Integrity Marketing

Email Campaigns That Generate Conversions

What makes one email campaign a soaring success, while the other sinks like a lead balloon? Two things: Content and Call to Action. The content has to be something that hits a nerve to estate planning prospects who are getting your emails. There also has to be an “ask”—a request that the recipient do something. Together, strong content and a persuasive Call to Action (CTA) can ramp up your email marketing campaigns so they deliver.

Let’s start with content. If there’s one thing you know as an estate planning attorney, people love to procrastinate about having their estate plans done. In some strange way, they do believe that not having a will might protect them from the inevitable. Or they’d just rather not think about dying and their own mortality. That’s a BIG obstacle to overcome, but you do it—and we do it too—every day. How?

First, make sure that your content has an element of time. Some of it arises naturally. The end of the year is a busy time for some estate planning practices, especially when big tax law changes are coming in the next calendar year. If many seniors in your community are snow birds and leave town in the winter, encourage them to get their wills up-to-date before they leave town. If you want to move readers to action, you have to create a sense of urgency. You want the recipient to feel like they must respond and they need to come see you to resolve a problem before it is too late.

Once you’ve told them why they need to act, the next step is to tell them what to do.

Any kind of digital communication that does not have a Call to Action, also known as CTA, is like a sales pitch that never asks for the sale. You’d be surprised at how many digital messages we see that never get around to asking us to do anything. For estate planning and Elder Law attorneys, the ask is pretty simple. You want visitors to fill out a contact us form, pick up the phone or send you comments.

An old saying—“Those who don’t ask, don’t get.”

One final point: we train our email recipients how to respond to us, just as we train our employees. If you send out one email a year, don’t expect too much to take place. But if you are sending out a monthly email blast with content that raises relevant issues and you ask your recipients to respond in a timely manner, sooner or later the content of your email is going to be read by someone who is facing the exact issue in your content. And if you ask them, nicely and repeatedly, they will respond!

Lawyer Videos Pack a Punch for Estate Planning Law Firms

Legal services marketing seeks to engage prospects when they are most apt to select an attorney or a law firm to solve a problem. For the estate planning law firm, it is usually when individuals and families have already taken a few steps along the client journey. They realize there is a problem, have identified the solution and have begun looking for an attorney or a law firm who can help solve the problem.

That search for a solution might be immediate—going online and scanning a number of estate planning and Elder Law firm websites, filling out forms and passively waiting to see who responds—or it may be a slow process—talking with friends and family members, scanning the local newspapers, leisurely looking at law firm websites and speaking with other trusted professionals, like a CPA or financial advisor.

How do you get to be the one they choose, whether they are on the fast track to retain or have time to spare? Today, you need to assertively engage the legal consumer with a variety of tools and techniques. We have seen the success of lawyer videos in helping practices stand out from others in their marketplace. It’s a powerful way to deliver a personal message.

Engaging with prospects is not easy. The field of messages is quite crowded, and online is not the only media clamoring for their attention. Most communities have at least one weekly or monthly publication geared to seniors. There are advertisements in most local daily newspapers for workshops and dinner seminars from other estate planning law firms, some more aggressive than others. There are attorneys who seem to be everywhere, attending community events, serving on highly visible not-for-profits and being quoted as sources in the news.

The professionally produced lawyer videos that IMS creates for our clients does more than inspire prospects. A call to action (CTA) is built into every video that we produce. The beautiful drone footage that we incorporate into the videos, the compelling personal stories of the estate planning attorneys and the clearly defined messages are accompanied by a very clear bit of direction: call us today. The message is not crass nor is it overly repeated. We’re more subtle than that. But we also know that clients who are watching your video, drawn into your narrative and hearing your targeted messages are at a perfect place to take the next step: contacting your firm for an appointment. If you don’t have a lawyer video on your website, call James at 877-352-2021 ext. 80 and learn how video can boost your firm’s engagement.

Now Appearing, Live and In Person: You!

While there may be some areas where lawyers can be chained to their desks, estate planning and Elder Law practices are not like that. Your practice is deeply personal, and your clients want to know who you are, which is why lawyer videos are so important to your websites. But what about maintaining long-term relationships with clients who have met you once or maybe twice in the last decade?

Make sure your clients don’t forget you by meeting them face-to-face in live settings on a regular basis. How do you make that happen?

Client Appreciation Events–Target your event to your client base. Are they all snowbirds who head south for the winter? If so, plan an event for when they return in the springtime. If your clients spend their summer weekends at the lake house, then don’t plan an event for a Friday night. How to find out what your client base is up to? Take a survey, using your E2-CRM. Once you have an idea of when your event will attract the most people, come up with something clever and unexpected. Another night at a restaurant might not appeal to clients who would go there anyway. But a night with a well-known local chef giving a cooking lesson could be a winner. Two extra notes: make it an annual event and tie in with a local not-for-profit.

