Most general practice law firms know that it’s easy to take complete care of existing clients rather than chase new ones, but plenty of firms miss this opportunity.
This is particularly the case in those firms where low-value products like conveyancing and simple wills represent for lots of firms single transactions and there is no strategy in place to keep them engaged and introduce other practice areas that may be relevant to them or their friends.
How Do We Engage Old & Current Clients?
When it comes to engaging old and current clients there are a number of ways that prove effective for us in helping our clients. Here they are:
Email Marketing (EDM)
Traditionally the best way has been through email marketing. In other words, each month sending an email newsletter (EDM) to your list. But when you do this, make sure you have segmented lists. This is often a challenge depending upon the practice management software you have. If you do have the capacity to segment, then by practice area is a good start and with referral sources by industry. In other words, financial advisors, accountants, real estate agents etc. The reason that you want to segment is that enables your law firm to send targeted emails. For example, if there is a new legislative update that is relevant for your agribusiness clients then targeting that list will ensure greater open rates. (Find out more about how we can help your law firm with email marketing)
Important Alert: As ISP become ever stricter with email communications, emails from third party email platforms like Mailchimp, Vision6 etc may be blocked.
Webinars, Videos and Podcasts
Typically off the back of an EDM, inviting past clients that you’re wanting to re-engage via an invitation to a webinar, or a link through to a podcast or a video on a highly relevant topic is a great marketing strategy. Email campaigns with links to articles etc are great, but what has great impact and open rates is when your lawyers go the extra mile and bit into a topic of high relevance and use a video or podcast or webinar to disseminate the content. (Find out more about how we can help your law firm webinars, podcasting or video marketing)
Spontaneous Personal Emails
Often forgotten but without doubt, the most powerful strategy to keep existing and past clients engaged, even better when you link across to a video or podcast that you or one of your lawyers have recorded on a topic of interest.
Imagine this, a new amendment to legislation is enacted at 2.35pm today and at 3.30pm and email from you personally to your top current and past clients on what this amendment means to their industry. The other benefit of this type of communication is that you will likely receive a 100% open rate because there is minimal risk it will be flagged as spam or promotional material given its coming from your personal work email adress.
Invitations to an Event
Going online to get offline is a great engagement strategy and events do this well. Using the example above, if there is enough meat in the topic, invitations to current and past clients to attend a breakfast meeting or whatever the case may be works well. Events like this also provide opportunities to potentially cross-sell or expose your list to a practice area that may also be relevant to the topic.
One thing to keep in mind, as mentioned above, is with the nature of these very targeted campaigns, a personal email by way of follow up will ensure your invitation gets seen in case it was blocked as spam etc
How Can Fast Firms Help
At Fast Firms we take care of all the design and execution of your email campaigns, invitations and RSVP sequences as well as this we do the complete end to end production of podcasts, videos and webinars.