Posts Tagged ‘leads’
Intuitive Navigation for Legal Experts
The design of your website can influence whether or not a client will choose you. One problem I often find is poor navigation. If someone has trouble or gets confused when searching through your website, they will likely leave your website and search for another legal expert. Think about when you go to a website and you can’t find what you are looking for… you leave. If you can’t find the information that you are looking for within the first 8 seconds, you are likely to leave that website and move on to the next site that appears in the search engine. You may have the more relevant content, but if the user can’t find it, then it doesn’t matter.
Intuitive navigation is important to create a lead. If you do a search for bankruptcy law firms in Dallas you come across the website for Dallas bankruptcy lawyer, Harriet Langston. The navigation for her website is intuitive and easy to use. She has a column on the left side with her core pages listed at the top and the areas of practice links listed underneath.
Having a good navigation isn’t hard to do. Before you design your website, think about the topics you want to discuss and what pages you need. Then arrange them into categories and subcategories. A quick way is to create index cards with each topic and create an outline. Decide on a few core Pages (Home, Practice Area, Our Firm, Contact Us, etc…) and work from there. Click here for more information about web standards for your website.
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.
Online Legal Leads – How to Keep Them
Part 2
In last week’s article, I wrote about what your online leads are looking for when they get to your legal website. Trusted information from a reliable source, consistency, and value will get you to keep them coming back for more information. I also wrote about using an email program such as Constant Contact or Outlook to correspond with the e-customers.
What kind of information should you provide? Of course, this depends on your area of practice. For example, these items could be summarized in a short email:
• A new law or an upcoming one;
• An update to a celebrated legal case;
• Tax planning tips;
• Benefits of a will and advanced directive;
• How the economy is affecting your area;
• Upcoming seminars;
• Holiday driver safety tips; and
• Statistics.
A good rule of thumb is to pretend you are the e-customer. What information would you want to read about? Bragging about a recent settlement you achieved, or the benefits of working only with your company, may just turn people off. You run the risk of an e-customer unsubscribing to your email letter campaign. If that should happen, it is acceptable to send them a short note acknowledging the unsubscribing and asking them if they wouldn’t mind telling you why. Some people may respond back that they no longer need the service or information you are providing, and some may say that your emails were getting annoying. If that happens, immediately reassess your campaign and put yourself back in the reader’s seat. A few unsubscribe are normal but if you see a large number, then your campaign needs some serious help.
If you find a campaign letter that people respond favorably to, go with it. Post it as an article on your website, or submit it to an online legal website. Make sure the content is your own, as well as any of the graphics that you use in the article. Some programs provide graphics to be used within the program. You can also download free graphics on the internet, or subscribe to a site that allows you to download graphics for a small monthly amount.
In any event, every six months or so read all your campaign letters and evaluate which direction you want to take your customers. Ask for what they want, ask them to pass you on to friends and family members, and then sit back and watch your database grow.
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.