Lawyers: Do you make these mistakes in emailing your clients?
One of the best ways to get more repeat business and referrals is to stay in touch with your clients and other contacts and one of the best ways to do that is via email. But whether you email individually or to a list of newsletter subscribers, your efforts can boomerang if you make some simple, but all too common mistakes:
- By your personal email tab (e.g., hotmail, aol, gmail, etc.) as a replacement for of you@yourdomain.com.
- Hard to read messages–ALL CAPS, paragraphs that span the entire email window, long paragraphs and sentences, unusual fonts.
- Poorly written or abridged, dull "lawyer-like" prose, too much "technical" law talk, not sufficient human interest.
- Lengthy disclaimers and CYA language that place space between you and the booklover.
- Emailing too often or not often sufficient. People need to hear from you and if you send valuable and fascinating content, they will want to hear from you. Occasional emails are better than no emails but monthly is better. If you have sufficient to say, weekly is better still. Daily is not unheard of for some markets.
- Always selling. Your emails should be 90% content.
- Never selling. Your offers (services, free intelligence, seminars, etc.) deliver benefits people need and want. Don't deny them.
- Not putting "you" into your messages. You are building a relationship with you, not your firm, so make your messages personal.
- Putting too much "you" into your messages. Talk to your readers about their lives, their business, not about yourself.
- Making it hard for recipients to unsubscribe or change their email address. Don't make people email/answer, automate the process with an autoresponder.
Have you made any of these mistakes? Are there any that you've seen your colleagues make that aren't on this list?