Archive for the ‘Lead Capture’ Category
How to Convert Legal Assistance Calls to Loyal Paying Customers
Legal marketing budget can run into several thousand dollars a month. This may include everything from tv ads, direct mail, email marketing, PPC, SEO, advertisements in local publications, seminars, yellow pages, directories or other kinds of online and offline media. When your firm’s phone starts ringing as a result of your marketing efforts, you are ecstatic and consider your marketing investment to be money well spent.
But is it really?
Not until you master the art of turning those phone calls into money in your pocket. Unfortunately, many of you are losing a whole lot of coin because you are investing in marketing without making the same investment in conversion.
Fortunately, converting leads into clients won’t cost you much more money than you are already spending to attract those leads, but it does require an upfront investment of your time and energy. Best yet, once you get it down, your lead to client conversion process can run without your involvement. The place to start is to get a crystal clear understanding of where you are right now. Here’s what you’ll want to do:
1. Over the next month, make a commitment to collect the metrics data you would need to track your numbers.
2. Have whoever answers your phones log every phone call.
3. Require that all inquiries be recorded on a prospect intake form, which captures how the person heard of you, all of their contact information, specifics about their situation and whether they made an appointment.
4. Use a spreadsheet to track how many actually made it in for their appointment and finally how many of those callers became paying clients after meeting with you or the other attorneys of your firm.
Each week, sit down with your team and review your lead to prospect conversion number (this is the number of phone calls you received that turned into appointments) and your prospect to client conversion number (this is the number of appointments made that turned into clients). If these numbers are not both at least 75%, don’t spend any more marketing dollars until you fix your client engagement problem because otherwise you are pouring money down the drain. There is NO POINT in spending money on marketing if you are not doing as well as you can to convert your prospects into paying clients once they pick up the phone to call your office.
Here are a few diagnostic clues to find the “leak” where your prospects may be getting away during the client engagement process:
- Your phone is not being answered in the correct way
- There is no system to follow up with prospects who want more information
- There is no system to follow up with prospects in the time period between when they make an appointment and come in to your office for their appointment
- You are not following a script during your client engagement meeting
Well begun is half done! Make a good start by collecting hard numbers on what’s actually happening in your office so you’ll be ready for the fixes as they are presented and understand which fix you need to focus on. You may be quite surprised by what you discover once you begin collecting your numbers.
We can take for example the NJ criminal defense lawyers of Benedict & Altman who have started focusing on optimizing their website to convert more leads into customers. With a site that includes several calls to action for visitors to email and phone the firm, they are set-up to win in terms of gathering leads. Now, they just need to follow the steps above to convert those leads into customers.
Managing your Law Firm Web Contacts for Legal Marketing
What do I do with my web contacts?
Part I – How to Keep a Lead
Every legal website should have a web form where a viewer can submit information such as name, address, email address, phone number, and a question or request for the site owner. How can you separate the window shoppers from future clients? The answer is to give them what they want – trusted information.
I have met many clients who utilize a contact web form for online leads, but they don’t know what to do with the lead after they get it. When the customer fills out the form, someone should follow-up on the request by either a phone call if the number is valid, or an email. Let’s say for argument’s sake the phone number is invalid but the email address is not. Does that mean it’s a dead lead? No, it does not mean it’s a dead lead. It just means the user felt obligated to fill something in the field but doesn’t want you to call him or her.
You should take your leads, as well as other client email addresses, and sort them into a database. Some firms use Outlook, or the popular program Constant Contact. With the Constant Contact program, you can see who is reading your campaign letters or newsletters, who considers you spam, who has unsubscribed, and who has forwarded you to a friend. The program is very inexpensive and has a free trial. It doesn’t take you long to get up and running, and the choices of newsletter and graphic designs are quite extensive.
If you provide quality information without a sales pitch, the client will remain with you for quite some time. Your law firm becomes a trusted authority for legal advice and questions. When it is time for them to call an attorney, you should be the first person they think of. This eliminates the competition you may encounter when clients meet with more than one law firm for that free initial consultation.
Lead Capture
Leads – Getting Them and Keeping Them
Some law firms complain that they feel their internet marketing efforts or website hasn’t been effective in connecting them with new clients. Good technique and optimizing your site and content for search engine result ranking certainly plays a part in this, but another simple and often overlooked concept is that of lead capture.
Lead capture allows your visitors to directly share their information with you, sign up for a newsletter, or request more information about your firm via a form on your website. Once this information is received by your firm or external marketing team, you can have a message automatically sent directly to that potential client as a follow-up.
Lead Capture is the Next Logical Step
Your website can be functional and aesthetically pleasing, but without a way for your clients to give you their contact information, you are missing out on a huge source of new leads. You’ve probably invested a great amount of time and money in putting up a website that looks great and functions as a good local law resource, but you have to take the next step to really reap the benefits.
Having a form available for clients to fill-in with their contact details puts you directly in-touch with your audience. Following up on form leads automatically puts you in contact with the client in the timeliest fashion possible. You can provide them with relevant, current information about your firm or provide law information in a newsletter format.
Hard Leads vs. Soft Leads
The downside of hard lead practices is that it requires a user to sign into your website to access certain content or use certain features; this can be a turn-off for some visitors – however, if your content is up-to-scratch, some worthwhile leads will be willing to register. Soft leads are more beneficial and less risky; they offer your visitors the option to sign-up for an information service, such as a newsletter, or provide their contact information for a follow-up from you. Your leads will view this as a friendlier way of requesting their semi-private contact information and will be more likely to be keen to provide it.