Is Marketing Automation for the Legal Industry Worth the Investment?
Law firms and other companies in the legal industry must carefully evaluate the costs versus rewards of changes before making them. In the case of automation, small changes are likely worth the investment, although your law firm will have to decide for itself based on your unique circumstances. Many of the areas where you can apply automation to your firm are related to marketing, but this is not always the case.
Automation Can Easily Identify Prospects
Automation used in your law firm marketing strategy for identifying prospects will likely show a return on investment in a short period of time if applied correctly. In this application automation can replace the time-consuming process of sending multiple follow-up messages to analyze which ones best resonate with your various subscribers. This current process used by many firms today is typically very time-consuming since you need to analyze click-through and open rates in addition to crafting new messages. It also poses the problem of bombarding subscribers with too many messages and producing limited insights.
This current time consuming process can be replaced by a process that is able to automatically send out emails based on what actions the prospect takes based on previous emails and or website visits. The marketing automation process is able to read the data based on that particular prospect, triggering the next automated communication task. The automated system can even send a pending agreement if the prospect agrees to hire you.
Analyzing Prospects’ Preferences
Automation can also help your law firm recognize preferences of your prospects. Much of this can be done with various Customer Relationship Management programs. The automation can segment prospects into different categories and utilize customization. This type of automation can also provide analysis of the automatic reports for every prospect, helping you determine the best time to send messages based on when prospects are more likely to open then read follow-ups.
Automation Can Analyze Your ROI
With the proper marketing automation, your law firm can also utilize various tools to analyze your return on investment. This automatic analysis can include breakdowns of cost per acquisition and the cost of keeping a client. Customer Relationship Management interfaces designed for law firms can automate the analysis of things such as expenses, profit and loss, completed cases, increase in clients or profit, date and time of engagement, bounce rate, open rate, click-through rate, cold calling success/failure rate, and more.
Automation Will Save Time
When it comes down to it, automation for your law firm will likely pay for itself quickly due to its ability to save you time. That will let you and your team focus on the tasks that you are educated to complete, and since time is money, this results in long-term savings. Some of the tasks that you can automate in your law firm including basic client communication, scheduling, tracking time, billing, client intake, managing files, and assembling documents.
Still Consider the Cost
As you look for programs that let you automate these tasks as well as aspects of marketing, you will need to pay attention to the cost. If automated programs are available for free and are reliable, then this will certainly be worth the investment. If they are not free, then consider whether it makes more financial sense to create your own solution or buy an existing one. This decision will depend on how much the solution charges and what it would cost to create it yourself or hire a developer to do so.
Takeaway
While automation should save you time and money, it will not always be worth it in the moment, particularly if your law firm does not currently have free capital to invest. However, for many large law firms and legal service providers, automation is indeed worth the cost. Marketing automation for the legal industry allows marketers to better identify and segment prospects, measure ROI, and complete tedious marketing tasks faster. If your firm is interested in implementing automation, but isn’t sure where to start, contact us for a consultation.
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