Have you ever been lost in the forest?
Have you ever been lost, ever?
These days we have an app and a map for almost every journey we take, from raising a child to building a business.
And yet, the one journey that most law firm owners fail to map, is that of their own clients.
Let’s find out why mapping the customer journey is important, how to do it, and then cover how you can expand and apply it in your law firm.
Why Map?
On this page
At first glance, it seems like mapping the customer journey is another marketing mirage.
Mapping the customer journey in your law firm is not an empty gesture, but a legitimate and necessary step to ensuring your marketing’s effectiveness. How can you advance into the future or go anywhere new, if you don’t first establish where you are?
If you define and map the ways marketing brings business to your firm, and then track client experience, then you can measure marketing effectiveness, staff performance, client satisfaction, and find opportunities to reduce costs.
This is especially true today with the still rampant Covid pandemic. It is likely that your map has changed over the course of this past year, considering the forced shift into a more digitized modus operandi thanks to social distancing norms.
How to Map?
The first step to mapping the journey is identifying all the touchpoints and relationships that the law firm has with clients.
Use a timeline of your sales cycle and overlap staff and strategies responsible at each touchpoint.
A typical customer journey should cover these five client touchpoints; Awareness, Acquisition, Consideration, Service, and Loyalty.
Imagine having the answers to these questions;
- Who is seeing your marketing & referring business to your firm? Who is aware of your firm? How can you increase that?
- What makes your clients choose your firm over others? What makes you unique?
- What happens during the consultation that makes clients sign? Is there clarity in your materials, intake structure?
- Are client matters & cases being handled on time? Is there a particular issue that keeps cropping up with a certain paralegal?
- Is there anything your staff can do better?
- What kind of media do clients consume & how can you keep in touch after disbursement?
Well, you can have those answers!
If you turn the above questions around and ask your clients & staff at your firm, you will have the beginnings of not only a customer journey, but also some amazing client experience data that can inform your marketing, guide future strategies, and more.
We have a FREE Client Experience Survey to get you started! -> DOWNLOAD HERE
Going Deeper
When you start documenting the touch points & experiences of your clients, you can see that every interaction matters.
But without editorial control, information overload cancels out the benefits of their being any helpful info to begin with. As a legal marketer working with a law firm, you can’t map out every single moment, but you can look to your staff for guidance.
At Sawaya Law Firm, to answer their top time-wasting questions, they partnered with Consultwebs to create an interactive timeline of their client journey, explaining every step of the way from intake to disbursement, in plain language.
Because I worked in-house at the law firm and personally created this campaign with the partners & Consultwebs, I will say, getting the content for this project took months. Thankfully, you won’t have to spend that much time learning how to do it. I’ll tell you how and in less time…right now!
- Create client survey based on the questions above but adapted for your firm.
- Send out an email to relevant staff at all client touchpoints, and ask them to provide their top ten client FAQs.
- Map out the client timeline against the case life cycle and all relevant touchpoints.
We decided on 14 client touchpoints that we felt could answer the most FAQs, help convert potential clients, pre-qualify leads, speed up consultations, and generate a sense of trust as well as bring down the anxiety of our current clients. Those touchpoints for our auto injury cases were;
Injury
Medical Treatment
Intake
Consultation
Retention Agreement
Creating a Case
Investigations
Case Manager Call
Meet Head Attorney
End of Treatment
Demand Letter
Negotiations
Settlement
Disbursement
Review
- Overlay the FAQ questions from staff, filter out the trends of client questions based on the touch point and then get the partners to answer those top questions as they explain each step.
- Edit these answers to the point that a child can understand them. We used an app called Hemingway – http://www.hemingwayapp.com/ which analyzes your content for grammar and grade level. We never went above an 8th grade reading level, and kept everything as short as possible.
- Once it’s ready to become an interactive timeline, get in touch with us here! We can do this! It’s easy!
3 Steps Towards Personalizing your Customer Experience
Plan your work and work on your plan
Having a strategic marketing plan can position your firm as the leading expert in the legal industry. Additionally, it helps build brand awareness, trust, credibility, improve conversion rates, and it can skyrocket your ROI. Sounds powerful, huh? It is, indeed.
All these benefits (and more) are possible thanks to personalization. With this, your firm should be able to take actionable steps that are in line with the realities of your vision and mission. Before diving in, let’s look at what personalization even is.
Personalization in marketing refers to the process of creating relevant, individualized interaction based on the information your firm learns about its consumers. This concept is creating a buzz in today’s world because clients expect a unique customer experience based on their pains and desires. According to recent customer analysis, the vast majority of consumers (80%) said they are more likely to make a purchase when businesses provide a personalized experience. In addition to this, 91% said they are more likely to do business with companies that remember, recognize, and provide them with relevant recommendations and offers.
To put things into perspective a little more, just think back to the times you went to a business, and they called you by name or remembered your accomplishments or preferences; it feels nice to be recognized! Your audience is no different. Because of this, your firm should plan the work towards a more personalized customer experience. Don’t know where to start? Here are some ideas.
Step 1: Start the process of market segmentation
Most firms start off with a buyer persona. In it, you can include information like demographics and interests. This is a great starting point, but you can take it up another level with segmentation.
