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Law firm marketing departments face a fundamental decision when deciding upon

which eMarketing platform to purchase for their operations. Do you host it in your

own shop or

do we hire a cloud base solution?

At Foley we built out our own eMarketing environment from Tikit. And Nanette will

discuss Sidley’s cloud approach using Vuture.

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At Foley our eMarketing tools, Tikit eMarketing Suite, is total in-house solution. We

have our own domain, Foley2.com, to keep marketing email traffic separate from

our main domain to prevent accidental blacklisting of our attorney’s business email

communications.

Building your own environment means you have to build everything. We have a

separate Internet connection, multiple servers, switches, security boxes, everything.

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Here’s a simplified view of the infrastructure. The three servers in the DMZ

comprise the Tikit eMarketing system, the EBF server that receives the job packages

from the users, ReAction Server a web server for form management, and an SMTP

email server to deliver the emails.

So why would any sane person take all of this on? Well let’s look at the pros and

cons of growing your own solution.

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After a high initial investment our annual costs are very low and fixed.

Cloud based solutions charge on a tiered pricing based on the volume of emails

processed. We process a high volume of emails but our costs are fixed and easy to

budget year to year.

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Having your own system provides you with a degree of flexibility for customization.

This benefit is not as clear-cut as it was a few years ago as the cloud based products

have improved greatly. But we have customized our email and forms templates,

mostly our forms templates, by inserting custom HTML to format. Part of this is to

match our creative services design standards and part of it is to provide enhanced

capabilities.

And we also leverage the platform for certain internal communications, such as for

retreat registration, CLE training announcements, and bounce back data

maintenance requests to attorneys.

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Within reason we control our destiny with regards to planned outages. Our IT

department works closely with us to schedule planned upgrades and other system

outages. And our line is our own and not shared so we can control the outbound

traffic scheduling and volume.

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It takes considerable effort to implement and maintain your own system. It‘s

complex, and when you include our CRM platform, our systems touch every major

application and technology groups.

Sometimes we feel like we’re Sisyphus pushing that boulder up the hill only to have

it roll back down. But it’s getting easier because we’ve gained valuable experience

over time, which leads us to skills…

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Building your own system requires that your team either has a set of technology

skills or has access to IT support folks with those skills. Specifically you need skills

with:

• HTML coding for customizing templates

• Networking troubleshooting

• Security support to protect your environment

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So what’s best for you, home grown or 3rd party? As usual, that depends on your

circumstances. Building your system in your environment may make sense if you

have:

1. The initial capital to invest in the infrastructure. Your fixed costs down the line

will be smaller but it does require an initial outlay of cash.

2. A large volume of emails where the variable cost of a cloud solution becomes

prohibitively expensive.

3. The skill sets or access to resources with the skill sets to create templates and

forms, as well as to maintain the system.

4. The staff to run it. Even if you have excellent support from your IT folks for the

infrastructure you still need feet on the ground in your department to create and

manage the output.

If you answered positively for all four, then perhaps building your own environment

is the path you should follow, And if you can’t say yes to all of these questions then

perhaps a cloud based solution is best for your organization.

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Many state bar associations regulate the electronic communications that can be sent to

clients and potential clients

Regulations vary from state to state

Usually concerns attorneys who work in a particular state, but may also apply to residents

within a state

Subject line: [topic] – ATTORNEY ADVERTISING

Basically concerned that attorneys don’t misrepresent themselves or the profession

Several states restrict the use of the words “expert” and “expertise”

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US legislation – enacted in 2003

Full name: Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing Act of 2003

Does not apply to attorney-client communications

Must maintain a suppression or opt-out list, and must be filtered against all mailings

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In the U.S., you don’t need to request permission before emailing the first time

But must include an opt-out “mechanism” – web link, email

The rest of the world is generally opt-in, meaning you must have a existing business

relationship prior to mailing, or the contact must request to receive your emials.

Requests can come from your web site, or in response to a snail mailing.

Double opt-in – the contact requests a subscription, and you email them to confirm. Until

they respond to your confirmation request, they are not subscribed.

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Data privacy is a growing concern

Other than the U.S., regulations may differ depending on whether the email address is a

business email (e.g., name@business.com) or a personal/home email (e.g.,

someone@aol.com)

Data protection goes hand-in-hand with data privacy. If you have someone’s personal

information, DO NOT SHARE with 3rd parties. If you are working with a vendor and need to

share contacts, get a signed non-disclosure agreement first.

If you are co-hosting, get the email template from your co-host and send to your own

contacts.

Generally, though, after a co-hosted event, any contacts who attended are considered to be

the “property” of all hosting parties.

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It’s movie night at home and you’re sitting on the couch with a bowl of popcorn

watching an old black-and-white movie, a love story.

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On the TV you see a middle-ages woman in a dress sweeping the porch, part of her

duties in taking care of her family, The friendly neighborhood postman enters the

scene and, walks up to the steps, and hands a bundle of letters to mom. She quickly

shuffles through them and sees a love letter addressed to her daughter from that

boy, Billy, from the bad side of town. Her normally pleasant smile quickly turns into

a scowl as she writes “Return To Sender” across the address and, rejecting delivery,

hands it back to the postman.

Across town the love sick boy gets a visit from the postman with a huge bagful of

rejected love letters; seems he’s been writing to ALL of the eligible girls in town. The

despondent young man stares at the pile of returns letters. He doesn't’ know why

they came back.

“Does Mary not want to read my letters?”

“Did Cindy even know I wrote to her?”

“Do I have Nancy’s correct address?”

“Should I just ignore these letters and write to everyone again?”

This love sick Romeo’s problems are the same one’s marketers address every day.

We send out thousands of love letters to clients and prospects and we get bagfulls

back each time as undeliverable, not knowing why the mail server, mom, rejected

our carefully crafted messages. Like Billy, we must process the returned messages

and determine our next steps.

