The Issue
One of the first marketing tools Jaffe used to promote itself was its “PR Tip of the Week,” a helpful weekly article on public relations strategy delivered via email to legal marketers, attorneys, law firm administrators and other industry decision-makers. As we built our subscriber database, this content proved to be a powerful means of demonstrating our expertise to prospects.
Although this tactic was successful and popular from the get-go, Jaffe eventually recognized the need to update the effort. The legal market had grown more competitive, creating several direct rivals to our informative weekly articles. What’s more, the emails lacked links that would strategically drive traffic to the Jaffe website, where subscribers could gain more information about our range of service offerings. Faced with this challenge, the Jaffe team planned the first of several total makeovers for its “PR Tip of the Week.”
The legal market had grown more competitive, creating several direct rivals to our informative weekly articles.
The Strategy
Jaffe completely redesigned the weekly email marketing template, rebranding it as “Newsstand” with a sleeker look and improved graphics. This first new iteration featured multiple articles and tips, accompanied by a visual graphic element for each item to bring attention to the content. In addition, rather than include the full article in every email, we incorporated teaser copy that would encourage readers to visit the Jaffe website, where a redesigned landing page encouraged them to delve deeper into the navigation and read entire articles.
Based on Newsstand’s popularity, the marketing team decided it was time to create a more streamlined layout and more strategic content strategy to align with current digital marketing best practices. Part of the new strategy was to shift articles away from the straightforward tips and blogs of Newsstand’s predecessors to more engaging and conversational articles incorporating current events and pop culture into legal marketing and PR strategy discussions. Today's Newsstand leads with a featured Trending article that often focuses on one of the week’s hottest trending topics, followed by three additional articles – Jaffe's original Tip of the Week and two blog posts that focus on issues in the legal marketplace.
Equipped with this fourfold increase in original content, our team committed to a companywide effort to increase Jaffe’s presence, following and shares across multiple social media platforms. Our marketing manager and digital strategists improved the quality of our subscriber database by carefully eliminating unused addresses and gathering new ones through a successful social media opt-in campaign. They also began using URL trackers in our email links, enabling Jaffe to use Google Analytics metrics to assess the popularity of every piece of content we created. With this data, our marketing team continues to fine-tune Newsstand’s content to ensure we are always delivering content that is relevant to our audience.
The articles shifted away from the straightforward tips to more engaging and conversational articles.
The Impact
The initial redesign of Jaffe’s email marketing program produced staggering results, including a 63-percent boost to online lead generation and a 78-percent increase in closed sales from those leads. Our website traffic increased by 25 percent in the first quarter after the redesign and, by six months, it was up 56 percent. Information requests via our website contact form have nearly doubled. Even after eliminating the unused addresses from our subscriber database, overall Newsstand subscriptions increased by 25 percent, while website visits from social media sources rose 87 percent.
Our second redesign continues to hold subscribers’ interest and steadily grows in readership, both in clicks and social media shares, proving we needed to invigorate our flagship marketing effort to continue its growth.
In addition to these impressive gains, the feedback we receive from Newsstand is more positive than ever. After all these years, our weekly dispatches continue to create invaluable brand awareness and good will for our agency while empowering legal marketers and lawyers with the information they need to succeed.