Integrity Marketing

Law Firms Connecting with Clients via Email: What Works Today

Email marketing presents an opportunity to have a meaningful and effective dialogue with prospects, clients and colleagues and even your own family members and friends (yes, they need to be on your email list too.). Content needs to be relevant, giving your estate planning and Elder Law practice a chance to show off your knowledge and experience. But the emails, whether they are announcing a new partner at the firm or that it’s time to review their estate plan, have to look and function well.

Be careful when using templates. Last week we got an email from a professional firm (not an IMS client!) that opened with filler language from Constant Contact. Someone had neglected to remove it when they created the email blast. Is this firm as careless with their main business as they are with their email blasts? We’ve stayed on their mailing list just to see what kind of gaffes come next.

Use your own response data and examine it with an eye to the end goal. The decision about when to send out an email blast should be based on your own email data. Use information about general best practices as a guideline if you are just starting out, but if you have data, use it.

Then, go a step further: if you sent out an email that led to a smaller than usual number of people reading the email BUT a larger percentage called your office for an appointment, that’s your sweet spot. You always want more people to read your email blasts, but the ultimate goal is conversions to appointments.

Use design elements to reinforce your brand. If you don’t have a formal logo, a color palette, typeface that is part of your branding, you may want to talk with our design department (or submit a support ticket). Every message that comes from your firm needs to be consistent, and that includes the look and feel of your emails.

Incorporate auto responders in your email marketing campaigns. Automating as much of the dialogue as possible to engage email readers to build trust, establish or strengthen creditability and save your staff time. Don’t leave them hanging without follow-up, and don’t leave them out in the digital cold, where, in a matter of seconds, they can be swiftly enticed to another estate planning and Elder Law firm!

Optimizing Websites, Law Office Teams and Clients

An “erosion of demand for legal services” and “Decreasing demand for legal services,” were just two issues facing the legal profession described in Altman Weil’s “Law Firms in Transition Survey,” as reported by the ABA Journal last week. The survey of law firm leaders echoes many of the points that we discuss on a regular basis in this blog.

The problems are real, but there are solutions. That’s what we do.

We write a lot about the changes that estate planning and Elder Law firms need to make in order to stay profitable. Among those changes are investments in technology in all aspects of the firm, from websites integrated with automated intake to fully integrated document management and billing systems.

Law firms with a culture that embraces change and the use of technology in providing superior client service will be ones that not only survive, but flourish and grow. Will that be your law firm?

Through our own investment in leading technology, IMS clients have adopted the now mainstream use of lawyer videos. We took websites to another level with the addition of E2-CRM, a proprietary Client Relationship Management system that was designed for estate planning and Elder Law firms. More recently, we launched CLIP^SM to give law firms the ability to make the intake process automated and seamless.

All of these systems tie back to a website that engages your prospective clients with content that is relevant to their concerns—also known as their pain points. We know today that lawyer websites must connect to your clients in an emotional and intellectual manner, hence the successful impact of lawyer videos. They must also provide many different ways to interact with you, with invitations to connect strategically placed throughout the website.

Integrating your website with the E2-CRM will improve your law firm’s ability to transform prospects into clients and to respond swiftly when the firm is contacted. Remember that today’s legal services consumer expects to hear back from you fast—and the faster they hear from you, the more likely they will retain your services.

When follow up is quick and service levels are high, you are likely to transform your clients into raving fans. Client satisfaction leads to testimonials, in the form of videos or content that become part of your website. Raving fans who post positive reviews on sites like Avvo or Google present an opportunity to bring even more visitors to your website.

When it works together, staff isn’t bogged down in repetitive tasks, your clients experience a well-run practice and their intellect tells their emotions that they have made the right decision to entrust their estate planning to you.

What Is a CRM and How Does it Boost Your Law Firm Website’s Performance?

The concept is simple: the more client information you have in an accessible format, the better you can manage your relationships with law firm prospects and clients. IMS created the E2-CRM because we want to make your website as powerful as possible, grow your estate planning and Elder Law practice and boost profitability. Working without an E2-CRM is like flying without instruments. You can do it, but who knows where you’re going to land, or if you’ll land at all.

What is a CRM? Customer Relationship Management systems have been used by sales teams and professionals for decades to manage information but the idea of integrating the CRM with a website, Contact Us forms, and automated intake has brought all of these tools together to provide a remarkable data set that can put your law firm way ahead of competitors.

Here’s an example of what successful integration looks like:

A prospect searches for a local estate planning attorney and finds your website. The magic starts. If a CRM is in place, once that Contact Us form is in place, the data collection and integration process begins.

