If, like me, you read a lot of business and marketing books every year, you will see a form of marketing that is confirmed over and over again as the cheapest and most successful form of marketing. It is one that provides you with the highest return on your investment and also one of the cheapest forms of marketing available to you. However, I know from talking to thousands of attorneys that it is the one marketing tool that they don’t use time and time again. This failure costs them tens of thousands of pounds of lost fee income each year. Lost income costing you?
So what is this big secret? What method are you not using that you should use?
It’s the boring, albeit tried and tested, method of communicating with existing customers on a regular basis.
I’ve heard all the reasons why it can’t be done:
1. It costs too much;
2. We don’t know what to tell them;
3. If we knew what to say, we wouldn’t know how to say it; Y
4. We do not have a database.
Let me break down each of these points so that you, too, can start benefiting from the hundreds of additional new instructions a year that my consulting clients benefit from.
1. It costs too much.
Not anymore. The software is now much cheaper than before and there are a lot of options available. So this excuse is no longer valid.
23. We don’t know what to say or how to say it.
Short and sweet is the answer here. People don’t want legal advice pages, they want tidbits of information. Whet their appetite and invite them to contact you if they want more information. One hour a month and you could be talking to all your clients every month. Do you think that if you did this you could occasionally receive more instructions from your existing customers? I know you can.
4. We do not have a database.
If you start today and take 10 new customers a month and add them to your email list, you’ll have over 100 by the end of the year. If you accept more than 10 clients a month and start actively looking for opportunities to build your mailing lists (job recommenders, accountants, promotion on your website), you will soon have thousands of subscribers.
Email newsletter software is so easy to use that in 30 minutes you can set up an account, import your customers’ names and email addresses (easily from a spreadsheet), and send your first email. Wouldn’t that be a good thing to do today?
Imagine sending an email every month to all your customers. Even if it’s only 100 people at first, soon those 100 will be 1,000. Imagine making an offer of your services to 1,000 people. They say a direct mail shot is a success if 2% of recipients respond. But you would be sending this to your own database, people who have already bought from you and like you. Even with a 1% return that would get you 10 queries, every month! Even more importantly, because you are encouraging contact, these clients are not in a “ring around” to get the best price, they are just going to be talking to you, “their attorney”. Loyal customers and higher profits, that’s my kind of marketing!
Resume.
If you’re not convinced that you absolutely must talk to your customers at least once a month, just think about this: I know that most of your competitors don’t communicate with their customers. If you start doing it, do you think you would do it better or worse than your competitors? Do you think that when Tesco Law or Insurance Law comes to fruition, you will have a more loyal customer base if they have heard from you regularly every month and continue to do so? We all know the answers, so why not take action now to protect your commission income in the future?