Review of Vertical Response for Law Firm Email Marketing

by Victoria BluteNov 16, 2015

In my last post about email marketing, I reviewed Campaigner, a marketing automation software that is both well-priced and well-rounded in terms of its offerings for law firms. It’s a software lawyers may want to use to improve their email marketing and decrease the time they spend on email-related activities.

Today, I’ll look at Vertical Response, an award-winning, San Francisco-based email marketing software that has several features of interest for law firms. To keep up with all the reviews in this series, you can visit our Email Marketing Series for Lawyers page.

Vertical Response’s Main Features

Responsive design templates: Vertical Response offers users about 100 professionally designed templates to choose from. They also give you the option to create your own email templates with their drag-and-drop feature, or for those with more tech experience, to build templates with an HTML editor. This company also provides users with customized call to action buttons. Vertical Response notes that more than half of people open their emails via mobile phone — and that many subscribers won’t read an email if it’s frustrating to access. As a result, this software gives its users responsive design email templates. Emails that utilize responsive design allow subscribers to read your messages no matter what device they’re accessing their email them from.

Autoresponders: This tool gives firms the ability to send automatic welcome emails to subscribers who have signed up for newsletters. A welcome email can help personalize your subscribers’ experience and keep them interested in your law firm’s content.

Email Scheduling: Vertical Response allows users to schedule emails, which means they can send emails and social media posts at the time of their choosing (whether that’s immediately or sending messages later). This tool makes it easy for law firms to send subscriber emails when it’s convenient, which may help them save time on email-related tasks.

Contact Management: For those who have a habit of keeping email contacts in a number of locations — or just haven’t found a better way to organize them — Vertical Response users can easily upload and add contacts to this software to keep email addresses neatly arranged. Vertical Response has a search option that allows users to find, manage and update individual contacts as well as create segmented email lists.

Email Delivery Tools: When you write great content, you want to be sure that it reaches the inboxes of your subscribers. Vertical Response has a feature that helps get emails to readers (and not their spam folder), as well as offering follow-up emails for users who may want to re-send newsletters to those who didn’t open or read them the first time.

Vertical Response’s Pricing Structure

Vertical Response is among the most competitively priced software we’ve looked at — particularly because, up to 1,000 subscribers, it’s free. On the free plan, law firms are able to send up to 4,000 emails a month to up to 1,000 subscribers. Additionally, law firms will benefit from the ability to connect their Facebook and Twitter account to this software.

While its free features –and perhaps even the paid features — are not as robust as some of the other software I’ve looked at, Vertical Response’s tools are still enough to get law firms started with email marketing. Here’s a screenshot of their pricing and features.

Vertical Response Pricing

Advantages for Law Firm Email Marketing

Much like Drip, Vertical Response gives its users several effective email marketing tools on a clean, easy-to-use interface. Users will find Vertical Response has a straightforward approach. There aren’t many bells and whistles, but this software has the sort of tools to get the job done. Here’s an example of what their home screen looks like:

Vertical Response has a handful of features that will interest law firms, particularly ones such as email scheduling, email list segmentation, and autoresponders. Email scheduling may free up time by arranging, in advance, when emails will be sent; email list segmentation can help create tailored and customized content for your subscribers; autoresponders can help new subscribers feel both welcomed and informed when they join your email list.

The feature that distinguishes Vertical Response from some of the other software I’ve looked at is that Vertical Response is free up to 1,000 subscribers — signing up gives users access to most of the software’s available features. Vertical Response’s free plan may be of interest to law firms that need very few tools for their email marketing and don’t plan on sending many monthly emails. While this software’s free features may meet the needs of some law firms, others may want to look into their paid options, which gives law firms other tools they may require to enhance their email marketing.

Vertical Response’s Potential Drawbacks For Law Offices

Depending upon the needs of your law firm, Vertical Response’s lack of bells and whistles could be an advantage or disadvantage. On the disadvantage side, one drawback of this software might be the lack of template selection. While other software such as MailChimp or Campaigner offers users hundreds of templates to choose from, Vertical Response offers its users roughly a hundred — and many of those templates may not be appropriate for law firm use. However, Vertical Response also gives users the ability to make their own drag-and-drop email templates. I recently tested this drag-and-drop feature to create a template and find it extremely easy to use. Additionally, in Vertical Response’s paid plans, law firms can get an email template featuring their company logo.

Vertical Response’s autoresponder welcome emails are only temporarily available in their free features plan, which means law firms may want to upgrade to a paid plan if they intend to use this service regularly.

While A/B testing can be an important part of law firm email marketing strategies, Vertical Response does not seem to mention anything up front about split testing in either in their free or paid features. I was, however, able to find a blog post by Vertical Response that details how to do split testing via their list segmentation tool. (I’ve reached out to Vertical Response for specifics on this issue and will update this blog post as this information becomes available to me.)

Summary of Vertical Response for Law Firms

In general, Vertical Response is a software that provides law firms with the basic tools — at a competitive price — to get started with email marketing.