Maintenance programs are good for your clients and good for you. If you only meet with a client once when they are forty and then never see them again, chances are good that their estate plan is going to be out of date when their family reads the will. That’s why some practices institute a maintenance program to ensure that clients return on a regular basis. Their legal documents don’t go stale, and neither does your relationship.

If they add value, workshops can work. Legal consumers are more sophisticated than they were ten or twenty years ago, so you can’t expect to do a “same old” workshop and draw people who are looking for a free lunch (or breakfast pastries). If your market is saturated with estate planning attorneys running workshops, yours will need to stand out to succeed. Don’t do a one-time only workshop and expect it to impact your practice. An on-going series of workshops will be more productive, combined with the E2-CRM to gather information and conduct follow up.

Attending community events is great—being part of the event is even better. If time allows, being a part of a community organization and involved with the planning is a two-fer opportunity. Not only do all of the organizers and volunteers get to meet you, but you may be able to contribute by presenting or moderating a program.

How to Really Engage Visitors to Your Law Firm Website

The days of dazzling website visitors with credentials are gone. It’s expected that you excelled in law school, graduated, and are active in your community. What today’s legal services consumer wants to know right now is simple: Can you help me? and Can I trust you? In other words, your website is not about you. It’s about your client, their needs and how you and your firm can help them.

What’s going to engage a prospect is a solution to their problem, from a team they trust.

So how do you get them to pick up the phone, fill out a Contact Us form, or engage with CLIP^SM, our automated intake system?

Remember, IMS works with law firms across the country and we draw on website performance data. We’re not guessing when we advise you on content or design.

Visual elements, including the layout and functional design of the website matters. Clients develop trust when they experience an easy-to-use website. Clicking on an attorney profile and finding a well written description of who you are, with a current photo, puts a visitor at ease. You don’t ask them to go through a maze of links. If drop down menus are used, they drop down for enough time that there is no rush to make a selection. Links open smoothly and bring them to the desired page. Fonts are clean and easy to read on all platforms.

You’ve gone to websites where simple things were hard to find. There’s no room for client frustration on your estate planning and Elder Law website. People will leave. This is too important for them.

About Us remains important, but Success Stories and Testimonials must be emphasized. Visitors to your website want to know that you can help them. They will feel better if they read narratives that reflect their own experiences. You do have to be mindful of privacy concerns when preparing content for a success stories, but you should be able to tweak things enough that the families in the story are not identifiable. Concerns about a loose-cannon relative, an adult child who can’t handle money, or an ex-spouse who is likely to engage in an estate battle are examples of narratives that will engage visitors.

Testimonials are a wonderful thing for prospects to read. We love hearing about happy endings. Someone compliments your services, and prospects think, that could be me. This firm can help me. It’s really that simple.

We build your website with all of these elements in mind. Want to make your current website even better? Call James at 877-352-2021 ext. 80.

Strike a Balance on Social Media: Professional Can Also be Personal

You know the phrase—we do business with people we know, like and trust. For many estate planning and Elder Law firms, social media seems like it could be the silver bullet that makes everything happen. When it doesn’t happen, it’s easy to let the whole thing go. That’s a mistake. Social media does take time and tweaking to find your voice and learn what types of posts work and which fall flat. You may need some outside help, or you may need to have a team member dedicate a certain amount of their time to the task on a regular basis. But just stopping altogether is a mistake.

Another mistake is limiting your social marketing to one or two platforms. You’re probably already on LinkedIn (we certainly hope so), and maybe you are thinking about Facebook. But Pinterest or Instagram for estate planning and Elder Law attorneys? Yes.

Pinterest is all about creativity, and if you are a creative type, there’s a place for you on Pinterest. You know the magic that happens when you and a new client discover a shared passion about a hobby or community organization. Pinterest is a platform to share ideas in images and videos. Users create “boards” that work like bulletin boards (hence the name) and you pin images to your boards. You can also share pins from other people’s boards. If you unwind with woodworking after a long day in the office, you could create a board featuring your projects, tools, and shared pins from fellow woodworkers. In January 2017, more than 150 million people were on Pinterest.

Instagram is about the visual, and you may have more content than you think. If you speak at a conference and take a photo with the event organizer, that’s a photo for Instagram. So is a special event that you hold at your office, a community group that your team supports, etc. If you can take a photo of it that speaks to your law firm’s values and commitment, it’s Instagram-worthy. Most recent statistics on Instagram: 700 million users. They do skew younger, but chances are your target market is skewing younger too.

