Top Ten Tips for Stellar Email Marketing Campaigns

Online marketing has evolved tremendously over the last several years, yet email marketing continues to be one of the most important online marketing tools. It allows you to connect with your target audience, building relationships with clients and prospects in a personalized way, at an affordable cost.

According to Hubspot, the inbound marketing software platform, there’s a lot of data validating the benefits of email marketing campaigns:

• Active email accounts are expected to hit 5.6 billion by 2019
• 99% of consumers check their email every day
• 59% of respondents say marketing emails influence their purchase decisions
• Email marketing averages a return of $44 on every $1 spent

In fact, we think email marketing is so important here at the Academy, that we recently devoted three sessions at our bi-annual Summit to it, diving into everything from copywriting and killer subject lines to campaigns and automations.
Drawn from the expertise of our Academy team and a recent analysis of 12 million emails done by Brian Dean of Backlinko and data partner, Pitchbox, here are ten top tips to follow to create successful campaigns:

1. Build a clean email list that’s segmented into categories such as clients, prospects, business connections.
2. Subject lines are the most important part of your email.

• Use odd and specific numbers
• Convey urgency
• Offer value or benefit right away
• Have a call to action
• Use lower case words
• Test use of symbols
• Don’t use spammy words, all caps, or excessive punctuation

3. Multiple outreach messages work better than a single message. Emailing the same contact multiple times led to 2x more responses in the Backlinko study.

4. Reaching out to multiple contacts can also lead to more success. The response rate of messages sent to several contacts is 93% higher than messages sent to a single person.

5. Personalized subject lines boost response rate by 30.5%. Personalization is currently a very popular tactic and data has shown that personalizing email subject lines can increase responses.

6. Emails with personalized message bodies have a 32.7% better response rate than those that don’t personalize their messages. The data suggests using a first name in the greeting and adding a personal detail or two in the body can really pay off.

7. Some studies indicate that Wednesdays are the “best” day to send outreach emails and Saturdays are the worst. However, you’ll want to track your data to see if the same holds true for your campaigns. By analyzing your own data, you can find which days/times work best for you.

8. Include a strong call to action (CTA). Offering something exclusive or of value often entices recipients to open an email and take action.

9. According to YouGov, 78% of consumers in the U.S. read reviews before making a purchase. Customer reviews, ratings, and user-generated content can help build credibility, so consider including some of these elements in your email campaigns.

10. Track campaign performance. By analyzing the days and times you send emails, along with subject lines, topics, CTAs, and types of campaigns, you can discover what and when your recipients really want to hear from you.

Email marketing is all about experimenting with different tactics and figuring out what works best for your law firm. Optimize your subject lines, copy, send days/times, and everything else. Then, test, re-test, and analyze your results. With all of the emails landing in our inbox each day, it’s really difficult to stand out, but implementing these best practices could be the difference between being ignored and retaining a new client.

Rita Chaires

Director, Web and Online Marketing Services
American Academy of Estate Planning Attorneys, Inc.
9444 Balboa Avenue, Suite 300
San Diego, California 92123
Phone: (858) 453-2128
www.aaepa.com