Attorney Marketing Blog

Your legal marketing is incomplete without a customer relationship management (CRM) software. You are, without a doubt hindering the success of your law firm. A CRM is different than a case management software and should be used in conjunction.

A CRM creates systems for how your law firm interacts and builds relationships with past, current, or potential clients and referral sources.

While CRM’s have several dozen functions and features that can benefit your law firm, the three central money-making benefits are nurturing your list, follow-up automation, and monitoring marketing performance.

Not having a steady flow of clients is detrimental for a law firm and leaves a lawyer in a constant state of feast or famine. You may have had a busy and profitable month, but next month is uncertain, and you could barely scrape by. This state of life is not sustainable and creates an excessive level of stress, which affects your health and relationships. The real benefit of a CRM is that it gives you clarity on the flow of clients through your law firm, giving you peace of mind.

1) Build and Nurture Your List

Cultivating a list of potential, current, and past clients is vital in a law firm. This group of people, also known in business jargon as your “tribe,” can single-handedly create a law firm that thrives. I cannot stress enough that you should never stop building your list. You may have an email list well into the thousands and think that you have enough, but there is always room for more. The larger you authentically grow your tribe, the more the law firm’s revenue will increase. While having a CRM doesn’t magically compel people to give a law firm their contact information, it automatically applies the proper tags that you or your marketing director have created so that you know exactly how to many people are in your tribe.

Having a long list of names and addresses won’t amount to anything if you are never in contact with them. Beyond growing your list, you also need to nurture the list that you have built. By nurturing your tribe, you turn leads into clients and clients into referral sources. A CRM not only enables a law firm to mass email a list, but it also allows you to make a note of who is sending you high-quality referrals so that you can create a system to thank them.

2) Automate Your Follow-Up

How many potential clients call your law firm, request more information from your website, or filled out an intake form only to be put on an Excel spreadsheet with dozens of other forgotten names. Sure, most of those people get a response to their immediate inquiry, but then they never hear from the law firm again. Not continuously follow-up with leads is a fatal mistake.

Anyone who has enough interest to take time out of their day to contact your law firm should be followed up with until they convert. However, you cannot spend your entire day writing emails to people that may never hire you, which is why you need a CRM.

With a CRM, the emails become 100% automated. All you have to do is put in a little bit of elbow grease to write the emails. Only one day of work can last you years. Now, when a potential client fills out a form on your website, they are automatically emailed the information and placed on a follow-up sequence which significantly increased the chances of them hiring you as their attorney.

3) Monitor Success Metrics

Tracking leads and how long they are before becoming a client, you can predict the flow of your law firm 3, 6, 9 months in the future.

When your emails are automated and sent through a CRM, you are provided with an ample amount of data, such as open rate, click rate, bounce rate, opt-outs, and more. Once you gather enough data, you’ll have a better understanding of which subject lines and call-to-actions perform the best and can optimize your low performing emails, thereby increasing your overall conversions.

Let’s talk about tagging (sounds riveting, right?). While this may be the least “sexy” benefit of a CRM, it’s just as important as the other vital functions (and brings you just as much money). When you connect your CRM to your website and marketing campaigns, you’ll be able to track the number of new contacts from a specific location (website, Facebook, Google, etc.).

Tagging allows you to create umbrella tags that you can use to email your entire list to send out remarkable law firm related messages like moving, a holiday card, or your law firm’s weekly e-newsletter. Personal touches are made easy.

Great Legal Marketing Approved CRM’s

• Infusionsoft – The CRM used by both Great Legal Marketing and my law firm, BenGlassLaw. Infusionsoft is an all-in-one CRM that offers automation, customizable campaigns, and app integration.
• MailChimp – An integrated marketing automation platform for small businesses, focusing on email follow-up.

Ben Glass

Ben is a nationally recognized expert in attorney marketing and the owner of Great Legal Marketing.

Most attorneys start their firms assuming that being a really, really good attorney should, in and of itself, be a marketing advantage. Those attorneys believe that joining a whole bunch of committees and putting their name in lawyer directories is “marketing,” and they never bother to ask if there is a better way.

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