Why Professional Service Firms Need Email Marketing

Why Professional Service Firms Need Email Marketing

Marketing is always a combination of messaging and frequency.

While the majority of Atomicdust’s projects are more focused on branding and web design, there’s a marketing channel we use that puts that philosophy into practice and is a great tool for professional service firms: email marketing.

Email marketing has been around a long time.

Email is 40 years old – as old as the internet itself – and it shows no signs of slowing down. Even with all the digital communication tools nowadays, like Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat, email is still the primary form of electronic communication for business. Even if you hate email (I have 325 unread messages in my inbox right now), there’s no getting away from it. Businesses and consumers alike rely on email.

Email marketing is cheap and simple.

For a business to start an email marketing campaign, the tools have never been better or more affordable. Campaign Monitor is a great service Atomicdust has used for nearly eight years now. These guys have an arsenal of easy, free tools for designing your own emails or importing your own custom creations. They handle every aspect of list management, including new subscribers and people that opt-out, and they’re priced fairly at $5 per campaign plus a penny per recipient. And they aren’t alone. Great companies like MailChimp and AWeber provide similar services with their own set of features.

Email marketing is measurable.

It sounds sneaky, but email is one platform that allows you to truly track and measure your users’ activities. You can see who opens your email and which links they clicked. With A/B testing, you can send multiple versions of your email to see which one your audience preferred.

For professional service firms, the average open rate on an email is around 25%, with the average click-thru rate at around 4%. That may not sound astronomical, but compare that to PPC ads, which typically yield about 1%-2%.

People stay on email lists for a very long time.

Most of us get a lot of emails that we don’t read. Emails can be annoying, but pressing delete is much easier than scrolling to the bottom, finding the unsubscribe link, waiting for the page to load, etc. That means you have a lot of opportunities to get it right if your audience doesn’t initially respond to your email strategy.

What kind of content should be in my emails?

We’re asked this question quite a lot. Professional service firms should deliver content that their audience finds helpful – content that helps them do their jobs better. No one really cares about topics that are self-serving to your firm (besides people in your firm). Your awards are great, but that alone won’t get people to tune in.

You should also use your website as a publishing platform for your brand. That means writing fresh content on a regular basis. Your marketing emails should provide a snippet of that content, and link back to the full article on your website.

And here’s a random side note we’ve learned producing email content over the years: emails with photos of people’s faces get more clicks than anything else.

The greatest reason professional services firms should be using email for marketing…

To put it simply, email marketing reminds people you exist. Most people that hire professional service companies don’t need to do so every day. Email marketing is a simple way to stay in front of potential clients and keep your firm on their radar for what is typically a very long sales cycle.