The Rainmaker Blog : Law Firm Marketing and Business Development : The Rainmaker Institute : Stephen Fairley : Professional Legal Marketing

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A new study out from MailerMailer, an email marketing firm, shows that click rates for e-newsletters are lowest during work hours and peak at – get this – 3 a.m.! 

MailerMailer studied 1.2 billion opt-in email newsletters for 2011 and found that click rates began declining at 6 a.m. and were lowest by noon. After that, click rates began to climb, hitting a peak of 7.4% at 3 a.m. during the first half of the year and 5.8% at midnight for the second half of the year:

Open rates were highest on Monday, Tuesday and Sunday – Saturday was the lowest open rate day in the 2011 study for the entire year. Click rates were highest on Sunday – perhaps because people have more time to explore than during the busy work week.

The study also found that open rates were highest for e-newsletters that had subject lines of no more than 15 characters and lowest for those with 50+-character subject lines. Another argument for keeping it simple.

Here are some other hallmarks of effective e-newsletters:

Proper list segmentation. The newsletters I like know who I am and they feed me the information I want and need. If you have more than one practice area in your law firm, you simply must segment your list. Don’t send out the same information to every email address you have on file. 

Brevity. Face it, these days, everyone is busy. Respect your reader’s time by keeping your content brief and provide links to more lengthy content on your website (improving your SEO!) if they want to take the time to read more. Don’t clutter your e-newsletter with off-topic information or too many different subjects. And present your information in a way that doesn’t sound too self-promotional. Give information that is valuable to the reader and tell them why what you are writing about matters to them.

Good design. A properly designed e-newsletter draws the reader in. It should be clean, concise, have interesting graphics and images and you should keep the same template from month to month so it is recognizable to your subscribers. 

Strong subject lines. You need strong subject lines that immediately grab your readers’ attention. Do not just toss in “July E-Newsletter from ABC Law Firm”! How boring. Even if you spent the time you should in creating compelling content, a weak subject line will get you bounced to the Junk folder.

Single call-to-action. Don’t ask your subscribers to choose among a list of actions you want them to take – choose one strong call-to-action that is a logical extension of your e-newsletter content. 

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