With all the current marketing focus on content marketing and social media, email marketing is sometimes relegated to Rodney Dangerfield status -- it gets no respect.  Yet study after study continues to show that email marketing continues to rank as the top method for businesses to get qualified leads, so full attention should be paid to making email marketing pay off for your firm.

One of the main questions I routinely get asked from attorneys about email marketing is how to build a good list.  This is no “one and done” proposition -- you should always be gathering email addresses and refining your list so your prospects are truly those who are qualified to purchase from you.

Here are 5 tips for growing your email marketing list:

Provide valuable content.  I have written ad nauseum about the importance of offering visitors to your website or your blog free reports or case studies that they can download for free in exchange for giving you an email address.  Valuable downloads will do more than just about anything to add good names to your list.

Easy does it.  Too often, important calls-to-action are buried at the end of a newsletter or in an inconspicuous place on a website, making it more difficult for readers to find and respond.  Don’t turn your prospects into pigs hunting a truffle -- make it easy for them to find your offer!

Try, try again.  If your calls-to-action or offers are not getting the response you expect, try spelling it out for them so they know what they’re getting.  If that doesn’t work, then try something different because whatever you are offering is clearly not finding a great reception in the marketplace. 

Spread the love.  Promote your content and offers on all your social media networks and be sure to share with your LinkedIn groups as well. 

Scour the statistics.  If you have a monthly e-newsletter (if you don’t, you should!), be sure you scour the statistics for any revealing information that can point to why you might not be getting the results you want.  Even the color you use for your call-to-action button can yield a much different result, so test different schemes.  Be sure you are also checking your website statistics as well so you can beef up those underperforming pages.