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In a recent blog post, Cordell Parvin outlined ten ways to show your clients you appreciate them. His list included:
1. Keeping up with what is going on in your client’s industry, including what its competitors are doing and offering ideas on any implications.
2. Helping the client obtain more valuable business. If ever you are able to actually expand the client’s business by introducing the client to other clients or to other lawyers in your firm who can do the same, that is always a plus.
3. Finding out about the client’s children and keeping up with them.
4. Simply saying at the end of every conversation “Is there anything else I can do to help you.”
5. Getting to know your client representative’s assistant and treating that person as well as you treat the client representative.
The more you show appreciate to your clients, the more they will appreciate you, and in return, provide you with more business.
Sometimes life moves too fast to make staying in touch with former colleagues, past customers and business acquaintances easy (or manageable). When you need to reconnect with someone (especially to ask for a favor) you probably wish you’d never lost touch, because for many, reaching out to people with whom you’ve lost touch is uncomfortable. The Harvard Business Review says this doesn’t have to be the case, and offers some strategies to make the process easier.
- Acknowledge the lapse in communication
- Explain why you’re contacting them now
- Offer something in return
Running a successful law practice requires business, marketing and technology know-how. Here are six recommendations to help run your practice efficiently.
- Liberate case intake: Automate case and client intake by placing your intake forms on your website for clients to fill out before they come into your office, or on your network so everyone on your staff can easily access them.
- Go paperless: It’s easy for mountains of paper to pile up, causing you to lose 15 minutes each day looking for misplaced information. Scan every incoming document and link them to your case files.
- Set up procedures: Without workflow procedures, cases frequently get neglected, stuck, or delayed at individual phases. It’s important to set up case rules and to regularly monitor the status of your cases using reports.
- Automate documents and forms: Generating frequently used documents and forms is a labor intensive process that ties up staff time and resources. Practice management software can auto-fill frequently used documents and forms to save you time and reduce errors.
- Properly manage contacts: It’s impossible to mentally keep track of all your clients, opposing attorneys, judges, experts etc. Keep all contacts in one central database for easy retreival.
- Make your calendar smart: Rules-based legal calendaring is a flexible and efficient system that will keep you on schedule. You won’t have to lose sleep worrying if you’ve missed something.
Firms that take the time to develop policies and continually work to improve upon them through training, technology, effective leadership and communication, are generally more successful in reaching their goals.
While your website’s primary mission is to provide a quality experience for your visitors and convert them into qualified leads, don’t forget your website also needs to be found by the right people. Setting up your website so it is search engine friendly is critical to having success with the major search engines such as Google and Bing. These search engines send out spiders (automated programs that analyze web pages) to crawl your website and add it to their search index. These spiders analyze your page titles, keywords, meta tags, content, site map, links, navigation, page names and HTML code to determine how you will appear and rank in search results. Don’t underestimate the importance of setting up your site correctly from a search engine optimization standpoint.
To learn more, visit http://www.abacuslaw.com/products/websolutions/websolutions.html.
Visitors to your website are usually apprehensive. The anxiety of their legal issues is combined with the fear of not being able to find the right law firm to solve their problems. If you don’t alleviate this apprehension, there is little likelihood they will contact you. The job of your website is to reduce fear and elicit trust. Build enough trust and it will be easy for them to contact you and become your client.
Credibility builders are the key to establishing trust and can include such things as success stories, professional affiliations, attorney profiles, professional awards and testimonials. Use credibility builders throughout your site to support your value proposition, content and call to action.
So, your potential client has spent a couple minutes on your website and is getting a warm fuzzy feeling about your ability to help them. What’s next? Many law firm websites don’t provide a clear next step. What do you want them to do? Call you? Email you? What is your best closing tool? A phone conversation? A free consultation?
Without a clear call to action, visitors will be confused – and confused people don’t act. Tell the visitor exactly what you want them to do, such as “Call us now!” or “Sign up here for a free consultation.”
A new visitor’s commitment to your website is very low. If they can’t find what they’re looking for quickly and easily, they are likely to leave. Instead of organizing your site around what you want to say, organize it around your visitor’s needs and goals. Structure and navigation should be easy to understand, easy to see, and speak to the questions and anxieties your potential clients will have when they come to your site.
As soon as they arrive at your site, potential clients want to know “what will you do for me?” and “what is so special about your firm?” In short, your website must have a well-positioned value proposition that succinctly describes what your firm does, who it serves, and what makes it better than your competitors. Your value proposition should be concise, catchy and placed strategically to drive visitors to act. In terms of converting traffic, a well-crafted value proposition is extremely powerful.
It is said that 65% of those looking for legal advice look for it online. Is your website turning those people away or turning them into paying clients? Are flaws in your website hurting your reputation, costing you clients, and undermining your competitiveness? I’ve come up with 7 critical components of law firm websites that I’ll share with you over the next few weeks.
The first critical component of a law firm website is the design. Design is the first thing people see when they visit your site – they react emotionally to colors, layout, graphics and images. A negative first impression is usually all it takes for visitors to dismiss your firm and leave your site. As a virtual extension of your office, your website should look every bit as clean and professional as you would in person. Online, you have less than 4 seconds to prove yourself and establish your authority. As the first thing visitors see, design is critical to surviving the first 4 seconds. On your website you’ll rarely have a second chance if you fail to make a great first impression.
Paying for advertisements in search engines (PPC) is an excellent way to immediately drive qualified traffic to your law firm’s website. By bidding on keywords and phrases of your choice, you can target messages to specific groups of people by showing them an advertisement when they type your keywords into search engines. PPC is cost effective because you only pay when your ads are clicked.
Any good PPC campaign begins with creating a list of targeted and appropriate keyword phrases. Start with the terms you think people would use to find your firm. For example, “Personal injury attorney, San Francisco” or “Estate planning lawyer Dallas, Texas.” Another way to find good terms is to look at your site’s analytics to see what search terms were used to find your website.
The most popular platform for PPC campaigns is Google AdWords. With AdWords, you create word groups and set a maximum cost per click (CPC) for each group. Google determines the position for each sponsored search result and the actual cost based on your maximum CPC, the relevance of your listing and the ad’s historical click through rate (CTR). For this reason, it is important to pick search terms that are effectively targeted and write headings and descriptions that relate to the search terms and your product or service.
Tracking your results is essential to a cost-effective PPC campaign. A good tool to use is Google Analytics. Once your campaign has been running long enough to generate traffic and record some conversions, review your campaign and adjust it to get the activity and cost per lead you want.
Abacus can help you manage your PPC campaign and more. Learn more here: http://www.abacuslaw.com/products/websolutions/internetmarketing.html
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Great post, it really is important to build trust and respect within client relationships.