Whether you are a sole practitioner or a nationwide brand, law firm marketing is essential to your practice’s growth. According to PricewaterhouseCoopers, the UK legal industry is growing with an average 8-10% growth in fees, with firms remaining largely resilient in the post-pandemic landscape.
On the other hand, claiming your piece of the cake requires marketing campaigns that excel beyond your competitors. According to an assessment fromThomson Reuters Legal UK, too many law firms still only see marketing rather than trying to understand the dynamics of each market.
This philosophy shows that it’s time to level up your game. One way of sharpening your legal marketing efforts is digital marketing tools. Let’s look at the most effective solutions for the year ahead.
Although you can carry out your marketing processes manually, this isn’t the best way of handling it. Using tools increases accuracy, efficiency and performance. In one study fromThink With Google, marketers using five or more tools for analytics alone were 39% likelier to see a performance improvement.
Taking advantage of cutting-edge technology can save you time while delivering better results. However, not all tools were created equal, so choosing your tech stack carefully is vital.
However, digital marketing tools deliver positive ROIs when wielded correctly. Some of the advantages of investing in these solutions include:
Better Understand Your Audience – Digital marketing tools deepen your understanding of your target audience. Acquiring detailed real-time data helps you refine your marketing strategy by understanding what your prospective clients really want.
Maximise Your Reach – Use tools to reach as many people as possible with your marketing content. This is especially helpful for UK law firms operating nationwide or looking to expand into new regional markets.
Measure and Optimise – Stop fumbling in the dark using a costly trial-and-error strategy. Instead, use state-of-the-art tools to determine what’s working for your firm.
Save Time – Time is precious in the fast-paced legal trade. Digital marketing tools automate many tedious, time-consuming tasks like social media scheduling, lead tracking and email marketing.
Reduce Your Spend – Switching your focus to technology-led marketing can enable you to cut out many of the usual expenses associated with traditional marketing. Plus, it’s not uncommon for tools to offer flexible plans, mitigating your costs.
Intelligent Segmentation – In the past, digital marketing focused on hitting a broad market and hoping some of them become future clients. Today, tools are helping lawyers to initiate hyper-targeted campaigns, increasing their returns.
It’s easy to shirk away from spending hundreds of pounds on building your marketing tech stack, but think about the big picture. Digital marketing tools are a proven way for legal eagles to reduce their outgoings while increasing their returns.
Ultimately, the firm that uses marketing tools will always beat the firm that doesn’t.
Best digital marketing tools for the legal industry
Thousands of marketing tools exist for every task and process known to man. If you’re unfamiliar with legal marketing, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by all the options available.
This is why many lawyers bury their heads in the sand and continue managing everything manually. If you’re confused, we’ve compiled a list of the best digital marketing tools specifically for the legal industry.
Legal Marketing Strategy Tools
Before you can launch a marketing campaign, you must plan one out. Strategising is where your marketing efforts rise and fall.
Here are our favourite tools for constructing your next campaign from the ground up.
Google Search Console
TheGoogle Search Console is part of a suite of Google-made tools for improving your SEO efforts. With the Search Console, you can conduct an initial analysis or refresh an existing strategy with an updated set of keywords.
This tool aims to do more with keywords, find errors on your site, and test how mobile-friendly your platform is. It’s also where you can see how your pages are doing on Google.
Plus, Google Search Console integrates with all other Google tools, including Google Analytics.
Google Analytics 4 (GA4)
By far, the best web analytics platform isGA4, the fourth iteration of Google Analytics. Lawyers can use this tool to acquire a comprehensive overview of how users interact with websites, apps and other platforms under your banner.
Ahrefs
Law firms looking for paid SEO tools with more advanced capabilities should look toAhrefs. The value of this tool is that it examines your website to produce a range of actionable data, including:
Keywords and search volumes
Link profiles
Ranking profiles
Other features include a site and content explorer to enable you to evaluate the performance of everything you’ve ever produced on your website.
AlsoAsked
Question-based long-tail keywords can provide opportunities to demonstrate your expertise and capture niche markets. TheAlsoAsked platform gives you all the most commonly asked questions from real searchers.
For example, we typed in “personal injury law”, and some of the questions we got back included:
How long does a personal injury claim take?
What’s the average payout for personal injury claims?
Should I get a solicitor for personal injury claims?
LowFruits.io
Finding keywords is one thing, but the key to good SEO is discovering high-traffic keywords with low-competition signals.
Designed for website owners, LowFruits is a bulk SERP analyser that uncovers those signals, helping you to find blue-water zones to build your authority through.
