3 Benefits of Drip Marketing for Law Firms
By: Aaron George
Tags: Business Of Law, Email, Marketing, Law Firm Marketing, Automation

Drip marketing is an efficient (and persistent) way of engaging with potential customers. The “drip” terminology is said to be derived from drip irrigation, a method for watering crops where small amounts of water are delivered to plants over a prolonged period of time. This not only reduces water waste, but also saves time by eliminating manual labor for the farmers. Similarly, drip marketing is an automated process for sending out messages which doesn’t require much interaction on behalf of the sender. In this post, we’ll explain how drip marketing works, and identify 3 main benefits of drip marketing for law firms.

What Exactly Is Drip Marketing?

Drip marketing is a communication method in which a sender delivers a series of pre-written, automated messages to recipients over a period of time. It is mostly done via email, although some companies have used other methods such as snail mail and SMS as well.

Drip marketing is primarily used for generating, nurturing, and closing sales prospects. It enables marketers and salespeople to continually engage with prospects over time, without requiring the effort of manual outreach.

How Drip Marketing Can Benefit Your Law Practice

You can probably already imagine some ways that drip marketing might be effective for you, but here are the 3 biggest benefits of drip marketing for law firms:

1. Save time

Using drip marketing to follow up with potential clients can save a lot of time because the process is completely automated.

Rather than going through your list of prospective clients one-by-one and manually typing out an email to each of them, your drip marketing campaign can message them all automatically at whatever time intervals you have specified.

Once you turn on the “faucet,” it drips continuously without requiring any additional effort on your behalf. This will free up many hours of time and allow you to focus more hours of your day on higher-ROI activities than typing out emails.

2. Increase conversions

Following up is an important part of any sales process. It often requires multiple touch points with a prospect before a conversion occurs, regardless of what industry you’re in. Many law firms overlook this fact.

Most law firms are not very sales oriented and don’t have a structured sales process, so they tend not to follow up as much as they should, which results in lost potential revenue.

Drip marketing can help by automating the process of following up with prospects. This ensures each prospect gets the attention it deserves, which helps to maximize your conversion rate, increase your ROI on marketing spend, and grow your business.

3. Improve client relationships

Did you know that the most common complaint made about attorneys to bar associations is lack of communication? It’s not the cost of services, and it’s not the outcome of the case. Clients complain simply because they don’t hear from their attorneys often enough.

Drip marketing is a great way to improve relationships with your clients by ensuring that your clients hear from you frequently. Once again, because the entire process is automated, you’ll be able to communicate with your clients without taking much time out of your day.

Even just a brief little message to let the client know you are still working on their matter and that you will have an update for them soon can go a long way toward boosting overall client satisfaction.

How to Start Drip Marketing

If you are interested in making drip marketing a part of your overall email marketing strategy, here are some tips about getting started.

Choosing Software

There are a lot of options when it comes to software, but ideally you want to use a combination of solutions that integrate together. That way you can have your CRM and drip marketing working in tandem.

You can use standard email marketing software such as MailChimp or Constant Contact, but those emails tend to be best for mass marketing purposes, rather than follow up. People can recognize these emails as being marketing messages because they are less personalized, which means the response rate won’t usually be as high.

Ideally, you can use your own email account to send out the follow up emails automatically. For example, this is possible with the Lexicata CRM, which integrates with Gmail, Outlook, and other IMAP email providers.

Our system allows you to schedule a series of automated drip emails using customizable templates, but they will come from you, just as if you had drafted them the old fashioned way.

Writing Content

Once you have set up your software, the next step is to write the actual email content you’d like to send. This step is pretty self-explanatory, but we do have a couple of recommendations:

Keep the emails short and to the point: People are far less likely to read a 6 paragraph email. Be conversational, and make it apparent that you are still available to help them. Something simple like, “I just wanted to follow up with you regarding our discussion X weeks ago and see if you have any questions for me” can do the trick.

People are far less likely to read a 6 paragraph email. Be conversational, and make it apparent that you are still available to help them. Something simple like, “I just wanted to follow up with you regarding our discussion X weeks ago and see if you have any questions for me” can do the trick. Include links to other content: Referring people to videos, articles, or blogposts that are relevant to their situation is another good idea for your drip emails. This will not only help them understand their situation better, but also build up your credibility and reassure them you are the right person to help them out.

Timing Your Messages

When it comes to timing, the goal is to find a perfect balance. If you send drip emails every single day, people will get annoyed and your follow ups will have a negative effect rather than a positive one. But the same thing can also be true if you are too infrequent with your messages — you want to be sure to strike when the iron is hot.

One possible way to structure the timing is to start off with more frequent messages, perhaps once a week or every 4–5 days for the first few messages. If that doesn’t work, you can then reduce the frequency back to once a month or every 6 weeks.

Again, the goal is to be persistent and show that you are available, but without bothering anyone or creating a negative impression.

Summary

Automation is playing an increasingly important role in the practice of law, and this is true across all business processes from document drafting, to discovery, to marketing, and more.

Finding ways to implement an automated, drip marketing process into your firm’s workflow can potentially benefit your business in three key ways:

reduce the amount of time required to follow up with prospects increase the number of leads that convert into clients, and thus boost your ROI improve client satisfaction by providing frequent communications and case updates once you’ve been retained

All of these things will help contribute to your law firm’s overall success.