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A bounce back email is when a receiving email server rejects your inbound message as

undeliverable and sends it back to the sender with a cryptic explanation as to the reason

for the rejection.

There are soft bounces, like when the recipient has gone on vacation and has turned on

their Out Of Office auto reply. We ignore these.

But hard bounces, rejections based on permanent problems, must be processed and

addresses.

Two of the most common hard bounces that can be addressed by marketers are typos in

the email address, and mail boxes that have been shut down because the contact no longer

works for that company, so the mail account has been shut down and the email address is

invalid.

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Bounce backs should not be ignored or they will build up and cause you massive

headaches. I know from experience as we let them get out of hand and paid the

price. There are three problems caused by excessive bounce backs.

First, The offending email addresses waste system resources when sending

invitations through your email server. Thousands of undeliverable emails get

processed with each and every send. We had one list with about 10,000 contacts

and 25% had bad email addresses that were bouncing. We have a governor on our

sends so our server sends one email per second. So 2,500 undeliverable email

addresses were taking 2 hours to process, preventing the deliverable messages

from reaching their audience in a timely fashion.

Second, inbound server security systems at your clients track excessive bounced

messages from same sending server and will blacklist as it mimics spammer

behavior.

Third, if you do get blacklisted it’s a resource intensive process to resolve. You have

to involve members of your IT department as well as try to get the cooperation of

the recipients organization’s IT department, and it’s not really a high priority for

them.

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So you can ignore bounce backs for a while but they will grow and grow until they

become a serious problem that you can no longer ignore. It’s a far better world you

live in if you manage your bounce backs from the start.

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Originally processing bounce backs was the marketing team’s responsibility; the

folks sending the e-vites and alerts were to monitor their inbox for replies and

bounces.

Epic Fail! Not only did they not process the bounced messages, but there was so

much garbage in their inbox that they weren’t processing regular replies, like, “Send

me more information,” “Please remove me from your list,” or “Have an attorney

contact me ASAP.”

So we decide we needed a new approach that would centralized bounce backs with

a semi-automated batch process

Each of our marketing teams has separate email accounts for their practices from

which all outbound email is sent. And the bounced emails end up back in their

custom accounts. We asked technology to create a new mail account for my team

and to move all of the messages from all of the 4-5 dozen marketing accounts in our

new account. When it was completed I was aghast to find out that there were over

a million messages in our inbox, the results of years of non-management.

It took us a while to work through a million messages but we did and set up a semi-

automated quarterly process to manage them going forward.

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First we have Exchange Rules set up for all of the marketing email accounts to forward hard

bounces to our returned mail account. Soft bounces are deleted and non-bounce

messages stay in the marketer’s accounts for review and follow up as needed.

Each quarter we run a script that exports the messages into a SQL table. Then SQL

procedures scroll through each message to parse out and extract key information from the

message body, the most important being the recipients email address.

The parsed data is then loaded into SQL table for import into our CRM application.

The most difficult part of this process was creating the code for parsing the message body.

I built the original formula in Excel using built in functions. Our DBA then took that

spreadsheet and build a SQL procedure to automate the process.

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There are actually two import processed.

First, each bounced email from the staging table is imported into our CRM as a bounced

email Activity record and includes the entire message body as reference. The contact’s ID is

found by cross-referencing the bounced email address.

Second, we sort the table by contact ID and those records with 3 or more bounces are

targeted for exclusion. Three things happen to excluded records.

The contact record is imported into the Bad Email Address folder

The offending email address is removed from contact’s record

The email added to an additional information field for archive reference

So at the end of the process all bounced emails are attached to the contact record that

generated them, and repeat offenders are isolated and stripped of the bad email address.

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Email Prevention refers to the step we take to make sure we are not resending to repeat

offenders. In the previous step we segregated the record into the Bad Email folder. But we

took no action with regards to the mailing lists they are on. If the contact was in ten lists

before the process, they’re still on those ten lists afterwards. But we don’t want to

continue sending emails to these contacts, as that will just generate even more bounce

back messages.

We prevent them from receiving future emails by leveraging a feature in E-Merge that

automatically skips records with no address. So in the previous step when we deleted the

address we were in fact protecting against sending more messages to a bad address.

If someone corrects the email address, E-Merge will automatically include them in the

broadcast going forward. And since we did not remove them from any marketing lists no

other action is required to restore their record.

Also, corrected addresses trigger a nightly process to remove the contact from the Bad

Address folder.

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After the quarterly batch process is complete, we generate an internal E-Merge message

from contacts in the Bad Email Address Folder but instead of sending it to the contacts it’s

sent to the attorneys who know the contact. This is a feature option in E-Merge.

The message contains and explanation why they are receiving the email and instructions on

how to correct the address in InterAction. The email explains that any records not

corrected will be deleted within 4 weeks. It includes a link to InterAction that lists their

contacts that are in the Bad Email Address folder. As they scroll through the list they can

see the offending address in a frame at the bottom, which is why we added that step

during the import process. It does us no good if the attorney adds the same bad address.

A few weeks later we resend a “Last Call” E-Merge to the attorneys as a final fair warning.

Once the deadline passes we delete the records, with a few exclusions, such alumni and a

few other segments we don’t want to lose. It’s important to note that this process does not

delete contacts from the attorneys’ Outlook contacts.

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We have reduced the amount of bounced messages we process to approximately 1,500

email messages each quarter. This translates into about 200-300 contacts. Several of our

larger lists saw a huge reduction in contact counts. Several lists were reduced by 25%.

We see dozens of attorney edits to email addresses after we send out the internal E-Merge

message. And after a year of employing this process we have had no complaints from

either the attorneys or the marketing teams.

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