Google Trends
Evergreen content is essential, but plugging your firm into current legal trends can help you join the conversations and address real people’s concerns.
WhileGoogle Trends doesn’t offer granular data, it effectively shows the legal topics and ideas people are currently exploring.
Website and Hosting Software
In the online world, your website is your most valuable asset. This is the digital equivalent of your office. Since it’s often the first thing prospective clients see, you’ve got to get it right.
Let’s examine the best way to get your site up and running.
WordPress
In 2023, WordPress continues to reign supreme. It’s the engine behind approximately43% of all websites on the Internet – and for a good reason.
WordPress has millions of free templates, customisation options and plugins to create the ideal legal website without coding experience.
Free web hosting doesn’t work for every business. We recommend Kinsta because of its high-end performance using Google’s C2 cloud platform (our Kinsta review gives more details!).
Kinsta’s infrastructure includes state-of-the-art security features and world-class support. Moreover, it’s highly flexible, with starter plans costing less than your monthly coffee budget.
Its lowest-cost plan includes 10 GB of storage, a premium migration and a 14-day backup.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of the most effective avenues to explore. According to one study, email marketing has a4400% ROI, meaning for every £1 invested, the average return is £36.
However, you need the right platform for email. Check out these two options.
ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign is an excellent email platform choice for most law firms because of its fair pricing system. It has all the features you need to send out highly targeted campaigns to your list.
Plus, you can customise your campaigns and split-test email subject lines with ActiveCampaign to determine what engages your list the most.
MailChimp
MailChimp is another prominent email marketing platform for lawyers. Like ActiveCampaign, it possesses all the features necessary to create custom emails and gain detailed analytics from each campaign.
Moreover, building custom templates is simple due to its drag-and-drop interface. However, beware thatMailChimp tends to get expensive with larger lists.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
CRM software streamlines how you interact with current and prospective clients. With a solid CRM in your tech stack, you can simplify building client relationships and supercharge the processes that lead to more business.
In our opinion, there’s only one choice for CRM software.
HubSpot
HubSpot isn’t a dedicated legal CRM, but it works equally well for all professional services. Some of the standoutHubSpot features that make it the most effective CRM on the market include:
Automated execution
Well-configured databases
Marketing source capture
Marketing channel evaluation
Full integration with other systems
Social Media and Youtube
Social media is critical for growing your legal practice. As you’d expect, plenty of tools exist for managing your social media channels, including ones designed around specific platforms.
Here are our top social media tools:
Linkinbio– Share all your most important links in one URL to maximise your bio space.
Actual Platform Analytics – The fact is that all of the most prominent platforms have built-in analytics tabs that provide all of the data you could ever need.
TubeBuddy– YouTube SEO, analytics, keywords and tags. TubeBuddy is specially built for the world’s largest video-sharing platform to help with law firm video marketing.
Other than reaching out to known bloggers directly, we recommend:
HARO– HARO allows journalists to ask questions of professionals. If they choose your answer, they’ll reward you with a link to your website.
Directories – Backlinks from general directories also provide some juice for your website. Ensure you’re listed on Yelp, Yellow Pages, DMOZ and others.
Supercharge your Law Firm Marketing with Tao Digital
Building your tech stack with legal digital marketing tools is the first step to accelerating your law firm. With Tao Digital, our team can help you assemble everything and gain the competitive edge you need.
If you want to learn more about the secrets of digital law firm growth,contact the team today.
Email Marketing for Law Firms: Software, Tips & Best Practices
It’s no secret that law firms often find themselves behind the curve in digital marketing, but in that lies tremendous opportunities for forward-thinking legal professionals to take advantage. One such avenue to explore is email marketing.
This is far below other industries, meaning that unlike other forms of marketing, such as PPC and social media ads, this is a blue-water zone to be exploited.
What can you expect from adopting an effective email marketing strategy? According to the Digital Marketing Association, email marketing has an average ROI of 42:1, meaning for every £1 spent, you generate £42 in business.
How can law firms benefit from email marketing?
Email marketing is yet another channel solicitors must add to their marketing mix. Unlike other channels, email marketing offers several unique benefits.
Understand that an email is a personal conversation. It’s an intimate communication technique that allows you to speak directly to prospects. This is why it’s so effective at building relationships: the message can be customised and delivered to the right people at the right time. It’s an alternative to the legacy scattergun approach.
Mastering email marketing is an opportunity to humanise yourself while demonstrating thought leadership. It’s the action that builds trust and formulates genuine relationships between you, your prospects and your existing clients.
