It takes a lot of work to grow a successful law firm. Those firms finding themselves on the right path have invested in a quality website, digital marketing strategies, and digital advertising opportunities to help their law firms continue to succeed and grow. Just like our company here at Broughton Partners, much of our success has been found by employing live chat options on business websites. It offers potential clients and customers an easy and low-pressure way to make contact with a company by sharing some information about themselves at the same time.

Live chat easily turns your website visitors into qualified leads. However, it will not automatically turn your leads into clients. The way you handle incoming leads will determine who remains just a visitor to your website and who comes on as a client. One of the more crucial ways to turn a visitor into a client is to offer a reasonable response time. Below are some reasons why your lead response time matters.

The First Five Minutes

Everyone has heard the saying that “timing is everything.” When it comes to the lead response time a business offers, it couldn’t be any truer. The quality of a lead is at its highest when a potential client is looking to hire a company. This holds true whether or not your leads come from your website, a pay-per-lead program, or from live chat. The longer a company takes to follow up on leads to come in, the lower the chance of them becoming a new client.

According to a study by LeadResponseManagement.Org, businesses are more likely to gain clients from quality leads if they contact them within the first five minutes of them reaching out. The study examined data that was collected during a three-year time period from six different businesses.

During the study, they focused on a single question regarding when companies should return calls to web-generated leads in order for there to be an optimal chance of contact and client qualification. The results they found were very interesting.

One fact they found out was that when team members followed up on their leads within five minutes instead of 30 minutes, they were around 100 times more likely to get in contact with that lead. On top of that, they were at least 21 times more likely to be able to convert that lead into a client.

Success relies on the ability to create a follow-up structure within your business that makes connecting to leads more efficient and effective. Effectively following-up will also help you offer those leads solutions to help turn them into long-term clients.

Creating a Follow-up System That Works Well for Your Business

Here at Broughton Partners, we understand the importance of quality leads and how they are necessary to grow a law firm. However, the only way quality leads can help your law firm grow is if you know how to use them. Becoming successful at turning your leads into clients requires creating a solid lead follow-up system to implement.

First, you need to determine which leads need to be contacted first. Prioritize and then categorize your incoming leads so that you can figure out which leads have the greatest potential and which do not. Some leads will just enter their information while they’re just browsing for information. Others will be more serious about hiring legal services. You determine which leads are more of a priority. Figuring this out will help you create a good follow-up system.

The variables include:

  • Incoming lead volume
  • Quality of incoming lead
  • Site traffic
  • Size and availability of lead intake team

Just as we do here at Broughton partners, we like to involve the office team in the follow-up plan creation because they will be helping handle the intake of leads and turning them into client relationships. It is also important to rely on your CRM software. Customer relationship management software will help you manage your leads and can feed your live chat directly into your records so that you may be able to use your current intake system when vetting prospects during live-chat sessions.

It should be noted that a responsive live chat system is equally important outside of your business office hours. The system should be able to facilitate communication with incoming leads so that they may be contacted as soon as possible when the next business day starts.

Remain Competitive

If you fail to respond to a lead in a timely manner, you’re giving competitor law firms an opportunity to close in on your prospects. More often than not, potential plaintiffs have already completed their own research and formed a strong opinion about the attorney they want to work with. Most clients will speak with a few different law firms before they make their choice. Because of this, it is important to stay accessible to any potential clients who show serious interest in your services.

Understanding what drives the increase or decrease in lead conversions will help you and your firm create a solid plan to keep your practice moving forward and bringing in a steady stream of clients and income. Having an effective and efficient lead response time will help your law firm capitalize on the smart investment of a functional, comprehensive, and strong digital marketing strategy.

Let Us Find Qualified Retainers For Your Law Firm

Law firms looking to save time and money looking for leads may choose to work with a legal marketing company such as Broughton Partners to receive qualified retainers. Our services offer law firms the chance to increase their incoming flow of retained plaintiffs. We use our innovative acquisition platform to find and review potential plaintiffs based on your law firm’s lawsuit criteria.

Don’t settle for just leads, and start connecting with retained claimants from Broughton Partners. Contact us at (800) 949-8904 or fill out an online form to learn more.