The information that they enter in the contact form starts the process of creating a client file in your E2-CRM. Their information is augmented by data that is drawn automatically by an AI program that populates as much of an internal form as possible. This is the custom development of the E2-CRM that we think is so important. You now know not only their name, email and phone number, but if the E2-CRM is set up for this, you’ll have data about where they live, income information, the price of their home and more. It all depends upon how your E2-CRM is set up.

What can you do with this? A lot. You’ll be able to learn if they live in a community where you have other clients. You might learn about a new area of town that you’ve never even considered for marketing. You’ll also know if they are a match with your ideal client profile and how much energy to expend in converting them from prospect to client. If the intake system is automated, a series of emails will go out to engage them with you and your form.

All of this happens automatically. How do you think that would impact your law firm profitability?

They say knowledge is power—it’s never been truer. If your estate planning law firm is not already using the E2-CRM, please call James at 877-352-2021 ext. 80. Our goal is your success –but you can’t do it without the right tools.

Are You Sending Website Visitors to Landing Pages that Matter?

You’d expect it has to have great content, but making a landing page sticky is a real art. Best practices for estate planning and Elder Law firms are creating a landing page that brings visitors who have specific interests to pages that are tailored to their own specific interests. After all, if your blog is all about using trusts for estate planning and you link to a page on your website, your visitor will expect to see more information about—guess what?—trusts. Sending visitors to your home page or an unrelated page will cause confusion and frustration.

Here are some other pointers to make your landing pages sticky:

Remember the goal: fill out a contact us form or pick up the phone to make an appointment. Make sure that your landing pages include a CTA: call to action. Decide what you want that action to be, and include several points in an obvious manner. If your page has more than one screen (below the “fold”), make sure there’s another CTA on the lower half of the page. Make it as easy as possible for visitors so they are not struggling to figure out where they can reach you.

Keep the content clear, use plain English, and make sure it’s useful. Remember that every page of content on your website serves a dual purpose: engaging human visitors and enticing Google bots. The content should emphasize whatever topic brought them to the page. Don’t use landing pages for general information about the firm. All information should be geared to move clients to interact with you.

Make sure the landing pages feature several ways for visitors to interact with you. One link at the top of the page to a contact us form just isn’t enough today. You’ll want to make it easy for visitors to become clients. That means incorporating our CLIP^SM system, so that you can easily lead them into engaging with an online, automated intake process.

Lawyer videos on landing pages? You bet! A lengthy page of text (especially if it’s in big blocks of text) may be fine for your colleagues, but the average website visitor is going to be put off by a wall of content. Instead, break up content into a series of smaller paragraphs with leading subheads and incorporate lawyer videos.

Landing pages need great visuals too. Graphics and images perform several functions on a landing page. If they are photos of people, they should be aspirational photos—happy seniors and families that reflect your client base at its best. If they are graphics, they should be aspirational also: what does the landscape of a happy retirement or happy elder years look like? That’s why you see many tropical scenes, sailboats and photos of national parks on estate planning law firms and financial advisor websites. Show your visitors the goal of your efforts: a safe, secure and well-planned life.

Drip Email Campaigns and Law Firm Marketing: How It Works

Drip email campaigns solve several marketing problems: staying in touch with potential estate planning and Elder Law clients over an extended period of time, reminding prospects of your knowledge and establishing credibility, building top of mind awareness and building name recognition.

The best part: the strategically planned drip email campaign gets created, scheduled and it’s done. You don’t have to think about it, unless you want to add to your campaign or change the message.

Drip campaigns are also known as life cycle emails, automated email and auto responders. They start with the basic premise that the person has reached out to you by filling out a contact us form or asked to subscribe to your email newsletter. They know who you are and have expressed some interest in you and/or your estate planning and Elder Law firm.

Using the data provided by the E2-CRM, you’ll be able to craft a campaign that will target the specific areas of concern for your ideal client. Let’s say all of your data shows that your client base, which we hope aligns with your ideal client profile, has concerns about how their retirement savings might be part of a charitable gifting strategy. Emails scheduled for the fall, when people start making plans for end-of-year contributions, will include messages about charitable gifting. That’s a very simple example.

Drip email campaigns can get more complex, especially with the use of the E2-CRM. If emails about a particular topic generates a higher than usual response rate, you’ll know that you’ve hit an area of concern. The campaign can be set up so that responses to a particular topic trigger a different set of emails than others will receive. This can reinforce your messages and expertise about a specific area, geared to prospects who are more likely to then take the next step and become clients.

