Legal Marketing phloxii/Shutterstock.com.

 

Law firms are constantly fighting the uphill battle to fill their lead pipeline and bring on new clients. In an extremely competitive industry, law firms face a difficult challenge. Most firms procure large marketing budgets to separate themselves in the marketplace and drive more traffic to their site, but there is still seemingly a disconnect. Tactics are employed from SEO to PPC and social media advertising to help bring in more leads to firm.

Everything from a marketing perspective could be done right, but at the end of the day leads are not progressing into clients. Let's explore why this might be and what can be done about the problem at hand.

Streamline Your Intake Process

The intake process is essential to the start of any lawyer-client relationship. Your first impression must be representative of your firm to ensure credibility and trust from the onset. This is the time to move leads from prospect to customer. The best way to ensure this process goes smoothly is to be as organized as possible. Regardless of the size of your firm, a well-structured intake process can be a major driver of the bottom line.

Being disorganized can lend to a lack of conversions and potential clients jumping ship to your competitors. Customer experience is one of the biggest indicators of a successful relationship, so you must be sure to have a system in place to efficiently intake prospects. Automating your process can also cut down on error and keep your team running smoothly. Online forms are a great way to streamline your operations and cut out unnecessary time spent on data entry.

Leverage Today's Customer Experience Tools

As mentioned before, your first impression is vital in converting a lead. On average 35% of phone calls from prospective legal clients go unanswered. Whether it is sending a lead to voicemail or not responding to a website or social media inquiry, your potential clients will jump ship if their needs aren't met. The early bird gets the worm, and if you are unable to give them the information they require, your competitor could be the beneficiary. Just because your staff is small, doesn't mean that providing a quality client experience is out of the question.

With CX tools like chatbots, live answering services and virtual assistants, law firms are able to capitalize on the leads their marketing efforts are generating. Legal teams are not often able to respond right away to every inquiry they are often meeting with clients or event at trial. Yet, data shows that firms who made contact with leads within the first five minutes after a query were 21 times more likely to convert the lead.

With these customer experience tools, you can automatically ensure your leads will not be met with radio silence. The ability to build custom scripts can add a level of personalization to their interaction and hearing a live voice on the other end of the line can resonate with those in need of legal services. This builds trust in the client relationship and starts the process off on the right foot.

Pre-Qualify Your Leads

An added benefit of many customer experience tools is the ability to pre-qualify leads to save your team time and streamline your sales funnel. If your marketing efforts are working right, you should have an influx of calls, emails or website queries. However, not all of these leads are the right fit for your firm, so it is best to vet them at the start of the process, rather than later down the line. This saves everyone time and allows you to focus further on the leads that can make a difference for your firm.

Live answering services can help to filter out unwanted or irrelevant calls and only pass on the leads that match your given criteria. Chatbots and virtual assistants serve as a gatekeeper to keep spam or not ideal clients out of your pipeline. You can gauge more information up front to expedite the intake process and ensure a seamless transition from lead to client.

Lead management is a critical piece to scaling your law firm. To receive the best ROI on your marketing budget you must look to streamline your procedures to save your team time, and engage with prospects at a more efficient rate. Otherwise, you are throwing away your marketing budget, and likely exhausting your team with unnecessary work chasing down potential clients. By working smarter not harder, your firm can look to increase conversions and see sustainable business growth.

 

Jay Reeder is the Founder and CEO of VoiceNation. With over 28 years in telecommunications, Jay Reeder built his career by creating innovative solutions to real-world challenges. He began crafting voicemail systems in high school, which led to his first "real" summer job at a telecommunications company called SDI. In 2002 he founded revolutionary live answering call center VoiceNation. Jay is innovative, forward-thinking and a leader who inspires, encourages and offers opportunities to make the world a better place.