How Law Firms can Retain and Engage Leads and Customers

What is a customer engagement funnel?

Building a clientele for, especially when you are a small law firm is not an easy job. Searching for new clients while nurturing and maintaining the existing ones is a challenging task.
Here is when it comes in place the concept of a customer funnel, that is somehow similar to the sales funnel but focused on taking your prospect from the awareness stage until you convert him/her into repeating client. Improving this process requires listening to your clients’ needs and careful attention. Ideally, you want to take your client on a controlled journey closing the margin for error. To be able to construct a customer funnel for your law firm you want to:

• Create a definition of your customer, its needs and what services offer would be more suitable for them.
• Once the customer is aware of your service offering and they show interest in what your law firm has to offer your funnel is started all ready to work. In this phase, you want to make sure you have a face to face meeting with your client and if it is not possible in your office tools such as Zoom or Appear.it makes your job easy for that face to face conversation. Here is the moment when you want to close the deal and build a trust relationship with your potential customer.
• Ultimately once you have dealt with the matter your customer had you want to make sure you keep that relationship open. It is not enough with doing the job only, you want to make sure you continue engaging with your clients via surveys, newsletters or a communication channel of your choice.

Building a sales funnel is crucial for your business and to continue it. In today’s fast-paced world only those who take the time to engage with their customers will make sure they stay ahead of the competition. Either way, you want to make sure you have a process in place to continue engaging with your clients.

How to build a customer engagement funnel?

In this article, we are going to guide you through the necessary steps to create your own lead engagement process and expand your customer base.

• Use more than one medium to attract clients. Only having a well-optimized website or only using newsletters it is not enough nowadays. The idea is to start using a combination of mediums to attract clients. An example can be a combination of actively engaging in two-three social media channels, sending a monthly newsletter and investing in a PPC campaign.
• Follow and Listen. When your leads are around the entrance of the customer funnel you want to address the main concerns they might have. A possible solution to this is to prepare a tailored FAQ section where you answer the most common questions your customers have when hiring a service like yours. Previous clients and cases give the necessary information to construct answers for them and provide information as quickly as possible.
• Store as much information as possible about a customer and make sure everyone in your team does the same. Having a CRM where conversations and files are stored converts your law firm in an efficient organization, You don’t want to lose time search for client’s documentation each time a client is asking for a service or an update. By defining communication systems between law firm members and clients you reduce the risk of having an unhappy client.

Customer engagement is the customer experience. When offered a good customer experience, clients are more likely to return or refer people from their network to approach your law firm.

Marketing research shows that organizations engaging with their clients on multiple channels have a higher probability to be hired by their customers multiple times. Meanwhile, organizations that do not follow up or continue engaging with their customers have a lower client returning rate.

Steps to Create an Effective Engagement Strategy

Once you know what customer engagement is about, what are the steps to create an effective engagement strategy?

• Define your customer journey map. Be aware of where your customers are coming from and who are they, what are the online channels they more frequently visit.
• Identify points of interaction. Identify how many customers are interacting with you, how often and what channels are using to do that.
• Analyze their behaviour. With tools such as Google Analytics or Heatmaps, you can analyze where your customers come from, from which page they landed to your website. Did they come from a social media platform, an ad you placed or through search engines?
• Offer customized services. Customers want to feel their experience is unique with your law firm. Although it is fine to have standard service packages make sure you leave room for improvement and flexibility when a client comes with a very specific enquiry.
• Engage in one on one conversation. There is no better resource of information than one on one conversation. Speaking directly to your customers and addressing their pain points is priceless. Therefore you want to make sure that your firm is collecting all that information and using it to assess areas of improvement in your law firm.
• Analyze feedback. Testimonials and reviews from clients show how satisfied they are with your services. If the overall rating of your firm is not as good as you expected is time for a change.

Take-Aways

There are different techniques you can use to retain and engage customers on platforms such as social media or through marketing automation platforms. Your law firm should make an effort to plan content for social media, have an email strategy in place, collect reviews and keep team members updated regarding a client case. All your customer engagement efforts should be directed to attract, convert and retain customers and convert them into paying clients.