Segmentation is the process of using data to re-organize broad customer personas according to shared characteristics. For example, you can divide audiences in line with their different purchasing habits or their level of interaction with your firm. Let’s look at a real case scenario.
Let’s say Bob and Linda are both interested in your family law firm. On the one hand, Linda is starting to go through major life changes, including the possibility of filing for a no-fault divorce or legal separation. She is searching the web for questions like, “what are the legal grounds for obtaining a divorce?” Or “What is the cost of divorce, and how long does it take?”
On the other hand, Bob is already in the process of divorce, but he is looking for more information with regards to property and business division. He is searching the web for questions like, “My ex-partner and I own a business together. Do we need to have an outside expert evaluate who stays with what?”
Although both Bob and Linda are interested in the services of a family law firm, they have separate wants and needs. Linda is at the initial stages of gaining awareness and gathering information. She is probably comparing and contrasting your firm with other firms. Meanwhile, Bob is aware there’s a problem and needs more specific actionable steps. He is perhaps checking more specialized pages on your website.
In order to start the creation of a killer personalized strategy that meets the desires of users, like Bob and Linda, it’s better to take a step back to analyze and organize the existing customer data. You can start off by dividing audiences according to the four different types of market segmentation.
- Demographic segmentation: (Focuses on the who) This is the most straightforward segmentation. It classifies audiences by age, gender, income, level of education, profession, etc.
- Psychographic segmentation: (Focuses on the why) Segmenting different personalities and interests. You can define the audience by hobbies, personality traits, values, beliefs, and lifestyles.
- Geographic segmentation: (Focuses on the where) This includes grouping people according to their locations, i.e., county, cities, regions, etc.
- Behavioral segmentation: (Focuses on the how) You can gather this data through your website analytics and additional marketing channels. Here you can check for the customers’ spending habits, click behavior, browsing habits, level of loyalty to your firm, and any other ratings/reviews they’ve left.
- Specific metrics you can find on your website’s backend include time spent on your site, pages visited, referral source, exit intent, and the number of sessions.
Step 2: Craft tailored messages with your content
Besides segmenting, it’s important your content targets all the audiences with a tailored messaging strategy.
While there are numerous ways you can perfect your content game, we’ll focus on a website and email strategy because these two channels are some of the top ways you’re able to control your own voice to capture and nurture different kinds of leads.
- Converting CTAs: Adding calls to action in the first person enhances the user’s perspective rather than the business’s perspective. Plus, first-person CTAs have a 90% better conversion rate! Make sure to add words like “me, my, I, you.” Make it all about the client.
- Add content recommendations according to their interests: Use your existing data to show the content they are most likely interested in. Let’s take another look at the case of Bob and Linda. Since Linda is at the early awareness stage, you can offer more content in regards to what divorce entails, what the process is, etc. On the other hand, Bob can be redirected to, e.g., your blog post content that details the basic principles of property/business division or suggests a consultation with your experts.
- Personalize emails and landing pages: Think of the landing pages and emails as you rolling out the red carpet for clients to walk in. Once you segment the audiences, you can create different landing pages according to their needs. Additionally, you can create email series and landing pages that are in line with past behavior on your site, geo-location, and any other segmentations. There’s no single approach to this. Just remain flexible and A/B test. The possibilities are endless!
- Timing your content: Be there “at the right place, at the right time.” Certain days are proven to be better than others when you send out content. According to email marketing data: Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays have a higher open rate. As for the timing, the middle of the day works best. However, feel free to test other days and times. Just like emails and landing pages, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach. It’s a matter of A/B testing.
- Set up trigger emails: Trigger emails have a 152% higher open rate compared to traditional emails. They can be automated by the different actions users take, i.e., welcome emails, re-engagement emails, cross-selling emails, abandoned shopping cart emails, birthday emails, etc.
Step 3: Add relevancy
Nowadays clients have enough options to pick from; what they are looking for is the best – not the cheapest. To be the best and offer the best, it’s necessary to tap into what your prospects are truly after. Relevancy refers to how fitting your services are to the wants and needs of the users.
Besides seeking the best option, clients want to feel seen and heard. Today, they are more inclined to try many brands and services and only stick to a brand if and only if their needs are constantly met. Harvard Business Review points out that businesses shouldn’t focus on a customer archetype (a buyer persona) but rather segment audiences to meet them at the right place, at the right time (louder for the people in the back: and this is relevancy.).
Due to the immense control and choice clients have over their purchasing journey today, Harvard Business Review suggests businesses meet the different buyers through this new Maslow’s hierarchy of needs:
- Purpose: clients feel your firm shares and advance their values.
- Pride: They feel inspired to use your services.
- Partnership: Make sure they can relate to you and they can work well with your team.
- Protection: When you make sure consumers feel secure when doing business with you.
- Personalization: This is considered an addition to the traditional hierarchy. With personalization, clients should feel their experience with your firm is constantly being tailored to meet their needs.
Build an ongoing relationship
In this day and age, adding personalization into your businesses’ vocabulary will help you stay relevant and reach more customers. In fact, it can propel you to shift towards a more focused mindset.
Although we have been able to share some top actionable steps today towards personalization, it requires more than a one-size-fits-all approach. If you’d like to learn how your firm can offer personalized content that’ll recharge the client’s user experience and connect more calls and cases, let’s talk.
