Legal Marketing

Sometimes Us Old Guys Are Right About Marketing -- This Is A ‘Great’ Marketing Tip

It is strongly in your interest to put together an email list -- even if it sounds a bit old-fashioned. 

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Okay, as you know, I am 60 years old.  Boy, I never thought that would ever happen, but here I am.

And as one gets older, one sees all these things happen to the world.  One of them is the expansion of the number of ways of contacting someone.  Long ago it was a letter, then by morse code, then by the old-fashioned phone, then….

But today it is out of control.  I only know a small portion of possible methods, but one could reach someone else by:

  • Email
  • Texting
  • Facebooking (apparently that is now a verb)
  • FaceTime
  • LinkedIn
  • Tweeting
  • Instagram
  • Snapchat

And a bunch more that seem to pop up every day, each more esoteric and techy than the last one.

I am not sure why someone who has his iPhone with him at all times and checks his email every 15 minutes to an hour-ish isn’t in pretty good contact with the world.  But this is not a rant about annoying contacting clutter.  This article is just to give you an extremely useful marketing tip as follows.

It is strongly in your interest to put together an email list.  Yes, email.  Email is utterly wonderful even if it now sounds a bit old-fashioned.

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I have created an email list over the years — for myself and for our law firm — and the list keeps growing, expanding into the thousands and even tens of thousands of persons in the real estate world (in which I practice).

We have been building this list religiously for a long time — and it has been extremely useful — however, validation recently occurred when I read an article the Wall Street Journal published only last week called “The Hot New Channel for Reaching Real People: Email.”  The article talks about how companies are slowly reverting back to email marketing and for good reason.

If you think about it, it is unlikely that anyone is scrolling through Facebook to find your marketing message.  On the other hand, they really don’t have that much of a choice but to see it when it ends up in their inbox with a tempting header.

So this is what you do:

  • Collect everyone you know in your industry and make an email list. Every time you meet anyone in your industry, add that person to the list.  Include friends, colleagues, people at work, etc.  Over-inclusive is better than under-inclusive.
  • The list will most likely start small and get larger and larger over time. This is ridiculously simple to do.
  • As the list grows, from time to time reach out to that list with whatever your message is, which, of course, should be about your Power Niche. A few cautionary notes are:
  • Don’t spam people — everyone hates that — and you just end up being deleted.
  • Don’t email people too often — but at the same time, don’t not email them with some reasonable regularity. There is no rule here except too much is bad and too little is bad too.
  • Think of the people you are emailing and make sure you are sending them messages and information of additive value — and over time, they will look forward to what you are sending.
  • And stay on message about your Power Niche. Indeed, just about all of your emails should be related to your Power Niche.

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Over time, you will be surprised — and even dramatically surprised — at what comes out of doing this.

Bruce_StachenfeldBruce Stachenfeld is the chairman of Duval & Stachenfeld LLP, an approximately 50-lawyer law firm based in midtown Manhattan with one of the largest real estate law practices in New York City.  The Firm is known as “The Pure Play in Real Estate Law” because all of its practice areas are focused around real estate. You can contact Bruce by email at thehedgehoglawyer@gmail.com. Bruce also writes The Real Estate Philosopher™, which contains applications of Bruce’s eclectic, insightful, and outside-the-box thinking to the real estate world. If you would like to read previous articles or subscribe, please click here.

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