Once you find a high-quality, cost-effective online lead source to assist the marketing of your law firm, you must then focus on maximizing conversions. Whether you purchase Social Security leads, Personal Injury leads, or Workers Comp leads, having a methodical plan for processing the inquiries will determine the value of these case referrals to your firm. Attorneys often assume that lead quality represents the sole variable in a campaign’s success. While lead quality is important, without adequate follow-up and conversion measures in place, most campaigns are doomed for failure.
Tips to maximize your return-on-investment with an online lead service.
Call Immediately
It’s all about follow-up. After speaking with with attorneys and disability advocates across the country who use our lead service, it seems most difficult to obtain successful results with online leads in the absence of an aggressive and persistent follow-up effort.
This cannot be underscored enough. It is crucial that you call a lead immediately after it is received in your inbox. We recommend calling a lead within 1-2 minutes of receipt, when possible. Many of these claimants find themselves in desperate circumstances, so they may complete evaluation forms on multiple websites. If you call a lead back several hours later, another attorney may have already signed up the case.
Be Persistent
As these claimants frequently experience adverse medical and economic circumstances, you may not be able to make contact with the lead on your first attempt. Thus, it is critical to stay persistent with your follow-up effort. We recommend making at least 20 outbound call attempts before giving up on contact. If this is not feasible for your staff, consider asking your lead provider to limit the volume to provide your staff with adequate time to make the required number of follow-up attempts.
Don’t Forget about Outstanding Retainers
It is not uncommon for attorneys to send retainers to an appropriate percentage of claimants, but to experience difficulty in having retainer packets returned. From our experience, these claimants do not tend to be the most proactive, and it is vital that you make frequent contact with the “pending” clients to ensure that documents are returned in a timely fashion. In addition to outbound calls, some advocate sending out packets in bright envelopes or certified mail to draw attention to the documents, visiting claimants’ homes, and scheduling office appointments to increase the packet return rate.
Be Prepared to Handle Objections
When calling leads, you and your staff should be willing to educate prospects on the claims process and the benefits of third-party representation. Many claimants do not realize how difficult the road to benefits or to a suitable settlement may be. Further, they may assume incorrectly that using an attorney is going to cost them upfront money. Once provided with some education and statistics, many claimants, who were at first apprehensive to speak with an attorney, are often willing to move forward with the claim evaluation process.
Track Data
It is easier to assess the efficacy of your online case referrals when you know how to record and to track certain data points. At a minimum, we recommend tracking contact rate, retainer send rate, retainer return rate, and cost-per-case. Some companies will provide you with lead and case management software to assist with data analysis.
Final Thoughts
These are just a few tips that can help you achieve better results with your law firm marketing. We pride ourselves on providing clients with a thorough orientation before sending any leads. We have also released a book, Taking the Lead, a concise guide on how to scale a disability practice using internet leads leads.
eGenerationMarketing generates thousands of Social Security leads, Personal Injury leads, and Workers Comp leads and also have software solutions to render your law firm marketing more efficient and cost-effective.
If you would like to learn more how online leads can augment your practice, please feel free to contact us.