Criminal Defense Marketing: Snail Mail vs. Digital Mail

Whether you’ve just started up your own criminal defense practice or you’re a seasoned criminal defense attorney, you’ve probably heard of a type of advertising for criminal defense attorneys called “Direct Mail” or “Jail Mail”. 

What is Jail Mail?

If you aren’t already familiar with Jail Mail, it’s a decades-old criminal defense marketing practice whereby attorneys obtain public arrest records that include the Name, Age, Charge, and Address of each person who’s arrested on a given day, then send each lead a criminal defense advertisement from their law firm. 

The Bad News:

Direct Mail Campaigns don’t work anymore. Perhaps 20 years ago, when public arrest records just started to become widely accessible, direct mail was an excellent way to reach prospective clients that most attorneys didn’t know about. 

Nowadays, a person charged with a DUI in a large county may receive anywhere from 15-30 letters in the mail from local attorneys. These odds don’t leave much room for you to obtain an ROI on the letters you may be sending, especially considering the high cost per-unit of direct mail campaigns. 

The Good News:

There’s a better way to perform marketing for criminal defense lawyers. Our software allows attorneys to automate digital solicitations to each person’s email and phone number within seconds of the arrest record being updated online. Here are 6 ways our criminal defense marketing software beats direct mail: 

• Time: Direct mail campaigns take several days to reach prospective clients, our emails and texts go out within hours of the arrest records being updated by the sheriff's department. 

• Privacy: Any criminal defense lawyer sending direct mail campaigns to notify family members of the arrested individual of that person’s arrest. This can be helpful when family members are on good terms. But when they aren’t–– arrestees can be pretty angry when their private information is released to the wrong family member. 

• Cost: Direct Mail Campaigns typically charge per unit of Jail Mail sent out, plus postage. Client Connect charges a flat subscription fee for each county you subscribe to. Any email or phone number we find for a person who’s been arrested is automatically shared with you, regardless for all criminal charges. 

• Saturation: Large counties like Los Angeles, California or Maricopa County, Arizona typically have at least 15-30 attorneys sending Jail Mail to a given arrestee. Highly sought after cases may receive even more. We cap the number of users who use our criminal defense marketing software in each given county to ensure that it remains valuable. We’d rather have a small number of happy users than a large number of angry ones. 

• Content: Client Connect enables you send legal advertisements in an automated yet personalized way. Each email you send to an arrested individual will automatically populate with that person’s Name & Charge–– leaving the impression that you chose to write your email just for them.

• Bonus! If you’re looking to maximize your criminal defense marketing reach, you can still use our data to send direct mail campaigns. We automatically store the addresses for each person arrested in each county we service so you don’t need to pay a 3rd party for that data. You can sort by charge to send direct mail to only the most valuable criminal defense cases, or send to all arrests.

Digital Legal Marketing for Criminal Defense Lawyers

Client Connect is the only criminal defense marketing solution to offer attorneys the digital effectiveness and automation of Google & Facebook ads combined with the affirmative approach of Jail Mail. Rather than wait for prospective clients to come to you, you get to reach out to them before the other lawyers in your area.

Not convinced yet? Get in touch with one of our sales associates to view a sample of the arrest data from your county and start designing your very first email campaign today. Setting up automated emails and texts to your county’s arrestees takes only one hour.