Does creating your annual Christmas card email list give you a stinker of a headache?

Too soon to mention Christmas?

Far too late if you are organising a staff party, but not if you are planning your firm's central emailing to clients and contacts. Just.

Dread it each year?? ?

Lists all over the place?? ?

No idea where to find your best contacts?

You are not alone.

You have many options to sending out your firm's Christmas messages:

1. eMail - or - post?
2. Individually sent emails - or - sending a bulk email card to 1,000s?
3. Is it Christmas - or - a Season?

What to call Christmas

I’m in CRM, not PR, so I can’t answer that for you. I deal with the 'who to send it to' list element of Christmas. As far as I can see, just choose who you upset the least.

Do you call it Season’s Greetings and insult Christians, or call it Merry Christmas and worry about everyone else??

I recall the year Birmingham City Council called it Winterval…?

What I can say is that I'm more than happy to help with the joy of other religious celebrations. In fact, I quite enjoy hearing about different lives and beliefs. I've got a couple of ankle biters running around the house, so Christmas for me is Santa, Turkey and stockings, so to speak.

Post or email

The old joke about receiving three Christmas cards have died off, but surely your Partners will send a hand written card to their best few contacts anyway.

If lawyers can’t send a hand written card or email to their best contacts with a lovely little message in, we're all doomed.

Bulk email the rest.

Nobody sends 1,000 of individual emails, so let’s show you how to pull a mass mailing together, quickly, without much hideous admin burden.

Can Legal CRM systems solve your Christmas Card problem?

Any CRM will find ‘all contacts’ that haven't bounced or unsubscribed.

Just add all your mail-able contacts onto a list and then remove people you must remove.

Hey presto, done.

But you wouldn’t believe how some systems or internal processes make this really hard.

Better law firm CRMs can do this…

How about only sending it to your top clients, work introducers, prospects and anyone else important that you've forgotten about, or that you contact all the time, or those who click links in your mailshots, or book onto your events.

Maybe you call them ‘engaged contacts’. Probably not even 20% of your database if you're being honest.

If you can’t segment these engaged contacts within a couple of clicks, you’ve got the wrong CRM. Or very poor processes. Or you need to jump on some refresher training by your CRM supplier.

If you think this is rocket science, get in touch and it’ll be far easier next year.

Not all CRMs are created equal.

Bear that in mind when you are hunting for one.

Saying that, even if you own an under-performing CRM database and you can’t do that, you can bolt our CRM Outlook alerts in and you’ll be able to do it next year without much effort.

Fine-tuning your law firm's Christmas list

Carrying on... from this huge list of contacts, that's only taken a few mins to create… all you do is weed out people who you most definitely should not send your Christmas email to.

But will anyone really moan if they get it?

Doesn't calling at ‘Season’ mean you don’t have to bother with this step?

I’ve no idea. As I said, I'm not in PR. I’d be dreadful at it.

I don’t worry about receiving emails about the Festival of Lights. In fact, I quite enjoy helping others to celebrate. Maybe your contacts are the same?

But what happens if your firm has mailing lists all over the place?

This is a problem.

It’s mid November.

You are probably too late.

Unless you like stressing your colleagues with nice tight deadlines and Christmas arrived unexpectedly. Who’d have thought it, Christmas time already.

Next time, get all your data into a CRM over the August holidays, then laugh at the ease of sending next year’s Christmas eCard.

How to send a mass email if you have lists all over the place....

If all you need to do is send a mass email with a generic message, asap, try this

Take every single email you can find (just the email address, nothing else) from team lists, Partner lists, old event lists, mailshot lists, emails from your email spam filter (like Mimecast) and stick them in one giant excel spreadsheet. Remove none email characters like spaces etc. Then stick the emails in something like MailChimp.

DO NOT use the bcc field of your Outlook unless you want to get your firm's email domain blocked and your lawyers can't send a single email for months. Or the CC field - that's a GDPR red flag no doubt.        

Put your message in your email, and picture if you must, and then click send.

eMail tools will not send two emails to the same contact, so don’t worry about adding a contact four times.

See. Easy.

Have fun. Work should be fun....

Oh yes it should.

It’s behind you, and all that.

Get in touch if it’s time to solve your CRM headaches.

#legaltech #legalIT #legaltechnology #CRM #Christmas