programmers or handled in-house on a self-service basis by your own staff. For clients electing the self-service route, we license software that offers the following features:
- Easy campaign creation by non-technical staff using an interface that resembles the MS Word interface and automatically inserts the appropriate HTML code (click thumbnail to right for a full view)
- Easy storage and retrieval of past campaigns for use in new campaigns (so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel each time).
- Easy upload, storage and retrieval of images for use in campaigns. All images incorporated into client emails are hosted on our servers, thereby eliminating bandwidth issues from hosting email images on the same server as your website
- Alternative text version for subscribers that do not want or cannot read HTML
- Personalization of copy using data in fields stored in your subscriber database
- Full compliance with existing anti-spam legislation
Deliverability - Getting Past Filters (back to top)
We practice only permission-based, opt-in email marketing and enforce it with our clients. Since current spam filtering software may at times erroneously block legitimate emails, we've taken several steps to ensure our clients achieve the highest possible delivery rates.
Content Detective: available as a "core" feature, "Content Detective" is a proprietary system that mirrors the logic used by spam filtering software to identify words, phrases, and patterns that are likely to trigger filters, and then recommends a resolution to each identified problem before an email is sent (click thumbnail to right for a full view of the interface).
eContent Scorer is a more advanced, premium solution that reduces blocking of your opt-in messaging with advanced pre-screening via score-based, Bayesian and keyword filter analysis.
Abuse Desk: One way to get in trouble with the anti-spam community is to avoid responding to email complaints. Our mail server host maintains an in-house abuse desk that is managed by a team of eight full time email delivery and privacy experts who promptly respond to spam complaints received and thereby minimize the impact of complaints on deliverability.
ISP Agreements: Our mail server host has "white list" relationships with key ISP's (e.g., AOL, Yahoo, etc.), and anti-spam organizations. White list status allows mail sent by our clients to be appropriately delivered without the potential for filtering.
Private IP Address and Monitoring: a private IP address is a premium feature that offers high volume senders an exclusive IP address for all of their emails that is not shared by any other client. The program includes dedicated time from the abuse desk to address and resolve any filtering that may arise.
Campaign Analytics (back to top)
After your email campaign launches, you’ll want to measure its success. Our advanced tracking tool presents campaign reports on the following metrics in an easy-to-read, highly visual format (click the thumbnail to the right for a full view):
- Opens and open rates
- Clickthroughs and clickthrough rates
- Unsubscribes and unsubscribe rates
- Bounces and bounce rates
Each of the above statistics can be drilled down to the individual recipient level so that you can see precisely who opened your emails, and which content was most popular with which readers. This level of detail provides unmatched opportunities for principals, “rainmakers,” and other business development professionals to engage in followup business development efforts with subscribers that are tied to demonstrated interests.
List Management (back to top)
Our list management tools ensure that your subscriber lists will remain "clean" and current. Features include:
- Deduplication of emails so no subscriber will receive more than one message in one campaign
- Color coding of emails for quick and easy identification of status
- Centralized capture of bounces
- Removals "remembered" by system to avoid resending emails to subscribers that opted out
- Easy import and export of lists (real-time integration with CRM such Interaction is available as an enterprise feature)
Online RSVP and Surveys (back to top)
Form Builder is available as a premium feature to enable your in-house staff to easily create online RSVP forms and other online surveys, and incorporate them directly into your emails. Fields can be pre-populated with invitee data pulled from your subscriber database, thereby reducing the amount of information that an invitee must enter to complete a successful registration (click thumbnail to right).
Online RSVP forms can revolutionize your seminar and other event registration by:
- Boosting response rates
- Expediting response time
- Reducing administrative hassles associated with paper-based registration
- Reducing mailing costs
- Facilitating capture of additional event information (e.g., meal preferences, accommodation needs)
The results from form submissions are stored in the same location in the “tracking” module as other campaign statistics.
Integration with Interaction and other CRM (back to top)
More and more law firms are deploying Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions to manage their client relationships. We now offer real-time integration between leading CRM packages such as Interaction with our email software database using a proprietary Application Program Interface (API) that enables remote procedure calls written in XML.
Data such as email addresses and other contact information can be passed in real-time from the CRM database to your email account while campaign statistics such as open and click through activity can be passed back from the email account to your CRM system.
Integration with Webtrends (back to top)
We've taken email campaign management and response analysis to the next level with the recent integration of our email system with Webtrends 7.0. This integration of precision email marketing and comprehensive web site analysis allows you to determine the effectiveness of your email campaigns at driving visitors to your site, and to immediately see what visitors do when they reach it.
Centralized Brand Management and Compliance (back to top)
Our enterprise solution allows senior marketing and business development personnel to enforce branding guidelines in all emails published by the firm without compromising marketing innovation at the local level.
Known as "Lock And Publish," the solution gives senior marketing personnel the ability to "lock down" specific design and compliance-related elements in email templates, which can then be published to local offices. Local offices can then customize and personalize those elements of the message to which they have been granted access in order to meet the needs of their local clientele.
“Excellence is not an act, but a habit”
Aristotle
Click here (or the screenshot below) for a free reprint of our recent article on email deliverability.
