Marketing Automation is the use of software to support or automate marketing tasks. The three main technologies that automation leverages are email, social media, and web forms. Marketing automation is used to do things like improve the effectiveness of existing personal injury leads by routing them through a personalized sales funnel that uses customer data in real-time; getting in touch with auto accident leads more quickly; streamlining campaign management; and boosting lead generation efforts through automated pre-marketing emails for high-value prospects.
How Does Marketing Automation Work
Marketing automation is a methodology and set of technologies that allows companies to analyze data and use it to plan, automate and optimize their digital marketing activities. Marketing Automation platforms can help marketers who need to be able to work more strategically, while freeing up time for more creative tasks like building relationships with customers.
How Can it Help Your Law Firm Sign More Personal Injury Cases?
Using marketing automation software frees up time to focus on the bigger picture and on activities that directly benefit the customer. This can translate into better relationships with customers, increased revenue and improved return on investment (ROI).
Each industry has its own reasons for using marketing automation software to solve their unique business problems when there’s no one on staff with coding training who can build it themselves (ie: website automation). What they all have in common is how this technology helps drive revenue because it integrates seamlessly with your existing software and marketing strategies.
One of the most common uses for marketing automation is making interactions more personalized: using data to connect with prospects as if you were talking to them individually,at just the right time on every channel they prefer. It’s an excellent way to handle communication at scale, being able to connect with old clients, referral networks, or your entire staff on auto-pilot.
Why should personal injury lawyers use marketing automation to sign more clients from their lead generation efforts
Personal injury lawyers can use marketing automation to sign more clients from their legal lead generation efforts because it enables them to manage and track their leads more effectively. Marketing automation tools allow you to keep track of who has visited your website, downloaded your ebook, or filled out a contact form looking for information on how to handle a car accident settlement. You can then use marketing automation tools to follow up with these leads via email or automated text messaging, which can increase your conversion rate.
Some of the most popular marketing automation tools for personal injury law firms:
- Filevine
- Mailchimp
- Constant Contact
- Litify
- LawRuler
- LeadDocket
- Hubspot
- Hootsuite
- IFTT
- Captorra
What is an autoresponder and why is it important to marketing automation for law firms?
An autoresponder is a series of prewritten email or text messages that are sent to a specific person, or group of people. Autoresponders have a lot of very useful applications, from immediately emailing leads after they fill out a form on your website, follow up with unresponsive leads that you weren’t able to get ahold of right away, and mining your former client base for referrals.
Autoresponders can allow you to respond quickly without having to drop everything and be very targeted and personalized while doing so, allowing you to build better relationships with prospects, clients, and colleagues. They work best when you segment your lists into groups, which allows you to send more targeted emails to each group. For example, you could put all the workers compensation leads that your firm speaks with that looked like good cases but decided not to file a claim into a specific group titled “Hesitant WC Claimants”. From there you could send a weekly email answering commonly asked questions about the process of filing a workers comp claim, stats about people not losing their job after filing a claim, etc.
Using an application that is part of your marketing automation software, you can trigger autoresponses to be sent as soon as a prospect has taken an action — such as a request for a free consultation.
An autoresponder gives you the opportunity to show off your expertise and start building rapport with lead prospects at any stage in the buying process.
Tips For Getting Started With Marketing Automation:
- Think in processes: Workflows are your friend here. Wherever possible aim to set up a workflow. This allows you to create a campaign that runs by itself once it’s been configured – or at least the bulk of the groundwork is done for you. If your business needs different automations depending on different situations then workflows can be configured to run individual automation if certain conditions are met. For example, you might want to promote a Facebook video via Twitter and Google+ only if the video has 1000 views or more (to meet this condition, set it up as an automation step where views are counted).Or, once the automated campaign is running you could also run individual processes for further optimisation based on email click-through rates, website clicks and views.
- Do your homework to find the right tools for YOUR law firm: Not every automation tool is the same, and doing a few product demos before deciding on which one to use can make the whole process much more successful.
- Involve your intake and marketing staff in the process: This is an important one. An automated campaign can be a game-changer in your firm, but still needs a human to program what to do, monitor the process, and handle the responses. Make sure the people in your firm who will be responsible for this have a chance to voice their preferences.
- Start small, just start somewhere: You’ll never get anywhere if you don’t – well – start somewhere. It might seem terrifying and overwhelming at first, but we all know that the only way to learn how something works is to jump in and give it a go (also, let’s be real: nothing really works perfectly right away). Pick one type of automation and work your way through the process, set it up and make the necessary adjustments until it’s running smoothly. You can start with something like a standard welcome series or drip campaign and work your way up from there to more complicated automations like an engagement plan which is scheduled to run once per week .
- Don’t over complicate it: If you’re planning on automating any of your marketing efforts, then it’s important that any automated campaign is simple enough for you to understand.
- Track and measure: Lots of great tools out there allow you to set up tracking and measurements for your automated campaigns. Google Analytics is a great option that can be added into any automation process so you get insights about site visits, views, opt-ins and conversions.
Conclusion:
Using marketing automation for your law firm is a great way of generating new personal injury leads, connecting with more of the leads you’re already generating, and boosting referrals from former clients and other attorneys. It can be a little daunting to setup and get your arms around at first, so starting small and scaling up as you get more comfortable is usually a good idea.