A few practical tips:

Each email must stand on its own so that someone who has not read any of the prior emails will not be baffled by any of the information or insights in the content.

The emails need to be consistent in tone and they need to be client-friendly. If they are too technical, you may lose some readers.

Be informative and not promotional. Remember another goal is to alert readers to issues that they may not be aware of and to make sure they know that your office provides the solution to their pain points.

Remember that every email needs a call to action, which is either to begin your automated intake process or to pick up the phone and call for an appointment.

Don’t just write the emails every week and hope they hang together. Prepare them, or have them prepared, all at once in order to see how they work together. It’s like writing a symphony: writing it in bits and pieces won’t create a cohesive whole.

Making Email Marketing More Effective for Law Firms

Email campaigns can be a powerful tool in your estate planning law firm's marketing strategy, or they can be an example of putting a mediocre driver behind the wheel of a Ferrari. Without superior driving skills, the car can’t achieve maximum performance. Want to make your law firm’s email marketing campaigns roar like a champion? Here’s how:

Your own email list is golden. This was true for direct mail and it’s equally true for email campaigns. The people who already know you and have a relationship of some kind with you are more likely to take the time to read your emails, especially if they contain useful and timely information.

Don’t bother using a purchased email list. We can’t tell you how often we get calls from law firms who want to know if we purchase email lists. For IMS, this is an opportunity to educate callers about what works and what doesn’t in estate planning and Elder Law firm marketing. By the time we’re done speaking with them, they are usually talking with us about strategic planning and why they haven’t had success with other marketing endeavors. We are happy to put them on the right path, and if they become a client, so much the better.

You are also an educator. Email campaigns that are effective usually involve educating prospects and clients about estate planning and Elder Law issues. That’s what is expected from a professional. Those that feature news about involvement in community service are also more effective than ones that simply sing their praises.

Email campaigns are like successful networking efforts: the focus is not on you. What do your prospects and clients need to know about estate planning? That’s why they signed up for the email newsletter in the first place, and if they don’t unsubscribe, that’s what keeps them on your list. Focus on the issues that you know repeat on a regular basis and you’ll be answering questions, not selling services.

Obvious to you, not your clients. We just saw a parenting column based on top questions to Google on raising children–one of the top questions is how to burp a baby. How could anyone not know how to do that? If they are new mothers, they don’t. Same goes for people contemplating preparing their wills. They don’t know things that you do without thinking. That’s the topic. Don’t overload emails with complex information unless a)your client base is extremely sophisticated about estate planning topics or b) you are directing your emails to fellow attorneys.

Make it strategic and planned and keep it coming. Whether you pick a day of the week or a day of the month, be consistent. Plan out emails so they make sense over the course of six months or a year. Tie into seasonal themes, focus on important deadlines and make sure that the materials you are sending present a professional, polished estate planning practice.

Why Newsletters Still Produce Leads for Law Firms

We remember back to the time when law firm newsletters were delivered by fax. At the time, it was revolutionary. Today newsletters still play a significant role in estate planning and Elder Law firm marketing, whether they are hard copy or eNewsletters, because they work on several levels.

Demonstrate thought leadership. A law firm newsletter shows that you are up on the latest developments in estate planning and Elder Law. It also shows clients and prospects that you are watching out for them. Remember that a big obstacle for clients is deciding whether or not they can trust you. An attorney who makes the effort to stay out in front of news indicates a higher level of commitment to their clients.

Demonstrating authority and credibility. If you are on a committee, whether it’s the local bar or a respected national organization in estate planning or Elder Law, and you are involved in creating legislation or impacting public policy, your authority in the field takes a quantum leap above and beyond competing law firms.

For one thing, clients and prospects think you must really know your stuff if you are involved at that level. And let’s not overlook the “celebrity” appeal of working with the attorney who shows up in the newspapers, legal publications or even on legislative documents. We all like to feel like we have the inside track; having an attorney who is publically recognized for his or her work is like having Martha Stewart catering your dinner party.

Regular communications build loyalty. The key concept here is “regular.” If clients see an email from you once a year or twice a year, with no particular rhyme or reason for the arrival date of the newsletter, you are missing an opportunity. If your email newsletters arrive with timeliness—when Medicare enrollment opens, for instance—then you are providing a service. If your newsletter shows up around the time that they are thinking about making contributions to charity for the tax year, again, you’ve provided another useful service.

