She Who Has the Biggest List Wins
Your contact list is one of your most valuable marketing assets. Unfortunately, most firms are not prioritizing building, managing, and growing their contact lists. This is one of the first things that you need to do. I repeat, this is one of the first things that you need to do!
The majority of successful attorneys get much of their business through referrals – whether through other lawyers, past clients, business contacts, friends and family, or other types or referrals.
Unfortunately, like last year’s Super Bowl loser, your referrers may forget about you . You must put effort into staying top-of-mind with these potential referrers, and building, managing, and growing your referral list is the starting point in doing so. It is the foundation of newsletters, enewsletters, firm announcments, and other marketing campaigns.
Contact Acquisition and your Brand
While attracting new clients and referral partners does involve time and effort, it typically, is one of the most cost-effective methods of marketing for you.
However, to be very effective in acquiring your client and referral base, you need to have a defined firm brand and you should know your niche in your area of practice. Else, why would other lawyers or past clients refer business to you? Remember, when other firms or referral partners refer clients to you, it is generally with the expectation that you will provide a successful outcome for this opportunity.
To maximize your contact list and referral efforts, you should have:
- A good understanding of your brand and value proposition for why referrers should recommend or refer business to you.
- What your area of focus is. Remember, if you have many diverse areas of focus, it is questionable whether you have a specialization in any one specific area, and even if you do, most potential referring law firms are looking for some sort of reciprocity.
Contact List Creation
Once you understand and can articulate your firm brand and what you stand for, it is time to focus, in earnest, on building your contact list. There are multiple ways of sourcing and building this list.
Friends and Family: The easiest place to start is family, friends, and people you know. This is the first place to start, and you should identify ten, twenty or more friends and family that can be initial members of your contact list.
Past Clients: It stands to reason that if you provide good service to your clients, they will refer others who have similar needs. 80% of consumer and potential clients rely on the advice of family and friends to make their decisions on selecting a lawyer? Past clients are a great potential source of business, especially if they have had a good experience with your law firm.
Others in the Legal Profession: Whether they be past referring lawyers, alumni from the same law school, or others within your local or state bar association, this is a critical group to think about when building a contact list and a referral network. If you are a member of a local bar association, you should check to see if you can get access to a membership directory for use in marketing.
Other Business Contacts: Chamber of Commerce members and professionals in other disciplines (medicine, banking, insurance, etc.) are the fourth group and, depending on your law practice, may be the most critical. The best way to find these groups is through online research.
Networking Activities: Contacts also can come from your networking activities, your memberships, and your involvement in community organizations like the Chamber of Commerce, The Rotary Club, Business Development Board, Community Redevelopment Agency, Homeowner Association, Urban League, Foundations, Community Centers, Planning and Zoning Boards, University, Animal Rescue, etc.
You might also grow your list by renting or purchasing your lists (realtors, HOAs, doctors, local businesses, etc.) but remember these organizations will typically charge you and there could be some real concerns about renting or purchasing lists – you could damage your brand reputation, the contacts may not want to receive your correspondence, the data may not be accurate or current, and you could be violating terms of service (ex. with email). Buying or renting a mail list may be a viable strategy but make sure you do your homework before purchasing a list. Check to see how often the data is refreshed, how clean is the data, where the data came from, what the costs for list usage are, what the list consists of, and in what format will the data be provided. Remember, you may be able to go to the source of a list versus using a third-party vendor.
CAN-SPAM: Keep in Mind the CAN-SPAM ACT of 2003. The Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2003, signed into law in 2003, established the United States’ first national standards for the sending of commercial e-mail – including what you can send and who you can send it to. More information here.
Also keep in mind the types of messages and content that you are sending. If your only message to your contacts is that you want them to refer your cases, then most likely you will not be successful in your marketing, unless you have a very strong reputation for certain types of cases or in specific areas of law.
Ways to Collect Contact Information and Grow Your Lists
Business Cards: One of the easiest ways to collect contact information is meeting people and getting their business card. You see people everywhere – at dinner, at events, on the courthouse steps. Start an engaging conversation and ask for a business card and give your business card. To maximize the impact, follow up with an email or hand-written note. Don't just let these business cards gather on your desk adding no value to your business. You need to record this information via an intake form or a contact management system (CMS) and start communicating with these contacts.
Intake Forms: Your firm should have a standard contact / client intake form. There are many case management tools that offer a standard intake process. If not, create your own client intake form that meets the needs of your practice. This contact form should include contact details along with relevant incident information (if applicable), and how the contact found your firm (if applicable).
Website Contact Forms: A critical part of your website is your intake form page. The contact forms on your website should be easily visible and accessed from every page of your site.
Other: Again, there are contact management tools on the market that allow you to manage your contacts, but they come at a price. You could also just create and use a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet or Apple Numbers spreadsheet. Typically, when using professional printers / mail houses for physical mail pieces or emails tools such as Constant Contact or Mailchimp, you can upload your contacts via an Excel file or Numbers file. So, if you have your list in a spreadsheet, your data is organized, and is easy to use.
What Contact Information is Necessary
The contact information that you collect depends on your practice and your marketing needs. This does not have to be overly complicated. At a minimum, you should collect: first name, last name, business, address, city, state, zip code and email address. Then, you could add a tag (is the contact a client, an attorney, a friend, etc.), you could add a salutation (Mr., Mrs., Ms., Dr.), you could add a case type or service provided (personal injury, bankruptcy, insurance dispute, contract negotiation, criminal DUI, or a copyright infringement), you could add an industry (environmental, finance, or construction) you could add a birth date, you may need a phone number, or you may add a notes section where you could put information you want to remember about that contact. You may want to track the origination of the contact (case management tool, Outlook, a bar association, etc.). Again, make sure it is information you need and will use.
