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Marketing With Newsletters

Keeping in Contact with your Clients Through the Use of Newsletters

Benjamin W. Glass, III, (Fairfax, Virginia)

Demographers, scientists who study population characteristics, warn that depending on where you are located, up to 35 percent of your client base will die or disappear within the next 12 months. Many will move away… some will die…and most will simply forget about you. Worse than forgetting about you, your more aggressive competitors will steal away another 5-15% of people who you have represented in the past. Marketing experts estimate that up to 50% of your total “past client and contact list” could be disappearing each year.

If you think this seems ridiculous, stop and think about it for a moment. Look at your old client lists and ask yourself how many of them have ever contacted you again for another legal matter or even to refer someone to your firm. Most lawyers have only a vague system for repeatedly marketing back to old clients and others who have contacted their firm. When lawyers do get around to thinking about a firm newsletter, the first thing most do is to contact some newsletter company who is going to send them a “canned” newsletter that they will slap their firm name onto. This isn’t nearly good enough. Worse, sending a newsletter that is boring, as most “canned” newsletters are, actually turns people off.

Newsletters aren’t as hard to do as you may think. Back when I first started my solo practice, I knew that publishing a newsletter would be an important part of my marketing mix. I really didn’t have any idea how to get that done, so I spoke to a local print shop and then began writing all my own articles. I even took the time to research bulk mailing at the post office and learned how to get a discount when mailing the newsletters out.

I was smart enough to know, even back then, that having a mailing list was going to be very important. Today when I speak to young lawyers about attorney marketing, the very first thing I tell them to do, even if they have no money, is to start the mailing list. Ever since the beginning of my (then solo, now five-lawyer) practice, I have kept our mailing list on a very simple program called MyMailList (www.MySoftware.com). I think it cost about $45 when we got it and its sole function is to be the one place where we can dump every single name that we come in contact with.

Several years after we began I discovered Newsletters Ink Corp. (www.NewslettersInk.com) because they were an ATLA (Association of Trial Lawyers of America) affiliate. For the first few years most of the newsletters that we published were written entirely by Newsletters Ink. We chose from an array of interesting articles written from a plaintiff’s perspective each month. Today we publish a six-page newsletter six to eight times a year filled with interesting articles written by me and the other attorneys in my office.
(go to part 2)