One thing I see a lot in email newsletters from lawyers (and others) is a cornucopia of requests and options.

“Click here, call now, share this link, sign up here, reply and let me know. . .” and the list goes on.

You know what usually happens when you do that?

Nothing.

Because when you give readers too many choices or too much to do, they usually shut down.

Nobody has time to do everything you ask them to do. They barely have time to read your entire email.

So, if you want a better response to your newsletter or a private email, ask for just one thing.

Every email should have an objective. If you want the reader to do something, ask specifically for that single action and nothing else.

Focus the reader on doing what you want them to do with a single call to action. You can ask for something else in your next email.

Which means your emails shouldn’t be “about” a multitude of your practice areas or offers. They should be about one problem and one solution.

If for some reason you must have multiple topics or calls to action within a single email, put them into separate paragraphs and use numbers or bullet points to demarcate them.

Just don’t expect as much response to any of your offers or calls to action.

It’s okay to include additional links in the footer of the email or in your signature, for social media sharing or to link to specific pages on your site, but don’t make your email topic or the call to action about that.

For best response to your next email, write about one subject and tell your readers the one thing you want them to do.

To learn more about writing effective emails, go here now.

The objective of every newsletter your write is to get your subscribers to do something.

To call for an appointment or to ask questions, to reply and give you their opinion, or to share something you wrote with people they know, just to name a few.

And, you have to convince readers to do that.

That’s why you write a newsletter, after all.

This doesn’t mean being pushy or sales-y or anything less than professional. On the contrary. Your professional demeanor is an important element in persuading readers to listen.

But you can’t be boring.

Too many lawyers see the function of their newsletter as a mechanism to deliver information. Information is valuable but it’s not everything.

And too much information is often. . . boring.

You need to talk to your readers.

You have to write copy that addresses their emotional needs in a relatable way.

You want to come across as authoritative, trustworthy and likable. Someone who understands what your readers want and how they think.

And, once you’ve done that, you want to tell them what to do next.

Before you send your next issue, read it out loud and ask yourself how it sounds. If a lawyer sent this to you, what would you think about them?

If you want to see how to do it right, head over to this page

Some lawyers’ email newsletters are too long. They cram too much information into each “issue”.

This is especially true of newsletters that are published infrequently.

You can see the logic. If you publish once a month, you’ve got a lot more to say than if you publish daily. But only the stalwart reads these tomes.

Most people don’t.

They may skim them, to see if anything catches their eye, but when there’s nothing but lengthy discussions about the law and documents and procedure, eyes glaze over and your reader is not long for this world.

Do this consistently and they won’t even open your email.

The solution is simple. In addition to being shorter–something that can be read in a minute or two–your newsletter needs to have some “human interest”.

You’ve got to talk about people.

Your clients. Litigants in cases you’ve read about. People in your community or in your client’s niche market.

Your office staff, your family, your neighbors, and yourself.

It’s not difficult to do. Just uncommon. But if you want people to read what you write, which is kind of the point, you’ve got to give them what they want, and they want to read about people.

Something else. When you write about the law or the news, don’t “brief” them, tell them what you think about it.

Because people want to know what you think.

Because that’s how they get to know you, which is the first step towards building a relationship with you and hiring you or sending you traffic and referrals.

If you want to know how to write a newsletter people want to read, without breaking a sweat, check out my email marketing course.

David Gaughran is an author and I’m on his email list. His latest newsletter issues a warning to those of us who write a newsletter, and those who want to.

He tells how he made a pact with his readers, telling them that if they signed up for his list, he would promise not to email them until he had a new book coming out.

“I thought I being considerate. I thought it would attract more people to my list. . . I thought most readers wouldn’t really care to hear from me in-between releases, and that I’d run out of things to say. . . I was wrong–so very, very wrong.”

What happened?

“People forgot who I was. Open rates fell. . . fewer and fewer were clicking and less again were buying. Reviews were dropping. Sales were increasingly tepid. It was a cascading clusterfudge of exponential fail.”

Emailing your list occasionally, e.g, only when you have an announcement or something “important” to say, is not the way to build a responsive list.

What is a responsive list?

A list that looks forward to hearing from you and reading what you write.

A list that comes to know, like, and trust you because of what you write, and then hires you or re-hires you.

A list of people who may never need your services (or need them again) but know people who do and refer them to you.

A list of people who tell others about your events, your videos, your articles, and your newsletter, and thus help you build your list.

Not a list of people who forget who you are or that they signed up on your list.

Gaughran has seen the error of his ways and is changing his approach. If your list isn’t responsive, or isn’t as responsive as you’d like, you might do the same.

It’s not difficult. Write something your list wants to read and send it to them often.

If you’d like to learn how to do that effectively, and why it’s a lot easier than you might think, head on over to this page to learn more.