Contact List Maintenance
Now that you have a client list or referral source list, cleaning, maintaining, and growing your list is especially important. It is a fact that it is more effective to retain a customer / referral than acquire new clients in other ways. If you are going to spend the time, effort, and resources to acquire a contact, why would you abandon the potential of that relationship once acquired? If you do not maintain your contact list, this is exactly what you are doing. Having a defined, ongoing maintenance process is critical.
Try and perform a daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly maintenance on your contact list. This is when you add all those business cards, intake forms and website intake form contacts. The more your practice grows, and your contact list expands, the more effort it will take to keep updated.
Keep in mind that contact list maintenance is not only about adding your contacts. It is also about deleting contacts that are no longer relevant and changing contact information, as needed.
Also note that clients tend to move – we saw this after the 2007-2008 recession and also during the COVID pandemic. Another way to help keep your contact list up to date is to consider using first class postage when mailing, so you can get returns and address updates directly from the postal service. Once you receive this information, make sure to update your contact list (contact management system).
How to Use Your Contact List
The purpose of marketing is to keep your name out there on a regular basis and creating a brand with the goal of getting new clients and referrals partners.
Start by establishing a plan to use and leverage your contact list so that it meets your practice’s needs and goals. Make sure what you send, or email is of value to your contacts. Often, attorneys send what they want contacts to know versus what these contacts actually want. It may be important to share your services, firm news, case results, and industry news. Content that is regular and brief fairs better. You can send your contacts:
- Direct or Mass Mailings – birthday card, holiday card, printed newsletters, firm brochure, collateral pieces, and giveaways
- Digital / Electronic Communication – email, enewsletters, or evites to events, seminars and webinars
Bar Association Advertising & Ethics Rules
It is your responsibility to make sure your list creation and use of lists is compliant with your state’s Bar Association Advertising Rules and Regulations or the American Bar Association (ABA) Model Rules of Professional Conduct.
Best Practices:
- Follow Opt-In Rules – As mentioned above, often when you acquire a list of Bar members, they have already agreed to receive information from you. That is not the case with intake from your website or other methods of getting contacts. Be fully transparent about what users are signing up for and get explicit consent if you are planning on sending marketing emails to these contacts through an opt-in checkbox. Make sure that if you are using your website to capture contact information that you list your privacy policy.
- List Usage – Understand what your list is being used for – Is it for email marketing, direct mailings or both? In most cases, firms will use a combination of email – announcements, enewsletters, etc., and direct mailing – holiday cards.
- List Hygiene – What is worse than no list? A list that is 10 years old and has not been cleaned. Whether it is you or someone else in your firm, make sure that there is a regular process in place to clean your list.
- List Backup – Remember to back up your contact list (contact management system) or make more than one copy to ensure you do not lose information if you experience IT problems.
- List Segmentation – It is very helpful to tag your contacts, so you can group and filter the records. This allows you to send personalized, targeted materials or announcements to specific contacts – i.e., a list for past clients, a list for referring attorneys, etc. Segmenting by location and practice type are also highly beneficial. To enable this segmentation, make sure that you have context for everyone in your list. Are they a past customer? A referring attorney? An alumnus from your law school?, etc. If you receive a business card and there is something you want to remember about a contact, write it on the back side of the card, so you do not lose that information.
- Welcome Email Process – Every month or every quarter, you should send a “Welcome” email. The point of the welcome email is to let someone know that they are on your list and inform them of the types of emails they might receive. This may also be a very good time to introduce (and cross-sell) them to your firm’s various practices, if you handle different types of cases.
- Referral Marketing – As mentioned elsewhere, one reason, if not the main reason, for referral marketing, is to get referrals business, whether the target audience is past clients, attorneys, or other contacts. Make sure that you explicitly tell your audience that you take referral business.
- List Management – Maintaining and updating your list regularly is very important as you add new people, people move, people pass away, and people change companies. You also spent time building this list and you do not want to waste your investment – lists are money! It is best to update your list as you get new information. If you are unable to update as changes come in, a good guide is monthly to once a quarter. Do not go beyond a year to scrub your list for accuracy.
- Linking Email – Address are important. Always remember to ask a prospect, a referral, or a client for their email address. This includes on your website (form or pop-up), calls into the office, or if you are at a networking event. An email address is a lead and is an ongoing way for you to communicate with a contact.
- Don’t “SPAM” your contacts – Understand how often your contact wants to be contacted by you and the type of information that they would find beneficial. Most likely, they don’t want to receive emails every week. Also, realize that past clients and referring attorneys probably want different types of emails.
Costs
Here is a generalized overview of standard list costs:
Costs will vary depending on how you build / source your list. If you buy or rent a list make sure you read the fine print before purchasing as there may be limits on usage or minimum order sizes, etc.). Some charge flat fees, while others charge by the contact.
On average, a mailing list can cost anywhere from $50.00 to upwards of $250.00 per 1,000 names and addresses. On average, email lists can cost anywhere from $200.00 to upwards of $1000.00 per 2,000 2,500 names and addresses.
If your audience is attorneys, you should seek out your local, state, and national bar associations. For members, they often will provide these lists for free.
Beware of cheap lists that you find either for free or for unbelievably low cost online, as these lists could potentially be illegally obtained or unethically compiled.
To maintain “clean” your own lists, plan on an average of $50 per hour for updates.
Building, maintaining, and growing your list can be tedious work but marketing to and growing this list is generally the foundation of a firm’s marketing program and can be difference between a growing successful law firm and one that is struggling to get cases.
