According to the 2022 State of U.S. Small Law Firms Report by Thomson Reuters, 72% of small law firms surveyed saw “acquiring new client business” as a moderate or significant challenge, and 51% reported that “demonstrating the firm’s value to potential clients” was a challenge.

In other words, if generating leads and getting your message out to your audience is a challenge for your firm, you’re not alone. The question is, what do you do about it? Chances are, you hardly have time to consider the answer; the number one challenge cited by small law firms was administrative tasks encroaching on the time available to actually practice law. But newsletter marketing for law firms could be part of the solution.

Benefits of Newsletter Marketing for Law Firms

A regular law firm newsletter can achieve many of your marketing goals:

Increasing Awareness of Your Firm and Brand

Prospective clients can’t hire you if they don’t know you. They won’t hire you if they don’t know what you do, understand how it helps them, and trust that you do it well. A law firm newsletter can get you on your readers’ radar and keep you there, positioning you as an expert in your practice areas.

Ironically, the best way to do this is often not by writing about your firm. One of The Modern Firm’s clients started a newsletter early in the COVID pandemic to keep employers informed of rapidly-evolving state and federal regulations that affected their workplaces. The information was so useful, and so difficult to find in one place elsewhere, that it grew awareness of the firm and solidified their brand as the law firm employers can turn to for solutions.

For what it’s worth, the firm doesn’t use their newsletter to sell services, and they don’t sell or share their contact list. The newsletter is intended strictly to be useful to readers, and it has the added benefit of increasing awareness of the firm’s brand.

Enhancing Client Relationships

Depending on your law firm's practice areas, your clients may only need your services every few years, or perhaps only once in a lifetime. You want former clients to think of your firm first if they should have another legal need, or if they might refer someone who does. Without some kind of ongoing contact, your work with them becomes a transaction that gradually fades from memory, not a relationship.

A law firm newsletter serves as a gentle reminder that you’re still there for your clients, but it does even more: it can build trust by providing readers with substantive content that educates them and reminds them that you are a reliable authority. A newsletter can also humanize your practice by highlighting community service, firm events, or individual team members—giving readers a glimpse of the people behind the practice.

Lead Generation and Lead Nurturing

Your law firm newsletter creates opportunities for readers to engage with your practice in a way that meets their needs and comfort level. Consumers don’t always want to “buy now;” often, they are just looking to learn, and an aggressive sales pitch can send them running for the hills. 

Lead magnets like downloadable ebooks and other resources give readers information that’s valuable to them without demanding much in return. Once they are on your mailing list, interactive content including polls, surveys, and FAQs can give them a low-pressure way to interact with your firm.

Over time, lead nurturing through a newsletter builds your firm’s credibility and positions you as a trusted go-to for legal questions. When readers are ready to reach out to an attorney, calls to action with convenient links make it easy for them to take that step. It may seem obvious that you want your readers to do business with you, but a simple call to action greatly increases the likelihood that they actually will. 

And, of course, law firm newsletters aren’t just directed at potential clients. Sending your newsletter to colleagues in different practice areas or with a different client base can keep you top of mind when those colleagues have a client to refer.

Tracking Engagement

Having a law firm newsletter is one thing. Understanding how well it is working for you is another. Fortunately, email platforms provide built-in analytics tools. You can see open rates (the percentage of recipients who open your email); click-through rates, or CTR (the percentage of readers who click on links in an email); bounce rates (the percentage of emails that could not be delivered); conversion rates (the percentage of readers who complete a particular action, like scheduling a consultation); and unsubscribe rates. 

Your email platform can also track time spent reading your emails, which can help you understand how long readers are engaging with your content and, by extension, whether it is capturing their attention. Using these analytics, you can tweak everything from your email subject lines to your content to your email list to make sure your newsletter is reaching the right people and resonating with them.

In short, there are many benefits of newsletter marketing for law firms—if you do it right. As you probably know from your own inbox battles, many newsletters are relegated to the trash folder without so much as an open. How do you make sure yours isn’t one of them?

Newsletter Marketing for Law Firms: Best Practices

Creating and sending a law firm newsletter isn’t a magic bullet. Like any piece of mail, electronic or otherwise, if it looks like junk, it won’t get opened. Here are some tips for making sure your law firm newsletter lives up to its potential. 

Know What Your Newsletter Does for Readers

You should be able to articulate in a dozen words or fewer the problem your newsletter solves for your clients. For the TMF client referenced above, it might be “legal developments that affect employers, clearly explained in one convenient place” If you can’t say why people should want to sign up for your law firm newsletter, your intended readers won’t be able to, either. 

Make it clear who will benefit from the newsletter (employers), how they will benefit (news they need), and ideally, what makes your newsletter different (clear explanations, everything in one place).

Send a Welcome Email

When you invite someone to sign up for your newsletter and they do it, sending a welcome email sets the tone for the relationship. A welcome email shows your appreciation and lets readers know what to expect from you, which begins building trust. And welcome emails generate four times more opens and five times more clicks than standard newsletters. 

In other words, they’re effective, so don’t miss this opportunity to bring your readers on board. Don’t forget to write the email itself in the same voice as the newsletter; your brand voice should shine through in both.

Keep it Real

You’re not just sending a newsletter out into the universe—you’re sending it to a real person. Actually, to hundreds or thousands of people. But ideally, each one should feel like you’re writing to them—that you care about their experiences, understand their pain points, and you’re happy to share solutions.Remember that one of the major benefits of newsletter marketing for law firms is relationship building, and authenticity is a critical foundation for relationships. 

People are also much more likely to open an email newsletter that has a person, rather than a company name, in the “From” line, even when they know the email is from a company. Surely the name of the sender can’t be more important than the Subject line, right? Wrong. While it’s important to have an engaging Subject line, it turns out that the From line matters even more—so long, of course, as it isn’t misleading or deceptive.

Play Fair

There are legal and ethical rules around the use of newsletter marketing, and it is important not to run afoul of them. Not only could doing so get you in trouble with your state bar and other authorities, but you lose your readers’ trust. 

Know and comply with your jurisdiction’s advertising rules. Steer clear of misleading or false information, and use disclaimers appropriately. For instance, when reporting on a successful case, remind readers that past outcomes don’t guarantee future results. If you include a case study or client success in your law firm newsletter, make sure that client confidentiality is thoroughly protected. 

Comply with the CAN-SPAM Act, which requires, among other things, that recipients are voluntarily on your mailing list and have an easy way to  opt out of emails; that the email be clearly identified as an advertisement; and that subject lines and headers are truthful and transparent. Violation is costly (with penalties of over $50,000 for each separate email) and compliance is straightforward, so get familiar with the rules and protect yourself.

Getting Started with Newsletter Marketing for Law Firms

If the benefits of newsletter marketing are appealing, but the prospect of getting started is daunting, remember that you can repurpose existing content, like blog posts and FAQs, to get them in front of more eyes (and to draw those eyes to your website). It’s often good to have a mix of content, such as firm news and announcements, team profiles, educational content, and updates on legal trends. 

To learn more about marketing your law firm through a newsletter, or to get help with the newsletter process, contact The Modern Firm to schedule a consultation with our Marketing team.