Marketing Automation for Law Firms
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What exactly Is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation is the practice of using software to automate certain marketing activities. Many tasks are repetitive and tedious, so automation makes it easier and more efficient to complete these tasks. Examples of tasks that can be automated include email campaigns, social media posting, and digital advertising. Marketing automation also allows for a more personalized experience for clients and prospects so they feel a greater connection between themselves and your products or services. The technology behind marketing automation makes mundane marketing tasks easier and more effective.
Imagine being able to have personalized conversations with hundreds of people at the same time, or sending birthday wishes to your clients - automatically. If designed correctly, marketing automation can deliver exponential growth of qualified leads for law firms like yours.
How We Use Automation to Make Legal Marketing More Efficient
Automation has extremely practical applications in many different areas of online marketing. Below are just three prominent examples of areas in which we use automation every day here at LaFleur:
- Paid Advertising - Automation can be used to adjust bids in real-time, scrub keyword lists, and help PPC professionals make informed decisions based on data rather than intuition.
- Social Media - Automation tools can disseminate social media posts based on a predetermined calendar, which allows social media specialists to focus their efforts on real-time responses and time-sensitive trending topics. Other tools will automatically populate social media posts when new content goes live on your website or aggregate data into easily digestible reports to analyze and improve performance.
- Data Collection and Lead Scoring - Marketing automation tools can collect data based on users’ behavior, manage your list of contacts, assign scores to different actions, and more. Then, you can follow up with the people who have been most active and not waste time and resources chasing after potential clients who aren’t engaged with your firm.
Automation has applications in many other contexts, from data aggregation to satisfaction surveys. But its potential involves much more than just making people more efficient and effective at their jobs. One of marketing automation’s most powerful applications is creating nuanced, personalized messaging.
Personalization: The Reason Marketing Automation Is Crucial for Your Law Firm’s Success
Personalized, targeted marketing messages have become the expectation rather than the exception. Marketing automation helps you increase your reach exponentially while retaining the personalization and attention that each of your contacts expects and deserves. At LaFleur, we have the tools available to provide an outstanding personalized experience for every potential client — starting with their very first interaction with your law firm.
We use marketing automation tools to build a huge database for your law firm that catalogues not just potential clients’ or customers’ contact information, but also their browsing behavior, demographic information, preferences, and much more. With this data, we can craft customized messages that truly resonate with the individual who is interested in your services and use automation to send those messages out to a limitless number of contacts.
Here’s How Marketing Automation Can Work for Your Law Firm
More and more of your potential clients are visiting your website long before they ever decide to call or email your office. These leads arrive in many ways: ads, organic search, your social media feed, word of mouth, and other methods.
While on your site, visitors can sign up for an offer (like receiving a free ebook, a bumper sticker, your paperback book, etc.). When a visitor fills out a custom-designed form to receive that offer, our marketing automation software captures the information they submit as well as their browsing history on your site. Immediately, the software sends them a personalized thank-you message.
From there, the possibilities for lead nurturing through marketing automation are virtually limitless.
Below are some of the key marketing automation systems and strategies that LaFleur can put in place for your law firm.
Email Marketing Automation
LaFleur can work with your firm to develop email campaigns centered around specific services, programs, and events.
For a potential client who shows interest in product liability, for example, we could send the materials they requested in an initial thank-you email. A week later, we could send an email about the statute of limitations. A week after that, we can send them an email about consumer rights. Next, we could send them the story of a case your firm handled particularly well. These messages will all be designed to establish trust and credibility, build a relationship between your firm and the potential client, and keep you at the forefront of their minds.
Additionally, every message we send addresses the person by name, is professionally designed to align with your brand, and can even appear to come directly from your personal inbox. We can send emails monthly, weekly, daily, or at any other interval. And once we create the emails for a campaign, you can use them repeatedly for any number of people who sign up.
By tracking browsing behavior (discussed further below), we can continually update and modify the email messaging sent to an individual as their preferences become clearer. For example, if that same potential client comes back to your site and visits several pages related to Takata airbag recalls, this action can trigger a follow-up email that talks specifically about those recalls, what the most recent developments are, and the prospective client’s rights as a consumer.
The content, messaging, design, and adaptability of automated emails can all be customized to perfectly suit your firm’s — and your potential clients’ — needs.
Tracking Your Potential Clients’ Website and Email Behavior
After capturing contact information from potential clients, our powerful software can track their browsing behavior on your site and even within their own inbox. Using customizable lead scoring parameters, we can update a potential client’s information to more accurately target their needs and interests and send them more relevant emails.
The powerful marketing automation tools that LaFleur has at our disposal also allow us to make your website display personalized messaging. This can lead the potential client to more relevant, useful information on your site. It can encourage them to take a specific action, like submitting the details of their situation for a case review. Or it can simply continue to build trust and cement their relationship with your firm.
Honing Messaging Based on Automation Analytics
Since the system tracks and logs engagement with campaigns, web pages, and individual emails, it becomes easy to determine which content is most effective and which content can be improved.
As more people engage with your site and your firm, we can collect and analyze more data so we can determine trends and help guide the customization of individual elements in your marketing automation strategy — like page structure, email messaging, design, lead scoring parameters, and more.
We can also apply these same tools and strategies to current and former clients to create positive, personal experiences that build trust, keep you in the minds of your client base, and maximize word-of-mouth referrals.
Saving You Time by Automating Follow-Up With Current and Former Clients
Marketing automation can also save you and your staff members time by handling follow-up with current and former clients. Rather than calling and emailing your clients repeatedly for information (or answering the same questions every time you get a new client on board), you can set up email automation tracks for things like:
- Answering frequently asked questions (FAQs) at the outset of your relationship with new clients
- Explaining the process of how a typical case unfolds
- Requesting updated information from clients at regular intervals
- Sending surveys to clients to see how you’re doing at important milestones in their case
- Asking for positive reviews — and providing step-by-step instructions about how to leave those reviews — on important platforms
If there is a task or communication that you spend time repeating, it can probably be automated to save you and your staff members time so you can focus on what matters most: working with your clients to resolve their legal issues.
Start Reaching More — and Better —Clients With LaFleur
Are you ready to get higher-quality leads, spend less time following up with your current clients, increase referrals from satisfied clients, and more? Call (888) 222-1512 or fill out our convenient contact form.
We’d love to discuss how marketing automation can help you achieve your business goals and then work with you to develop a customized strategy for your firm.
Not Ready to Talk With Someone Yet?
That’s okay! We have a lot of other resources related to marketing automation, analytics, and digital marketing. Check out a few of them below:
- Utilizing Marketing Automation for Your Law Office: A LaFleur Service Highlight
- Sowing the Seeds: Grow Your Law Firm’s Business With Marketing Automation
- Using Real User Data to Power Lead Nurturing for Your Law Firm
References
Hanington, J. (2014, January 13). 20 Incredible marketing automation stats. Salesforce. https://www.salesforce.com/blog/2014/01/20-marketing-automation-stats.html