Leveraging Automation for Effective Legal Marketing: A Strategy Overview

In today’s legal industry, embracing technology-driven software for your day-to-day operations is not merely an option; it’s a must. In fact, in order to find success in client retention, client experience, and more, you must utilize this innovative technology that is altering the way legal teams all across the nation do business. As a modern law office, you stand on the cusp of a revolution in marketing automation. Thankfully, this revolutionary way of doing business can easily impact your success and yield great results overall for your client experience, and improve your productivity levels by automating mundane tasks. Read on to learn more about how automation is affecting legal marketing and what you need to know about how to leverage it within your firm: 

Marketing Automation and It’s Evolution

At its most basic definition, legal marketing automation is all about connectivity and simplification. It allows you to effortlessly nurture leads, follow up with emails, track your client engagement, manage your firm’s social media accounts, and more, all from one easy-to-manage location. It is an automation technology that aims to straddle the fence between technological efficiency and personal touch. Of course, in previous years, legal marketing primarily consisted of billboard advertisements and yellow page ads. This morphed into more technology-based efforts, but the technology still wasn’t up to snuff in terms of creating a personalized experience. Thankfully, as the tech has evolved even more, you can now engage with clients in ways that were previously considered impossible, creating more personalization and efficiency than ever before.  

Utilizing Automation for Client Intake

Client intake is a time-consuming process that can become downright frustrating for many legal teams. After all, many times, these mundane tasks take time out of your day. However, using automation helps you allocate more billable hours to other matters more pertinent to a client’s case. The following are ways that automation can serve your legal team in the process of client intake specifically: 

• Email and Drip Campaigns: With legal CRM software as a weapon in your marketing arsenal, you will never have to worry about forgetting to follow up with emails and potentially losing out on a lead. With this type of automation, you can initiate drip email campaigns for potential clients, ensuring you stay at top of mind. You can also automate texts for the same purpose. This will free up your team to do other tasks, and you will never have to worry about forgetting to follow up with potential clients again. In addition, intelligent forms that can be linked to an email or other formats can effectively capture client information and even help you prequalify leads.  
• SMS: Another aspect you will want to utilize within CRM software is SMS marketing, also known as text message marketing. We briefly touched on this before. However, it’s worth mentioning on it own as well as this is a simple way to reach customers, and has been proven to have a much higher ROI than other forms of marketing. In fact, many clients prefer text messaging as the way they are contacted, so this works well with today’s digitally-based clientele.  
• Voice Follow-ups: Another important aspect of moving a client through the intake process involves voice follow-ups. This is a phone call message or can be a softphone dial to call back clients who have previously contacted your firm. The idea is to not let these prospects slip through the cracks and instead guide them to the next step of the process of becoming a client.  

Additional Ways to Leverage the Automation Process 

In addition to the key points outlined above regarding how automation can make the client intake process easier for everyone involved, it’s also helpful to understand other ways that automation can positively impact your marketing strategy overall. The following are a few additional points that are worth noting: 

Enhances Competitiveness Through AI  

As you know, competition within the legal arena is fierce. Therefore, you want to embrace any and all advantages you can get to make your firm more competitive and desirable above others in your field. Thankfully, automated tools like those offered as part of legal CRM software give you that competitive edge in many cases.  One way it does this is through AI or artificial intelligence, which can craft pitches, craft first drafts of documents, and help reduce the time it takes you to do all sorts of other tasks. This can make your response time faster, your pitches more effective, and give you an edge over all law firms that aren’t using CRM software. Elements like personified text messaging, one-click electronic signature capture, and document automation work to make your entire team more efficient and your firm more desirable to potential clients.  

Streamlines Lead Generation 

Another way that you can leverage automation as part of your legal marketing strategy is through streamlining lead generation and lead nurturing. Automation successfully turns leads into a seed that is then planted, watered, and nurtured, theoretically, through follow-up texts, voice messages, drip email campaigns, and more. This helps you create a stronger client relationship and will give you the information you need to tailor your communications towards an individual prospect, making them feel as if they are the only client you are working with and your most important task.  

Can Help Foster Collaboration 

In addition to all the other benefits of leveraging various aspects of marketing, automation can also help your team work together, no matter where they are. Various applications, including important documents, can be effortlessly shared between team members, even if some of them are away from the office. Editing documents, adding data to client forms, and taking notes in various cases can all be made simpler with the automated services available on legal CRM software and AI-enhanced platforms. Employees or legal team members being able to access documents no matter where they are with these enhanced platforms simplifies so many processes when it comes to collaborating together on a case. Since only 23% of attorneys work exclusively from the office, it makes sense that you or someone on your legal team falls into the category and could benefit from this feature.  

Increased Client Engagement 

Speaking of which, while you might assume technology, especially in the form of automation, is not the way to increase client engagement, in reality, automation helps you improve your client engagement rates. This is because the automation process actually ensures that you stay connected with prospects, and they don’t end up forgetting about you. This doesn’t mean annoying spam through their inboxes or via text messages, though, but instead, there is personalized content, helpful tips, educational pieces, and more coming to them via their inboxes that will help them transform from prospects into loyal clients. This automation is a connection with your firm that will never dim.  

Leverage Automation with Legal Marketing with Law Ruler 

At Law Ruler, we offer a comprehensive approach to CRM software. We would love to help you automate various parts of your marketing practices as well as help make the process of client intake more seamless and less time-consuming.  

Contact us today to schedule a demo and see exactly how our automation services could improve your appeal to clients, your ROI in your current marketing efforts, and to show you the difference that automated marketing services can make in your firm’s overall success.