Ultimately, this results in more brand awareness, leads and business.
Considering the low-cost barrier to entry of email marketing, this is a cost-effective marketing option requiring little investment. You can benefit from email marketing, whether you’re a large firm or a one-man operation.
Creating an email marketing strategy for your law firm
Gathering emails and blasting out corporate news is no strategy at all. People want information that’s relevant to them. For example, if you specialise in tackling unfair dismissal cases, there’s little point in sending out a newsletter on human rights.
You need a strategy that reflects your firm and the interests of the future clients you’re targeting. So, what aspects make up an optimal email marketing strategy?
Target Audience – Who are your target audience, and what do they care about? This will be specific to every law firm. Typically, you should begin with your primary practice areas when divining content for your newsletter.
Competitor Research – What are your competitors sending? One of the easiest ways to conduct competitor research is to sign up for a few of their newsletters and create a database of the subjects they’re tackling.
Goals – What is the purpose of your email list? Not every firm’s primary goal is generating direct business. Some use them to create brand awareness and generate industry authority. Defining your goals establishes the line between success and failure and the KPIs you prioritise.
Frequency – The frequency of your emails is another defining factor. Setting expectations early is crucial to avoid annoying/abandoning your audience. Make it clear what your subscribers can expect from you.
Thankfully, email marketing strategies don’t require a budget because of the minimal startup cost. The primary challenge for law firms is setting aside the time to write newsletters and measure the results.
Email marketing requires constant learning and development to master. After all, the habits of subscribers change over time. However, certain best practices remain. Let’s discuss some top tips for law firms getting to grips with email marketing.
Set Clear Goals – Every email marketing campaign should have its own goals. Whether it’s acquiring more clients, retaining existing ones, or increasing awareness of your legal niche, you need a goal because this is what influences your measurables.
Keep Your List Pruned – Building your email list is always a priority, but so is keeping your list clean. Only56% of email subscribers stay on a list for 12 months, meaning you may be swayed by results from emails that are no longer monitored.
Offer Value – Your emails are not a place to discuss why you are the best solicitor in the country. Instead, seek to offer value in as few words as possible. Stay away from complex legalese and leave your subscribers coming away feeling like they’ve learned something.
Monitor Your Performance – Pay close attention to your metrics for each campaign, and don’t be afraid to change if something isn’t working. A/B testing is as relevant to email marketing as any other channel.
Beware of Legal Compliance – The legal industry has more stringent policies to protect client confidentiality. This extends further than legislation likeGDPR. Familiarise yourself with what you can and cannot feature to prevent potential problems.
Best email marketing software for law firms
Countless email marketing platforms exist to help you write newsletters, consolidate lists and launch campaigns. Let’s look at some of the leading options law firms use today.
1. Active Campaign
Active Campaign is widespread across multiple industries because it integrates email and marketing automation. Although it’s often used for B2B clients, it’s also perfectly serviceable for B2C clients.
It allows you to tag contacts based on their behaviours, enabling you to drill down into different subscriber segments for more targeted communications.
2. MailChimp
MailChimp is one of the largest email marketing platforms in the world. It’s mainly designed for small and medium-sized businesses and offers several unique features.
For example, you can build landing pages in minutes, deliver personalised email postcards, and even send surveys to gather client feedback. However, beware that MailChimp gets expensive as your list grows, so some prefer MailerLite.
3. Sendinblue
Most email marketing platforms’ fees are based on how many people you have on your list. However, Sendinblue is among the few that charge based on the number of emails sent.
Newbies to email marketing will love their drag-and-drop editor to design their emails, and their customer support team is proficient in helping with things like GDPR compliance.
If you’re ready to step into the law firm email marketing world, Tao Digital is waiting to support you in growing your firm. To get started, read our Beginner’s Guide to Digital Marketing now.
Email Marketing Software: A Comparison Guide
In this guide, we’ve taken a look at two of the biggest platforms in the email marketing space (Klaviyo and ActiveCampaign) and explained how they work, their top features, price and more.
How Email Marketing Helps B2B and eCommerce Businesses
Email marketing software helps both B2B and eCommerce businesses in a variety of ways, such as:
Lead generation: Email marketing is a brilliant method of marketing and can be a great form of lead generation and direct sales.
Advertising directly to your audience: You’ll be contacting people who have opted in to hear from you, so the chance that they’ll convert is marginally higher than other forms of marketing, e.g. paid social ads or traditional PR.
Access to valuable analytics: The analytics available within email marketing platforms can provide you with really helpful insights into your audience – you can see what products/content/offers are working well, and what kinds of people are drawn to different content. Not only can this help your email strategy, it can also work hand-in-hand with your content marketing strategy too.
