Email newsletters are at the core of many law firms’ digital marketing strategies. Like other businesses, especially those that market services to the general public, law firms have in many cases struggled to adjust to the ways that Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) protocol has reduced the granularity of the “feedback” data digital marketing teams long used to understand how well their newsletters were delivering and how well the newsletters were received once they made it into inboxes. Fortunately, for law firms still trying to figure out the best way to handle the transition, there are a number of options that can be combined to yield the kind of information marketing professionals need to make important strategy refinements going forward.
What Is a Newsletter? Refreshing the Basics
You’ve probably been using email newsletters as part of your law firm marketing strategy for years (or you’ve worked for firms that did). Let’s take a quick look at the basic premise anyway.
Synthesizing from several of the top definitions found online, the consensus is that a newsletter is a bulletin of an organization’s recent activities, sent out on a regular schedule to members or other interested parties. Merriam-Webster is a little looser: A newsletter may be any “small publication” that contains news of interest primarily to a special group.
In practice, law firms have typically used newsletters to reach members of their local business communities, past and current clients, and sometimes also colleagues and prospective clients. They have often included in their newsletters not only updates about the recent activities of their partners and associates, but also information about local events (especially those in which the law firm is involved, e.g., as a sponsor) and pending or recent changes to law or procedure in their respective practice areas. Many law firm newsletters have included some sort of “message” from a partner, not unlike the note from the editor-in-chief that has traditionally appeared in the opening pages of print magazines.
Why Do Law Firms Use Newsletters?
Newsletters have long been popular tools in law firm marketing for a few reasons. They are usually very cheap to produce, compared to several other kinds of public-facing materials. Depending on how their content is curated, they can often “provide value” by presenting expert insights. They give law firms a chance to tout the accomplishments of their attorneys in a “just sharing our updates” format that many people find less off-putting than a more direct brag (no matter how well-deserved).
They also provide a relatively low-effort means of getting a law firm’s name in front of prospective clients or referral sources. Name recognition is not the only pillar of a great marketing plan, but it is one no marketing strategy will be complete without, so it makes sense that law firms, like many other businesses, take advantage of newsletters as a low-cost and low-risk way of increasing the number of eyes on their name and the number of times their name appears before each set of eyes.
How Has Email Technology Shaped the Use of Marketing Newsletters for Law Firms?
If you sat for the bar exam any time within the past decade, you may not remember when paper newsletters, delivered by the postal service, were ubiquitous in advertising. Businesses used them. Nonprofit organizations used them. Some of us had extended family who sent them for the holidays. “Production values” ranged from full-color printing on glossy heavyweight stock to blurry gray tones on paper that, let’s be honest, sometimes made newsprint look posh (newspapers were printed back then, too).
Natural Fit
Email was in many respects a natural transition for newsletters (some organizations have made a practice of sending newsletters both in print and electronically). They are, of course, even cheaper to produce than the cheapest black-and-white printed newsletters, and they can as a result be mailed to more recipients, more often. With their habitual focus on organization news and updates, newsletters for a genre with which members of the general public tend to be broadly familiar, a fact which allows for, even encourages, the kind of communication law firms have particular incentive to make, so the availability of email as a means of reducing the barriers to production and delivery has long incentivized high levels of law firm participation in the newsletter marketing trend.
Competitive Advantage
As the digital marketing landscape grew increasingly competitive over the course of the 2010s, email newsletters gave law firms a tool for staying relevant that in many cases was easier to align with attorney marketing ethics than some of the more aggressive tactics being tested in other industries. Additionally, encouraging newsletter signups gave attorneys a way to collect zero-party data (information, such as contact email or phone number, provided directly by the user) from prospective clients. For all of these reasons, email newsletters have been a mainstay of law firm digital marketing now for several years.
How Have Apple Privacy Updates Changed Email Newsletter Effectiveness?
MPP has made much of the data tracking email newsletters once facilitated unavailable, or at best unreliable as a gauge of marketing campaign effectiveness. Law firms can (and many do) still collect the voluntary zero-party data provided when individuals curious about the firm’s services sign up for the email newsletters.
The opt-ins themselves offer some utility as a tool for reducing attorney’s risk exposure, in the sense that they indicate the user’s expressed interest in receiving communications. However, the metrics for which digital marketing experts used to watch in the first 48-72 hours after each newsletter “push” are no longer as valuable in measuring the rate at which those newsletters are actually opened and acted on by their recipients as they were even a few short years ago.