For Pinterest, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, your blog and anywhere else you might engage with social media, remember that these are all opportunities to build thought leadership. Keep in mind the different milieus that these social platforms offer and tailor your posts accordingly. Finally, remember why you are posting: to provide more people with an opportunity to get to know you. That occurs when what you post is informative and helpful to your readers, wherever they are finding you.

How Does Spam Hurt Your Law Firm Website? Let us Count the Ways

Spam can wreak havoc with your law firm, in more ways than you might think. The junk cluttering your email inbox, the time wasted when your IT department has to fix a damage done by spam, the investment in technology necessary to continue to combat spam; that’s just for starters. Think about this: spam poses a real threat to your website’s Google analytics.

And what if spam is not seen as spam by Google, but as black hat SEO?

Fake traffic skews analytics. It can happen pretty quickly, and you may not realize it at first. Your website traffic is growing steady and then, traffic takes off like a rocket. You think, wow, that article I published in the bar journal must have really gotten a lot of interest. But the calls to your office don’t align with the jump in analytics. A closer look reveals that all of the traffic is coming from one website, and it’s not a website you know. It’s spam.

Referral spam is profitable for hackers. Spammers target large numbers of websites to find vulnerable sites. They spam your site to show that their URL is sending many referrals, with the goal of building their own website’s traffic. Often they are paid based on the number of links or referrals they generate.

Spam can overload your computer system and compromise security. It’s hard to imagine that hackers would want to launch a DoS (Denial of Service) attack on a lone law firm, but that’s why so many security systems are in place. A DoS attack makes your website unusable and crushes your firewalls. The goal is to exhaust technical resources. The result is legitimate users can’t get to your site.

Smart hackers lead to smarter systems professionals. At IMS, we are always on the lookout for improved solutions, and that includes website protection. Today there is a new class of captchas—those small boxes at the bottom of forms that require you to type in randomly generated codes are no longer state of the art. We’re not sharing what it is we are using, but with systems that automatically detect spam bots on forms, we prevent spammers from getting near our client’s forms.

At IMS, we build websites to shield our clients from the impact of spam. With the help of trained end users—you and your team—your data and your systems are in good hands! If you have any concerns about spam and your estate planning and Elder Law website, submit a support ticket.

Why IMS Law Firm Websites Use Proprietary Software

You’ve seen the ads for do-it-yourself websites everywhere, from online to broadcast television commercials. Promoted as a great solution for small scale enterprises, including law firms, there’s just one piece of information missing: some of these sites, especially the more popular ones, are frequent targets for hackers. That’s why IMS law firm websites are built using proprietary software programs with a level of security you don’t get with mainstream do-it-yourself websites.

Need a visual? Compare the estate planning documents created by an online website to the estate plan that you create for clients. You know which one you would rather have.

Who wants to hack a system no one uses? Way back when, when Apple computers were not as popular as they are today, word was that Apple computers never got viruses. There simply weren’t enough of them to be of interest to hackers. The same goes for websites that are built using highly popular systems. The more popular the system, the more attractive the websites are to hackers.

Software vulnerabilities Certain website platforms require maintenance on a regular basis to prevent hackers from gaining access. Left unprotected, they are easy targets. Some of these sites use plugins, a piece of software used to add certain functions to the website. These are created by third-party programmers, and not all are created equally. You may chose one that looks great and two weeks later, find your site has been hacked.

Why does someone want to infiltrate your website? To gain access to databases of information stored within your server. Worst case—your website is used to download viruses, malware and ransomware onto your client’s and colleague’s computer systems.

Mega-breaches happen. We don’t want them to happen to our clients. When hackers gain access to massive numbers of websites, like the infamous data breach reported in October 2016 (43 million accounts from one do-it-yourself website company hacked), the entire tech world shudders.

We’re strict about adding content but it’s for client protection. There are a lot of moving parts in IMS websites, including website optimization and SEO. To keep our website performance on track and stay as safe as possible, we do require that you contact us to upload new content or making edits to your website. It protects the website from any malicious code that might be lurking on your system or hitching a ride on files.

A Brand Story Video You Gotta See!

We just wrapped up our latest Brand Story Video for a client named Mike Mastry in St. Petersburg FL. Mike wanted to find a way to show the value of a persons legacy. He wanted his clients, referral sources, friends and family to think about how they will be remembered. Mike also wanted to solidify how HE wanted to be remembered as well. This formed the basis for his Brand Story script, shot plan and music.