Overcome inertia. While estate planning is central to your activities, for most people it feels like a burdensome task. That's what your practice and every estate planning practice out there battles every day. To overcome the inertia of your prospects and clients, you have to be the one that starts the ball rolling. A newsletter is a way for you to provide good information and reminds readers that this is still an outstanding task, in a helpful and thoughtful manner.

Why Direct Mail Still Matters to Law Firm Marketing

Direct mail is alive and well, especially for estate planning and Elder Law firms. In certain regions, direct mail has never gone away. In others, the move to digital marketing has pushed direct mail out of the picture. But if everyone in your community has gone strictly digital, a hard copy newsletter or a personalized letter will really stand out.

Newsletters perform on a number of different levels. Newsletters help to establish you as a credible and authoritative source, by providing informative and intelligent discussions of issues concerning your target market. They also remind people that you exist. Yes, you have to remind them.

Estate planning is at the center of your day-to-day work world, but for clients, it’s a task, and not one that they particularly look forward to. You know from experience that most people would rather postpone their appointment. By sending a newsletter on a regular basis—quarterly works—you remind people of your existence.

See if this sounds familiar: your office means to send out a newsletter by direct mail to prospects and clients, but you get busy, and before you know it, one month has slipped away, and then another. When you finally do return to the task and the newsletter is sent out, clients and prospects call to say “I’ve been worried about this problem and your newsletter arrived just at the right time.” We hear about this happening more frequently than you’d expect.

Make it personal for more impact. Using the E2-CRM, your direct mail can be extremely personal. Group recipients by age, stage of life, family dynamics (if you are aware of any relevant issues) or zip code and create a letter that references that unifying factor.

Birthday cards are back, in a big way. Walk into any big retail store and you’ll find numerous aisles dedicated to greeting cards, some with microchips that play songs on opening or lots of glitter and feathers. If your office sends birthday cards, and we think it’s a nice touch, be mindful of bulk cards that look inexpensive—they’ll send the wrong message.

Condolence cards are part of the estate planning and Elder Law practice area. They are also the source of some gaffes. For one thing, don’t send an inexpensive card. If you purchase cards in bulk, buy quality. The card should be signed by hand by the attorney who worked with the individual or the couple. And in the “we can’t make this up” department – do not enclose a business card. It may seem like a very practical and helpful gesture, especially if this is the second spouse to pass and you’re not sure if the adult children know who you are. Develop a relationship with the adult children before their parents pass away.

Client Contact: More Options, Some Confusion

How you communicate didn’t used to be a decision. You either sent clients information by mail or called on the phone. Yes, you can give your clients amazing service when they can reach you and you can reach them 24/7. But because you can reach your client instantly, does that mean you should? At the same time, do you want clients to have immediate and direct access to you, 24/7?

Texting clients or having clients texting attorneys has become second nature for many practices, particularly if the client and the attorney have a good relationship. Texts and emails are notorious for communication snafus. What if a short text does not adequately express key information on which a decision needs to be made? Or if the attorney misunderstands the client’s text?

You know your clients best. You know which ones need to be managed more than others. The same holds true for managing your communication with clients.

In many instances, there are simply too many nuances for texting to be a suitable means of

communication. To protect yourself and your client, send a text indicating that you’d prefer to have a live conversation or that you will be in touch when you have fully reviewed pending materials.

Cell phone calls are different than calls you take while seated at your desk in your office. You want to provide clients with the best possible service, but there may be times when just because they can reach you does not mean it is the right time for you to have a detailed conversation. You’re on the ball field with your kid’s softball team? Maybe that’s not the time to dig into an issue on their estate. If you are not able to properly address the substance of their call, be prepared to tell them that.

Some attorneys use a work cell phone and a personal cell phone. That is a viable solution, in that you can provide a mobile phone number to clients so they have access to you, while preserving your privacy.

Another cell phone/texting issue: record keeping. Unlike emails or reports to a file, keeping records of your texts will require some additional effort. There are software programs that can save and print out text messages for record keeping and court purposes. If you go this route, test the program fully for compatibility and ease of use before deploying it throughout the office.

You could take screenshots of text messages, but if they are lengthy, that may end up being a bigger project than necessary.

Track your cell phone calls the same way you track calls from your office. Time and the substance of the conversation needs to be documented.

Last question: how are you tracking billing the time you spend texting clients? You are probably tracking your time on mobile phone conversations the same way that you are tracking landline conversations. But remember when you are texting, the time is not just the amount of time sending the text. You are likely stopping another task, refocusing your attention on the text, and then it takes time to refocus back on what you were doing before the text arrived. Respect your time and make sure to report it accordingly.