Legal Marketing & PR

Concise Law Alerts or "Spray and Pray"?

By Tom Kane

I am not a fan of eNewsletters. I may be in the minority here, but with the email-tsunami reality today, I just don't believe that many of them get read. In a post in August 2005, I indicated I was a fan of them. Well, that was 2005, and now is 2011. There has been a ton more spam since then, including those masquerading as eNewsletters. Okay, not being a fan any longer does not mean that others aren't. Certainly, they can play a marketing role, but I prefer 'law alerts,' and by that I mean short, topical and fresh. They should be one page max, one topic and interesting to those who receive it.

Okay, that would be one approach. Another is 'spray and pray' according to Lynn Foley, in-house marketer at Bull, Housser & Tupper in Vancouver. What a great phrase! That's what I think must be the rationale behind many email campaigns – whether they are eNewsletters or other forms. Throw out as many electronic messages as possible, and hope that they get read. I love what Adrian Dayton said on his Marketing Strategy And The Law blog in the post in which Foley's phrase appeared; to wit:

'Now, if you want to take a chance, you could just keep spraying out your client alerts and hope that when the GC gets 50 client alerts, yours will be the lucky one chosen. It could happen. The GC could read your blog post, pass it on to his friends and call you up to find out if you're available to take on his company's global portfolio. It could happen, but I wouldn't bet on it.'

Aw, come on Adrian, stop being a pessimist!

Dayton goes on to provide three suggestions for successful law alerts:

• Make them brief like blog posts (short and sweet);
• Make them 'industry-specific' for better positioning and focus showing 'understanding (of) the business realities faced by GCs;' and
• Include a personal message to increase chances of it being read.

Sound advice. It sure beats spraying and praying.

Thanks to Debra Cassens Weiss for her heads up on this one in her post on ABA Journal Law's News Now.

Full post as published by Legal Marketing Blog on February 08, 2011 (boomark / email).