Email Newsletters: Faster, Cheaper and Easier than Paper and Stamps

Looking for a way to improve client relationships, develop better loyalty or increase referrals to your firm? How about in such a way that is as easy as writing an email, much less expensive than stamps and paper plus it can be shared by your clients with others in just a few seconds?

Sounds great, almost too good to be true, I know, but it really is easy to do. You might associate Email Newseletters with Spam, but with the right information they become an educational resource for your clients and a marketing tool for you. Make it valuable enough and your newsletter gets forwarded on to a few of their close friends in similar situations or maybe their entire address book. You’ve just made 1-100 new contacts by word of mouth. Great job. The best part about the whole thing is, you only spent a few short hours to generate that newsletter and now it is shared with hundreds of people.

Where Do I Start?

Excellent question with a ton of different answers. You probably made the intuitive leap that you want to send an email, but don’t make the mistake of sending it out using Outlook or Yahoo.

1. Use a service designed for this specific task. A few to look at are: Campaign Monitor, Mail Chimp and Constant Contact [Mail Chimp is an affiliate link]. We use Mail Chimp and I highly recommend it for beginners and advanced users alike.
2. Import your contacts. These applications allow you to import contacts from other online contact management tools or from .CSV or XLS files. They’ll even show you step by step how to import different types.
3. Create & Send your first newsletter. Spend some time to come up with a topic or two that will be benefitial to your clients. You want the information to be useful, but also intriguing so that your client will share it and then call you to learn more or review something in their dealings.
4. Repeat as necessary.

Be Careful

When starting up your list, you’ll want to be careful about Spam laws. Make certain that your list contains people that you have done business with and will appreciate the information you wish to pass on. You’ll also want to be careful about what constitutes legal advice, so be certain to add any disclaimers you feel are necessary. Don’t give away too much information either. It’s a difficult line to explain, but you want give enough for your readers to share but not so much that they don’t want to follow up with you.

There are an endless number of nuances involved in this process and we will touch on those in the future. For right now, do some research, get your list ready and generate some clients. When you run into an area that isn’t 100% clear, give me a call or shoot me an email. I’ll be happy to help design and develop your newsletter.

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Jason Wietholter is the Technology Director at Opveon. Think of him as your technological go-to guy. If you need something that has to do with technology and the legal world, he can handle it for you or find someone else that can.