Automation: Email marketing platforms can help you understand the user journey in more detail, but more importantly, you can set automated emails and SMS campaigns based on certain trigger events.
Klaviyo is a US-based marketing platform used primarily for email and SMS marketing. Their mission statement is to ‘help businesses grow with real-time data learnings for marketing campaigns through email and SMS marketing campaign automation.’
The platform largely focuses on eCommerce due to the customer-focused analytics it provides, which we’ll dive into further in the top features section. We personally use the platform for our eCommerce clients plus a couple of our own projects.
How Klaviyo Works
Klaviyo works by connecting to your online store as well as other tools, providing in-depth data about your customers and their buying journeys.
Once you log into the platform you have an overview of how your campaigns are performing – example pictured below. You can see how well your ‘flows’ and campaigns are doing, and from there you are able to navigate to your campaigns, analytics, audience etc.
Within the campaigns section you can view your most recent campaigns as well as see a top level overview of their success, including open rate, click rate and how many of your subscribers are currently active on the site (if you have web tracking enabled). From there you can create either an email or SMS campaign, which can be sent now or scheduled for later.
There is also an analytics section where you can review how your campaigns are doing, which allows you to continually optimise your emails.
Top Klaviyo Features
There are various features that we enjoy about Klaviyo:
Segmentations: we really like how customisable the segmentations are within Klaviyo, in particular being able to segment customers when they were last active on the site or when they last opened a campaign from us. This has made it very easy to clean up our lists via ‘reengagement’ and ‘sunset’ campaigns.
This is something that we believe makes Klaviyo stand out compared to other platforms – within ActiveCampaign, for example, at the time of writing (February 2023) there is no way to filter contacts who haven’t opened campaigns within a specific timeframe.
You can also segment by ‘interests’, e.g. for our footwear client we have been able to segment which email subscribers have visited pages under the category of ‘workwear’, ‘mens’ and ‘womens’ so that we can send campaigns specific to them.
Design templates: We really like the wide variety of design templates within Klaviyo’s ‘Drag and Drop’ editor, some of which look quite complex design-wise but are very easy to customise. You don’t have to be a world-class graphic designer to put together a decent looking email.
Although through the many emails we have sent we have naturally come across some technical issues with design (e.g. the whole design shifting if we move a block slightly), we have been able to resolve these issues quickly with the support team’s help.
Subject Line Assistant: Klaviyo has a built-in subject line assistant that can help you to nail your subject lines based on your previous campaigns. It can also generate subject lines for you based on the goals of your campaign, e.g. promotions/product announcements/newsletters etc.
Audience breakdowns: Another great feature is the audience breakdown within campaigns. You can see which lists open your emails the most, and tweak your strategy accordingly.
We love how in-depth you can get with the audience analytics. This is Klaviyo’s real strength and the reason we prefer to use this platform for our eCommerce clients. Within each customer’s profile you can get a historical overview of when they first ordered, the average order value and how likely they are to order again. This can help you clean up your lists by identifying customers who ordered a long time ago or are unlikely to become repeat customers.
Customer Service
The customer service that we have received from Klaviyo is top notch. When we first started using the platform there were a few teething issues that their written guides were unable to assist further with, so we used the live chat function.
Although there is a bit of a queue (the longest we’ve waited is around 90 minutes with 40 people in front of us), it’s still a very quick turnaround time from request to solution. This is a much shorter response time than other platforms.
Even though the live chat support is listed as open between 9am and 5pm EST (so 2pm to 10pm GMT), we’ve often sent requests earlier than this and still received an answer. Please note that the live chat feature is only available to paying customers – those on free accounts only have access to email support, so will need to wait longer.
Difficulty Level
If you’re a complete newbie to email marketing, we’d give this platform 3 out of 5 stars for difficulty, the reason being the teething problems that we ourselves experienced when we first started using the platform (e.g. technical difficulties and design issues).
Segmenting and flows can also take a while to get your head around, but their guides are very useful and once you’re more familiar with it, it’s a great beginner platform. If you’re more experienced with other platforms, we’d give the difficulty 2 out of 5.
Klaviyo Price
The cost of Klaviyo depends largely on how many contacts you have and/or how many emails you are looking to send each month. Please note these are subject to change and the GBP equivalent may be incorrect depending on the value of the pound at the time of reading. For the most updated version, take a look at Klaviyo’s guide with live costs.