This was the first shoot we were able to use some of our new gadgets as well. We made use of 4 different lenses on our Cannon 4D camera and drone for some of those amazing daytime ocean shots. We utilized our Phantom 4 Drone and a brand new slider system for some truly cinematic shots. We couldn't be more proud of how Mike's video turned out and to say the client was "happy" would be a severe understatement.  I hope you take a couple of minutes to watch his video to the end and think about the impact you and your story could have on the success of your practice.

 

  (see the video on his website here www.MastryLaw.com)

If you have a desire to tell your brand story let me encourage you to do it. Nothing in your marketing will build trust and have a bigger impact than a fantastic brand story video. If you are curious about the process and want to hear directly from Mike himself you can watch his brief testimonial video below.

 

 

How Do Well-Built, Best Practices-Based Law Firm Websites Get Spammy?

Law firms that count on strong SEO performance also rely on the technical back-end of their websites to protect against the efforts of malware, viruses, spyware and other threats. With multiple layers of digital protection in place, well-designed websites can withstand attacks that, in most cases, users are completely unaware of. How do you know your website is shielded? It performs well, Google has not penalized you for being spammy, and people are able to search and find your website.

Isn’t that something you expect? From IMS, yes, but not everyone understands why website protection is part of what we build into IMS sites. Here’s what can happen without the care and technical proficiency built into every IMS website:

Not all SEO practitioners have your best long-term interest in mind. Be wary of the SEO practitioner who promises the moon, delivers, then disappears, just around the same time that Google rankings sink or worse, your site is blocked and can’t be accessed. They have likely employed black hat techniques to give rankings a quick jump, and your site has been deemed spammy by Google.

Keyword stuffing, broken links, poor quality links and a bad user experience. Time is everyone’s most precious commodity. It’s annoying to open a website that you thought had useful information and find it’s nothing but a waste of digital space. Repetitive use of keywords, links that take you to useless pages, and tons of ads creates a bad UX (User Experience). Google agrees, and will rank the website accordingly.

Who is behind that website? Millennials aren’t the only ones who expect complete transparency—Google does also. We hate opening an “About Us” page and finding nothing but corporate speak. A good website includes info about people, even if it only tells us about top leadership. A spammy website has no people, and you won’t find anyone associated with the company on social media.

Sometimes your solution creates a problem. If you do a search and a URL listing contains a message saying “The contents of this website cannot be displayed,” it might not be a safe website. We all know what happens next. You try another browser and it opens fine. Sometimes that’s a good thing, but sometimes you have simply found a work-around to a system that was put into place to protect you.

At IMS, our focus is on estate planning and Elder Law firm sites, not ghost practices that exist to gather clicks. If you have any questions about the health and well-being of your website, call James at 877-352-2021 ext. 80 and we’ll be happy to give your website a check-up!

Phishing, Spam and Ransomware in Your Email In Box

Here’s where the IT department and the rest of the estate planning and Elder Law firm can get into what we like to call “spirited debates.” You realize that you haven’t gotten a response to your emails from a really important client for a week. You ask your paralegal if she’s heard from Mrs. Jones. No, she has not. Then it hits you: Mrs. Jones and a week’s worth of her emails are sitting in the firm’s blocked email senders file. You can almost feel your blood pressure rising, can’t you?

We know you want to say “Let everything in so that this doesn’t happen again.” But that’s dangerous.

Protecting your law firm against email spammers requires a delicate balance between providing the level of protection necessary against spam email and making sure that you get the emails that you need to serve your clients. It should not happen often, but it does happen.

“Phishing” is still around because it still works. Phishing is the use of spam emails that seem to come from a legitimate company, even one that you do business with, but the goal is to get you to provide a credit card number, PIN number or other bit of information that will let the hacker gain access to accounts. It’s easy to cut and paste company logos, and thieves are really good about presentation, so many smart people fall pretty to phishing. One key to look for: misspelling is common, the URL that the email comes from is often a weird version of the bank or other company’s address (i.e., @uspasears.biz, rather than @sears.com) and the request is urgent.

Ransomware attacks are becoming more prevalent. Ransomware is an attack on your system that demands payment, usually in digital currency, or your entire system will be destroyed or published. In some instances, paying the ransom does not help and your data will be deleted. Often access is through phishing email that seems innocuous. But ransomware can also come from clicking on links on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and even instant message chats, including Skype.

Make checking spam filters or blocked emails a daily task. A trusted employee, one with common sense and some digital savvy, should be trained by your IT department on how to review these emails for two purposes: making sure you don’t miss any legitimate emails and allowing the IT department to be more familiar with the emails that need to be allowed.

“White list” important domains and emails. White listing in advance will ensure that emails from these domains and senders will not get caught in spam filters.