Understanding Apple’s MPP
Apple’s strategy for protecting user privacy works in two main ways. Understanding what they are and how Apple’s approach to each integrates into a single privacy strategy sets lawyers up to also understand the options law firms have for addressing the impact of Apple MPP on email newsletter effectiveness:
- User location: Apple splits processing of emails so that IP address receiving email and the email content received are handled separately. For Apple Mail users, one of the main benefits of this system is that it prevents the automated mail delivery systems generally used for newsletters and other email marketing communications from connecting the destination IP address with the recipient’s email address.
- Remote download: Under Apple’s MPP protocols, the default setting is for email content received to be downloaded in the background by default. This “pre-fetching” has a number of effects for email users, but for email senders it means that the email will show as “read” in their mail management system when Apple Mail processes it, not when the user actually opens it. The “background” download function means that the open rates on newsletters sent to emails using Apple MPP are essentially useless.
The IP “masking” enabled by the first protection means that senders are not able to use a recipient’s interaction with a message to track the user’s activity across websites or other digital surfaces in the way that they could before Apple deployed MPP, or the way they can when emails are handled through another system that does not employ similar privacy protections. Meanwhile, the element of the protocol means that email senders cannot see how many times an individual recipient opened an email, or whether the recipient forwarded the message.
What Can Law Firms Do To Improve Newsletter Effectiveness With Apple MPP
The first thing you can do, as an attorney concerned about how to manage law firm newsletters in light of MPP, is talk to a marketing professional. Someone who is familiar with the latest technologies as they are currently used, and able to take a look at the specifics of your situation, will likely be in a position to advise you more effectively than you will be able to assess the strategy implications for yourself without that professional background.
While the details will depend on a combination of factors unique to each law firm, some of the adjustments a marketing strategist is likely to consider include:
- Click-Through Rate (CTR) vs. Open Rate (OR): The background loading of email content that generally invalidates OR as a measure of subscriber interest does not also trigger “clicks” to links embedded in the email content. The number of click-throughs can no longer effectively be compared to the number of email opens, so you lose some of the granularity in tracking how many of the people who receive the email are interested enough to open it vs. how many of the people who open the email are interested enough to take further action. However, CTR itself continues to be valuable as a measure of subscriber interest.
- Conversion Rate (CR): Third-party cookies will often be able to track post-click activity, like filling out a form or responding to a poll, after a user has clicked a link embedded in the email newsletter. Given the general trends in digital privacy, you may want to consider building some CR resilience into your tracking by getting used to (or getting your marketing team used to) comparing the number of actions taken on the page linked in an email to the number of times the link is actually triggered. Particularly if you generate a separate page for each email campaign (many email newsletter management systems offer a built-in option for creating a landing page and integrating its link into the body of an email during the design phase of newsletter creation), this comparison should hold up extremely well even as privacy policies lean away from third-party cookies.
- Unsubscribe (Opt-Out): Keep a sharp eye on your newsletter’s unsubscribe rate. If you receive “unsubscribe” notifications after your law firm pushes an email newsletter, or if your subscriber list drops in numbers in the two or three days immediately following, that is a sign that your newsletter is not doing its work, which is not just to reach email addresses but to engage individuals who have a genuine interest in what your law firm offers, what your attorneys have been doing, and what you see coming up next.
None of these methods is a complete solution by itself. Together, they can give your law firm a competitive edge in understanding what the people most likely to hire you want to see from their attorneys.
Be Ready for AI
While not technically a part of Apple’s MPP, you probably want to pause to take a look at the move toward AI summaries across many different email service providers. Content confined to an image is usually unreadable to those AI tools, which means a .jpeg of a flyer with the dates and times for your upcoming webinar may look like mere “decoration” to a tool many of your recipients are relying on to tell them which emails are worth opening. Focus on text-based context (going old school to keep up with the latest tech!), and use a classic trick from journalism to put your most critical information in the first one or two lines of your message.
Consult the Experts
As always, stay in touch with a trusted digital marketing professional who can help you fine-tune your strategy as technology advances and as new user habits develop. Work with this person (or agency) to make sure that your email newsletters stay readable and relevant, and that they are integrated into your overall law firm digital marketing strategy.
Annette Choti, Esq., has over two decades of legal experience and is the Founder & CEO of Law Quill, a concierge legal marketing agency for law firms. Annette authored the bestselling book Click Magnet: The Ultimate Guide To Digital Marketing For Law Firms, hosts the popular Legal Marketing Lounge podcast, and founded Click Magnet Academy where she teaches professionals to leverage the powerful LinkedIn platform. As a sought after speaker for Bar Associations, Legal Associations, and Marketing Conferences, Annette provides legal marketing insight along with an entertaining twist. Annette used to do theatre and professional comedy, which is not so different from the legal field if we are all being honest. Annette can be found on LinkedIn or directly through email at Annette@LawQuill.com
The post Email Newsletters That Survive Apple’s Privacy Changes appeared first on Above the Law.
