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Believe it or not, the formatting of your legal website newsletter is almost as critical to your success as the content itself. These days, people receive such large volumes of email, that if your newsletter is not easy to read, people will just not bother trying. They will delete it and you will have lost your credibility.
Here are some guidelines that you should follow when formatting your law website newsletter:
Header/Footer
In every issue, you should include the name of the newsletter, the date or volume number, the issue title, and your contact information, including the law website address. Since this is quite a bit of information, it will look better if you split up between the header and footer, and include your contact information at the bottom.
Table of Contents
This organizes your legal website newsletter and lets the reader decide which particular articles or sections they are interested in reading without having to scroll through pages of information. This kind of organization will show your readers that you value their time … a gesture they will appreciate.
Teasers
Consider mentioning what will be covered in the next issue of your law website newsletter so that your readers will look forward to receiving it.
Use Dividers To Separate Sections of Your Law Website Newsletter
Some examples of section dividers for your law website newsletter might be:
Dots …………………………………………….
Underscores _________________________
Asterisks ***************************************
Dashes ------------------------------------------------
Equal Signs ========================
Make It Easy to Unsubscribe from Your Legal Website Newsletter
If you plan on distributing a legal website newsletter via e-mail or the Internet you must give your subscribers the option to unsubscribe on each and every newsletter you send out. If you do not, you will receive complaints from disgruntled subscribers that will cause you more of a headache than they are worth. Not to mention, it's the law.
There is no point in forcing someone to remain subscribed to your law website newsletter. The reality of it is if they want to unsubscribe they would probably never want to do business with you anyway! So always remember to include an “Unsubscribe” option at the bottom of every newsletter you send to your subscribers.
Side Note: All Attorney Café law websites automatically have the Unsubscribe feature in the newsletter section of the website by default.
Choose a Subject Line That Really Works
If you want your legal website newsletter to be a success, then it is critical that you keep your subject lines consistent. By keeping your subject line consistent, your subscribers will eventually recognize your newsletter just by reading it, thereby decreasing the chances of the newsletter being accidentally deleted as spam.
Every month when we send out our free “Marketing Tips” newsletter, we use the same subject line that reads:
Subject: August edition of the “Attorney Café Marketing Tips” newsletter is ready
The subject line is consistent in format every month so that once our subscribers have received their first couple of issues they automatically know what it is. If you just put “newsletter” in the subject line, your email will look unprofessional, and your subscribers may not even bother opening it since they have no idea who sent it or what it is about.
How Often Should You Send Out Your Legal Website Newsletter?
This point depends on how much content you have and how much time you have to put it together. If you do not have enough content or enough time to publish a legal website newsletter once a week, then do not publish it once a week! Instead, publish it once a month. Your subscribers would rather have a quality, well-written newsletter once a month than a poorly written newsletter full of rehashed information once a week.
Keep in mind though, if you have a ton of quality content every month, you are definitely better off splitting up your legal website newsletter into four shorter weekly editions and sending them out once a week instead of once a month. People are more likely to read a two-page newsletter once a week than read an eight-page newsletter once a month.
Choosing Length
As long as you are providing unique and quality content in an easy-to-read and easy-to-follow format, your law website newsletters can be up to 10 pages in length. Beyond 10 pages, you are going to start loosing readers unless your information is extremely captivating and of fantastic value. In this day and age people have less and less time to sit around and read, so the faster you can deliver the information the better. (Plus, don't forget that reading a 10-page email in an email client can seem like 100!)
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