A Law Firm’s Guide to Email Marketing Segmentation

You don’t approach every lead your firm gets in exactly the same way. How you communicate your offerings and next steps likely depends on the client’s specific situation. If your conversations with a lead reflect what you know about their needs, your marketing messages probably should too. Tailoring your communications based on your audience’s characteristics, area of need, and other factors is called segmentation, and one of the first places we recommend implementing it is in your email marketing.

Email marketing segmentation divides your subscribers into various groups based on what you know about them, helping you send relevant messages that feel personal and keep your contact list engaged. Information tailored to each segment of your audience allows you to respond to something you know about a particular contact, making it more like a personal conversation than a general interest lecture.

Why Email Segmentation Matters for Law Firms

Relevant information tailored to recipients positions your law firm as a trusted resource and valuable partner during what can be an overwhelming process for your clients, especially in Social Security disability, personal injury, and workers’ compensation cases. Statistics on email marketing segmentation support this, with Mailchimp reporting segmented campaigns deliver 14% higher open rates and 100% higher click rates than non-segmented campaigns.

Over time, non-segmented campaigns can negatively impact engagement, as you teach your subscribers that what’s inside your emails may not be particularly relevant to them. Segmented campaigns see an unsubscribe rate 9% lower than non-segmented campaigns. In extreme cases, subscribers may mark irrelevant content as spam, negatively impacting all of your email marketing initiatives. Abuse reports are almost 4% lower in segmented campaigns than non-segmented ones.

While the value of email segmentation increases with the size of your subscriber list and scope of your practice, firms of any size can benefit from more personalized marketing messages, including solo practitioners.

How to Segment Your Subscriber List

The best segmentation strategies for your firm depend on how you practice and what information you collect about your leads and clients. Any of your email communications can be segmented, including newsletters, automations, and firm updates. The reason for segmenting remains the same: more relevant content delivers better results.

Common email list segmentation strategies include sends based on:

• Practice area: This can be fairly broad, such as all personal injury leads, or much more specific, such as people looking to appeal an SSI decision or people injured at a job in healthcare.
• Case stage: Tailor your emails based on whether a subscriber is a lead, onboarding client, current client, won their case, etc.
• Type of referrer: Provide relevant information to other lawyers, healthcare professionals, or social workers/advocates who refer cases to your firm.
• Subscriber behavior: Send messages based on how someone interacts with your firm, such as whether or not they’ve opened recent emails.
• Geography: Where a subscriber is located can be important in practice areas affected by city- or state-specific laws.
• Attorney: Keep an up-to-date list of every attorney’s active clients.

Email Segmentation Ideas

There are so many ways to connect with the email segments that make sense for your firm. The best email segmentation ideas are the ones that are achievable with the list and resources you have available. Common options include:

• Educational drip campaigns for specific practice areas that nurture leads who haven’t become cases yet.
• Onboarding and offboarding automations that welcome new clients with important information about what to expect, and thank clients whose cases have closed.
• Industry updates paired with your lawyers’ insights for referring attorneys who may not keep up with changes in your practice areas.
• Attorney-specific messages with information only their clients need to know, such as who to contact during upcoming time away from the office.

Email Segmentation Tools

It is completely possible to capture the benefits of segmented email campaigns using manual tagging to divide your list into distinct groups. However, if you have even a few hundred emails, this can quickly become overwhelming. Instead, consider how your existing tools can tag contacts.

Website

Segment contacts based on how or when they contacted your firm, what options they chose in a contact form, or how they scored on an eligibility quiz.

Client Intake Software

Tag leads during the intake process with additional details, such as practice area, whether or not they’ve submitted a claim, and demographic details in platforms like Clio and HubSpot.

Email Platforms

Push contact information and corresponding tags into an email SaaS for sophisticated automations and better design capabilities. At Better Cases, we use Mailchimp. Similar options include Campaign Monitor, Klaviyo, Constant Contact, and many others.

Email Segmentation Best Practices

1. Use automations to eliminate manual segmentation.
   Tag contacts in your intake and management solutions based on the segments you think will be most useful in your ongoing email marketing. Using automations, you can likely share these profiles (including any updates you make over time), with your email marketing platform.
2. Know when to use static and dynamic segments.
   Static segments are set once and never change. For example, this may be everyone you worked with in a specific year for the purpose of sending a tailored holiday email. Dynamic segments change based on a subscriber’s real-time status. Your active clients list should be dynamic, because clients are added as leads become cases and then are no longer active clients after their case ends.
3. Keep total send frequency in mind.
   Even if a single segment only receives an email or two each month, if subscribers are often in several segments, all of which are getting a few emails, your total email volume could become overwhelming to a subscriber.
4. Resist the temptation to over-segment.
   Email marketing segmentation takes work. You have to define and update your segments, and then create relevant emails for each list. More specific segments create more work; at some point, this effort will not deliver a return on your investment. Also keep in mind that you know personal, sensitive details about your clients, and targeting based on some of this information can go past the point of relevant and be unsettling to your recipients.
5. Review segments and performance regularly.
   Digital marketing gives you lots of data, which you and your marketing partners can use to optimize your efforts. Consider whether or not your list of segments still reflects your business and email list. Review how each of your segments performs and, if necessary, make changes.

Harness the Power of Audience Segmentation

Start sending more relevant messages and increase the ROI of your email marketing campaigns with Better Cases. We can support every part of your segmentation strategy, from defining groups to implementing tools to sending the right emails at the right time to the right people.