Email newsletters are at the core of many law firms’ digital marketing strategies. Like other businesses, especially those that market services to the general public, law firms have in many cases struggled to adjust to the ways that Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) protocol has reduced the granularity of the “feedback” data digital marketing teams long used to understand how well their newsletters were delivering and how well the newsletters were received once they made it into inboxes. Fortunately, for law firms still trying to figure out the best way to handle the transition, there are a number of options that can be combined to yield the kind of information marketing professionals need to make important strategy refinements going forward.
What Is a Newsletter? Refreshing the Basics
You’ve probably been using email newsletters as part of your law firm marketing strategy for years (or you’ve worked for firms that did). Let’s take a quick look at the basic premise anyway.
Synthesizing from several of the top definitions found online, the consensus is that a newsletter is a bulletin of an organization’s recent activities, sent out on a regular schedule to members or other interested parties. Merriam-Webster is a little looser: A newsletter may be any “small publication” that contains news of interest primarily to a special group.
In practice, law firms have typically used newsletters to reach members of their local business communities, past and current clients, and sometimes also colleagues and prospective clients. They have often included in their newsletters not only updates about the recent activities of their partners and associates, but also information about local events (especially those in which the law firm is involved, e.g., as a sponsor) and pending or recent changes to law or procedure in their respective practice areas. Many law firm newsletters have included some sort of “message” from a partner, not unlike the note from the editor-in-chief that has traditionally appeared in the opening pages of print magazines.
Why Do Law Firms Use Newsletters?
Newsletters have long been popular tools in law firm marketing for a few reasons. They are usually very cheap to produce, compared to several other kinds of public-facing materials. Depending on how their content is curated, they can often “provide value” by presenting expert insights. They give law firms a chance to tout the accomplishments of their attorneys in a “just sharing our updates” format that many people find less off-putting than a more direct brag (no matter how well-deserved).
They also provide a relatively low-effort means of getting a law firm’s name in front of prospective clients or referral sources. Name recognition is not the only pillar of a great marketing plan, but it is one no marketing strategy will be complete without, so it makes sense that law firms, like many other businesses, take advantage of newsletters as a low-cost and low-risk way of increasing the number of eyes on their name and the number of times their name appears before each set of eyes.
How Has Email Technology Shaped the Use of Marketing Newsletters for Law Firms?
If you sat for the bar exam any time within the past decade, you may not remember when paper newsletters, delivered by the postal service, were ubiquitous in advertising. Businesses used them. Nonprofit organizations used them. Some of us had extended family who sent them for the holidays. “Production values” ranged from full-color printing on glossy heavyweight stock to blurry gray tones on paper that, let’s be honest, sometimes made newsprint look posh (newspapers were printed back then, too).
Natural Fit
Email was in many respects a natural transition for newsletters (some organizations have made a practice of sending newsletters both in print and electronically). They are, of course, even cheaper to produce than the cheapest black-and-white printed newsletters, and they can as a result be mailed to more recipients, more often. With their habitual focus on organization news and updates, newsletters for a genre with which members of the general public tend to be broadly familiar, a fact which allows for, even encourages, the kind of communication law firms have particular incentive to make, so the availability of email as a means of reducing the barriers to production and delivery has long incentivized high levels of law firm participation in the newsletter marketing trend.
Competitive Advantage
As the digital marketing landscape grew increasingly competitive over the course of the 2010s, email newsletters gave law firms a tool for staying relevant that in many cases was easier to align with attorney marketing ethics than some of the more aggressive tactics being tested in other industries. Additionally, encouraging newsletter signups gave attorneys a way to collect zero-party data (information, such as contact email or phone number, provided directly by the user) from prospective clients. For all of these reasons, email newsletters have been a mainstay of law firm digital marketing now for several years.
How Have Apple Privacy Updates Changed Email Newsletter Effectiveness?
MPP has made much of the data tracking email newsletters once facilitated unavailable, or at best unreliable as a gauge of marketing campaign effectiveness. Law firms can (and many do) still collect the voluntary zero-party data provided when individuals curious about the firm’s services sign up for the email newsletters.
The opt-ins themselves offer some utility as a tool for reducing attorney’s risk exposure, in the sense that they indicate the user’s expressed interest in receiving communications. However, the metrics for which digital marketing experts used to watch in the first 48-72 hours after each newsletter “push” are no longer as valuable in measuring the rate at which those newsletters are actually opened and acted on by their recipients as they were even a few short years ago.
