You’re investing considerable time and money to market your practice. Between digital ads, website design, and more traditional channels like billboards and television, law firms invest on average, anywhere from 5-20% of their annual gross revenue in marketing.
But even as marketing budgets grow, the intake process stagnates. Firms too often fail to follow up promptly with potential leads. Rather than improve the lead management process, many firms keep putting more money into marketing and lead generation services.
It’s like working tirelessly to sow a field and never irrigating the plants. When the harvest fails, you just buy more seeds for next year.
Lead management software helps you nurture the leads that come your way, turning more of them into your clients. This will improve your marketing ROI (return on investment) and make sure your marketing expenses are actually working for you.
6 Ways Lead Management Software for Law Firms Can Improve Your Marketing ROI:
1. Increase Conversion Rate with Client Tracking
At its foundation, lead management software was created to improve your conversion rate. You’ll know it’s working if more of your leads sign on to become clients.
The first step is to track every potential client. Many law offices still track leads on little slips of paper or through emails that pile up in already-overburdened inboxes. That creates two big problems:
- It’s easy to misplace incoming leads.
- It’s hard to take immediate action.
To improve your marketing ROI, look for lead management software that captures and centralizes all incoming leads. Whether they’re calls, walk-ins, emails, webchats, or responses to a social media post, it must be easy to add them to the funnel. If it’s too complicated or takes too many steps, your intake team won’t capture them all.
Secondly, look for legal case management software that actively facilitates action. It must be simple to reach out to potential leads through the right channel, at the right time, and with accurate information. You should be able to automate much of it. Otherwise, you’re putting too heavy of a burden on your intake team, and their performance will lag.
2. Accessible ROI Data
You can’t improve what you don’t track. To increase your ROI, you need to be able to watch it closely over time.
Your ROI isn’t a complex equation. To get your ROI, subtract your marketing cost from the revenue generated and then divide that by the cost. Then multiply that by 100 to make it a percentage.
ROI= (Cost of Investment / (Final Value of Investment - Initial Value of Investment)) x 100
Without marketing software, you have to track down these numbers and enter them manually in a spreadsheet. With all the work you and your team are already doing, manual data entry usually slips through the cracks.
Look for lead management software that tracks your ROI for you. When the system is automated, you can make wise marketing decisions based on up-to-the-minute information — without wasting time on data entry.
3. Optimize Marketing Sources
You want to invest in the marketing sources that are working for you and understand when one channel is falling behind. Make sure your lead management software breaks down your ROI by marketing source.
Marketing channels and campaigns with high ROI deserve more attention and resources. You should also be able to see where you have a low ROI, indicating which marketing channels need an audit.
When you use ROI to shape your marketing budget, you can improve your revenue without increasing costs. Ultimately, this means growing profits without even needing to increase investment.
4. Utilize Integrations for Automation
To fully leverage your marketing ROI, you need to track the full lifecycle of a case, from the very first contact to the final result. That’s why you should look for lead-tracking software that connects with your other case management tools.
Without the full picture, you can’t make the right marketing choices. You might get a lot of leads from one marketing source, but the ultimate outcomes are disappointing. On the other hand, a certain source might bring you fewer leads that are high quality, making its ultimate ROI much higher. If you’re only looking at lead volume, you’ll make the wrong decision about which channels to prioritize.
Tools like Filevine’s Lead Management automatically compute your marketing ROI by comparing marketing expenses with case outcomes, which it pulls from your case files. It also shows you revenue by marketing source, so you can see which channels are bringing in the bulk of your business. If you don’t have an all-in-one solution, ensure you choose software that integrates seamlessly with the other tools you rely on.
5. Improve Intake with Automated Workflows
When bringing in new clients, timing is crucial. Often potential clients are shopping around with several different firms. You need to be the first to respond, and do it in a manner and format that will actually reach the potential client. If they prefer to text, your email or phone call might not go very far.
Look for lead management software that allows you to create a custom automated response system. That can mean sending automatic text messages or emails, or informing your intake specialist when it’s the right time to call. If it’s right for your practice, you should also be able to create a completely contactless intake process.
6. Boost the Referral Channel
Lead management software can improve your referral fee process in two ways.
First, with full lead tracking, automation, and simpler workflows, you’re more likely to refer incoming leads to the right lawyer. Rather than ignoring requests that don’t quite match what you’re looking for, it’s easy to connect them to a lawyer you know and trust who can better meet their needs.
Secondly, the right lead-tracking software will help you stay on top of your referrals. Since fees can be contingent on the final outcome of a case, you might be waiting a long time before a payment is collected. You can’t just hope that the other lawyer remembers to pay your referral commission when the time comes.
Good lead management software will clarify your referral network, make sure that you have clear referral agreements in place, and help ensure that you fulfill your obligations. And crucially, it will help you follow up with other lawyers, automatically sending timely reminders to ensure that you collect the fees you’re owed.
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There are potential clients out there who need the expertise and support that you offer. But without a strong intake process, they won’t ever be able to connect with you.
If you transform more leads into clients, you can reach the people who need you and make your marketing budget work harder. Learn how Filevine’s Lead Management with Lead Docket can help you attract more new clients, give you greater peace of mind, and dramatically improve your ROI.