ActiveCampaign is a US-based cloud software platform encompassing email marketing, marketing automation, sales automation and CRM categories. For the purpose of this blog, we’re going to focus specifically on the email capabilities of the platform. We prefer to use this platform for our own marketing and for our B2B clients.
ActiveCampaign’s aim is to help you ‘reach your audience through the power of automation without sacrificing personal touch.’
How Active Campaign Works
ActiveCampaign works through a combination of site tracking, app integrations and AI. Through all of this integration you can get a huge amount of data about those who have signed up to receive your email marketing.
Similarly to Klaviyo, when you log into ActiveCampaign you have a dashboard that gives you a general overview of your contacts, campaigns and recent activity. We really like the ‘Top Contacts’ feature, which shows those who have opened/engaged the most with your campaigns.
The campaigns section gives you an overview of your most recent campaigns, as well as some handy links to best practices (it’s always good to have a reminder!).You can also manage and create custom design templates from here.
The reports section is where you will find all of your analytics, including campaign data, automation reports, goal reports, contact reports and much more.
Top Features of Active Campaign
There are some great features that we enjoy using within ActiveCampaign, such as:
Tagging: Similar to Klaviyo’s segmentation feature, you can set up ‘tags’ that will automatically be added to contacts based on certain behaviours, e.g. if they have entered their email to download a PDF guide or have even subscribed to our YouTube channel.
We’re a fan of their ‘tagging quiz’ which lets you know whether a tag is necessary when setting a new one up – this can help to avoid tonnes of unnecessary tags that are never followed up.
Email deliverability checks: When you send your first few campaigns within ActiveCampaign, one of their team members will check them before they get sent out to see if they are compliant.
The platform is top of the list when it comes to compliance – they’re members of top industry groups, for example M3AAWG, and platforms such as TrustRadius and G2 have given them praise for compliance. Their guides on this are incredibly helpful.
Free onboarding and migration: we believe this is a top feature of ActiveCampaign in comparison to other platforms and is a great help for beginners. It’s like being part of a community who are committed to your success.
The platform offers free small group digital onboarding sessions from their Education Team, which can help you to get up to speed quickly and have any questions answered. Other platforms, such as Klaviyo, rely more on guides and checklists to get you up to speed.
Free training: ActiveCampaign’s Education team provides ‘Blueprints Sessions’ hosted by highly trained members of their team, in several different languages and across different time zones. They also offer 30 minute one-to-one meetings.
Customer Service
The response from the support team takes longer compared to Klaviyo and Hubspot. On their Contact Us page, it appears they once had a live chat but have since removed it as the link isn’t working (January 2023). It also isn’t easy to navigate to the contact page compared to Klaviyo, who always have the option in the top right of the platform.
Whilst the chat function has been down we have submitted support requests via email, which can take up to five working days to receive a reply if one of the support team is on annual leave – this was our experience recently.
They are, however, able to resolve the issue quickly and usually ask for a Loom video of your screen to get a real understanding of the issue at hand so that it can be solved ASAP.
Difficulty Level
If you’re new to email marketing, we’d give ActiveCampaign 3.5 to maybe even 4 stars to get your head around on your own. Booking in for a one to one and taking advantage of their free training can bring this down to a 2.5, the same level of difficulty goes for those more experienced.
The main downfall we have with ActiveCampaign is that the design templates are quite basic compared to Klaviyo, so you do need some level of understanding of design and what elements you need to move in order to get the look you want. However, the free training and customer service is above and beyond the other platforms in our opinion!
Active Campaign Price
Again, the cost largely depends on how many contacts you have, and/or how many emails you are looking to send each month. It also depends on the features you want in your account, so there are Lite, Plus, Professional and Enterprise options.
As the costs are so bespoke depending on what you want from the platform, it’s best to visit Active Campaign’s page, which will give you the most up to date information. We’ve added a screenshot below of an example of the costs for 1,000 contacts.
Which email marketing software is the best?
To use a marketer’s favourite phrase, ‘it depends’! The platforms are equally good for different reasons. If you’re in the B2B space, Active Campaign would be your best choice as Klaviyo is certainly more catered towards eCommerce, especially with its Shopify integration.
If your goals are more towards easy customisation, Klaviyo may be a better option for you. From our own experience, their templates are much easier for a beginner to familiarise themselves with.
If you’re looking for a great onboarding experience, Active Campaign may be better for you due to their onboarding process, one to one sessions etc. It all depends on what your needs are.
We recognise that there are pros and cons to each and we use each platform for different clients!
If you’d like to speak to us about email marketing, you can contact us below – we’d love to chat about your strategy and how we may be able to help you.