Understanding Apple’s MPP
Apple’s strategy for protecting user privacy works in two main ways. Understanding what they are and how Apple’s approach to each integrates into a single privacy strategy sets lawyers up to also understand the options law firms have for addressing the impact of Apple MPP on email newsletter effectiveness:
- User location: Apple splits processing of emails so that IP address receiving email and the email content received are handled separately. For Apple Mail users, one of the main benefits of this system is that it prevents the automated mail delivery systems generally used for newsletters and other email marketing communications from connecting the destination IP address with the recipient’s email address.
- Remote download: Under Apple’s MPP protocols, the default setting is for email content received to be downloaded in the background by default. This “pre-fetching” has a number of effects for email users, but for email senders it means that the email will show as “read” in their mail management system when Apple Mail processes it, not when the user actually opens it. The “background” download function means that the open rates on newsletters sent to emails using Apple MPP are essentially useless.
The IP “masking” enabled by the first protection means that senders are not able to use a recipient’s interaction with a message to track the user’s activity across websites or other digital surfaces in the way that they could before Apple deployed MPP, or the way they can when emails are handled through another system that does not employ similar privacy protections. Meanwhile, the element of the protocol means that email senders cannot see how many times an individual recipient opened an email, or whether the recipient forwarded the message.
What Can Law Firms Do To Improve Newsletter Effectiveness With Apple MPP
The first thing you can do, as an attorney concerned about how to manage law firm newsletters in light of MPP, is talk to a marketing professional. Someone who is familiar with the latest technologies as they are currently used, and able to take a look at the specifics of your situation, will likely be in a position to advise you more effectively than you will be able to assess the strategy implications for yourself without that professional background.
While the details will depend on a combination of factors unique to each law firm, some of the adjustments a marketing strategist is likely to consider include:
- Click-Through Rate (CTR) vs. Open Rate (OR): The background loading of email content that generally invalidates OR as a measure of subscriber interest does not also trigger “clicks” to links embedded in the email content. The number of click-throughs can no longer effectively be compared to the number of email opens, so you lose some of the granularity in tracking how many of the people who receive the email are interested enough to open it vs. how many of the people who open the email are interested enough to take further action. However, CTR itself continues to be valuable as a measure of subscriber interest.
- Conversion Rate (CR): Third-party cookies will often be able to track post-click activity, like filling out a form or responding to a poll, after a user has clicked a link embedded in the email newsletter. Given the general trends in digital privacy, you may want to consider building some CR resilience into your tracking by getting used to (or getting your marketing team used to) comparing the number of actions taken on the page linked in an email to the number of times the link is actually triggered. Particularly if you generate a separate page for each email campaign (many email newsletter management systems offer a built-in option for creating a landing page and integrating its link into the body of an email during the design phase of newsletter creation), this comparison should hold up extremely well even as privacy policies lean away from third-party cookies.
- Unsubscribe (Opt-Out): Keep a sharp eye on your newsletter’s unsubscribe rate. If you receive “unsubscribe” notifications after your law firm pushes an email newsletter, or if your subscriber list drops in numbers in the two or three days immediately following, that is a sign that your newsletter is not doing its work, which is not just to reach email addresses but to engage individuals who have a genuine interest in what your law firm offers, what your attorneys have been doing, and what you see coming up next.
None of these methods is a complete solution by itself. Together, they can give your law firm a competitive edge in understanding what the people most likely to hire you want to see from their attorneys.
Be Ready for AI
While not technically a part of Apple’s MPP, you probably want to pause to take a look at the move toward AI summaries across many different email service providers. Content confined to an image is usually unreadable to those AI tools, which means a .jpeg of a flyer with the dates and times for your upcoming webinar may look like mere “decoration” to a tool many of your recipients are relying on to tell them which emails are worth opening. Focus on text-based context (going old school to keep up with the latest tech!), and use a classic trick from journalism to put your most critical information in the first one or two lines of your message.
Consult the Experts
As always, stay in touch with a trusted digital marketing professional who can help you fine-tune your strategy as technology advances and as new user habits develop. Work with this person (or agency) to make sure that your email newsletters stay readable and relevant, and that they are integrated into your overall law firm digital marketing strategy.
Annette Choti, Esq., has over two decades of legal experience and is the Founder & CEO of Law Quill, a concierge legal marketing agency for law firms. Annette authored the bestselling book Click Magnet: The Ultimate Guide To Digital Marketing For Law Firms, hosts the popular Legal Marketing Lounge podcast, and founded Click Magnet Academy where she teaches professionals to leverage the powerful LinkedIn platform. As a sought after speaker for Bar Associations, Legal Associations, and Marketing Conferences, Annette provides legal marketing insight along with an entertaining twist. Annette used to do theatre and professional comedy, which is not so different from the legal field if we are all being honest. Annette can be found on LinkedIn or directly through email at Annette@LawQuill.com
The post Email Newsletters That Survive Apple’s Privacy Changes appeared first on Above the Law.
