Email newsletters are at the core of many law firms\u2019 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\u2019s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) protocol has reduced the granularity of the \u201cfeedback\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
You\u2019ve probably been using email newsletters as part of your law firm marketing strategy for years (or you\u2019ve worked for firms that did). Let\u2019s take a quick look at the basic premise anyway.<\/p>\n
Synthesizing from several of the top definitions found online, the consensus is that a newsletter is a bulletin of an organization\u2019s recent activities, sent out on a regular schedule to members or other interested parties. Merriam-Webster<\/a> is a little looser: A newsletter may be any \u201csmall publication\u201d that contains news of interest primarily to a special group.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cmessage\u201d from a partner, not unlike the note from the editor-in-chief that has traditionally appeared in the opening pages of print magazines.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cprovide value\u201d by presenting expert insights. They give law firms a chance to tout the accomplishments of their attorneys in a \u201cjust sharing our updates\u201d format that many people find less off-putting than a more direct brag (no matter how well-deserved).<\/p>\n They also provide a relatively low-effort means of getting a law firm\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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. \u201cProduction values\u201d ranged from full-color printing on glossy heavyweight stock to blurry gray tones on paper that, let\u2019s be honest, sometimes made newsprint look posh (newspapers were printed back then, too).<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> now for several years.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s services sign up for the email newsletters.<\/p>\n The opt-ins themselves offer some utility as a tool for reducing attorney\u2019s risk exposure, in the sense that they indicate the user\u2019s 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 \u201cpush\u201d 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.<\/p>\n Apple\u2019s strategy for protecting user privacy works in two main ways. Understanding what they are and how Apple\u2019s 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:<\/p>\n The IP \u201cmasking\u201d enabled by the first protection means that senders are not able to use a recipient\u2019s interaction with a message to track the user\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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:<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n While not technically a part of Apple\u2019s 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 \u201cdecoration\u201d 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Annette Choti, Esq., has over two decades of legal experience and is the Founder & CEO of\u00a0Law Quill<\/a>, a concierge legal marketing agency for law firms.\u00a0 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\u00a0LinkedIn<\/a>\u00a0or directly through email at\u00a0Annette@LawQuill.com\u00a0<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n The post Email Newsletters That Survive Apple\u2019s Privacy Changes<\/a> appeared first on Above the Law<\/a>.<\/p>\n Email newsletters are at the core of many law firms\u2019 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\u2019s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) protocol has reduced the granularity of the \u201cfeedback\u201d 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.<\/p>\n You\u2019ve probably been using email newsletters as part of your law firm marketing strategy for years (or you\u2019ve worked for firms that did). Let\u2019s take a quick look at the basic premise anyway.<\/p>\n Synthesizing from several of the top definitions found online, the consensus is that a newsletter is a bulletin of an organization\u2019s recent activities, sent out on a regular schedule to members or other interested parties. Merriam-Webster<\/a> is a little looser: A newsletter may be any \u201csmall publication\u201d that contains news of interest primarily to a special group.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cmessage\u201d from a partner, not unlike the note from the editor-in-chief that has traditionally appeared in the opening pages of print magazines.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cprovide value\u201d by presenting expert insights. They give law firms a chance to tout the accomplishments of their attorneys in a \u201cjust sharing our updates\u201d format that many people find less off-putting than a more direct brag (no matter how well-deserved).<\/p>\n They also provide a relatively low-effort means of getting a law firm\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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. \u201cProduction values\u201d ranged from full-color printing on glossy heavyweight stock to blurry gray tones on paper that, let\u2019s be honest, sometimes made newsprint look posh (newspapers were printed back then, too).<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> now for several years.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s services sign up for the email newsletters.<\/p>\n The opt-ins themselves offer some utility as a tool for reducing attorney\u2019s risk exposure, in the sense that they indicate the user\u2019s 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 \u201cpush\u201d 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.<\/p>\n Apple\u2019s strategy for protecting user privacy works in two main ways. Understanding what they are and how Apple\u2019s 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:<\/p>\n The IP \u201cmasking\u201d enabled by the first protection means that senders are not able to use a recipient\u2019s interaction with a message to track the user\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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:<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n While not technically a part of Apple\u2019s 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 \u201cdecoration\u201d 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Annette Choti, Esq., has over two decades of legal experience and is the Founder & CEO of\u00a0Law Quill<\/a>, a concierge legal marketing agency for law firms.\u00a0 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\u00a0LinkedIn<\/a>\u00a0or directly through email at\u00a0Annette@LawQuill.com\u00a0<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n The post Email Newsletters That Survive Apple\u2019s Privacy Changes<\/a> appeared first on Above the Law<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Email newsletters are at the core of many law firms\u2019 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\u2019s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) protocol has reduced the granularity of the \u201cfeedback\u201d data digital marketing teams […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-155866","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-above_the_law"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155866","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=155866"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155866\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=155866"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=155866"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=155866"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Why Do Law Firms Use Newsletters?<\/h2>\n
How Has Email Technology Shaped the Use of Marketing Newsletters for Law Firms?<\/h2>\n
Natural Fit<\/h3>\n
Competitive Advantage<\/h3>\n
How Have Apple Privacy Updates Changed Email Newsletter Effectiveness?<\/h2>\n
Understanding Apple\u2019s MPP<\/h2>\n
\n
What Can Law Firms Do To Improve Newsletter Effectiveness With Apple MPP<\/h2>\n
\n
Be Ready for AI<\/h2>\n
Consult the Experts<\/h2>\n
\nWhat Is a Newsletter? Refreshing the Basics<\/h2>\n
Why Do Law Firms Use Newsletters?<\/h2>\n
How Has Email Technology Shaped the Use of Marketing Newsletters for Law Firms?<\/h2>\n
Natural Fit<\/h3>\n
Competitive Advantage<\/h3>\n
How Have Apple Privacy Updates Changed Email Newsletter Effectiveness?<\/h2>\n
Understanding Apple\u2019s MPP<\/h2>\n
\n
What Can Law Firms Do To Improve Newsletter Effectiveness With Apple MPP<\/h2>\n
\n
Be Ready for AI<\/h2>\n
Consult the Experts<\/h2>\n
\n