Driving traffic to your website is one thing; turning that traffic into paying clients is quite another. In his recent ElderLawAnswers webinar, web content expert Alex Valencia explained some tried-and-true tools for converting visitors to a firm’s website into clients or at least “happy brand ambassadors.”
Valencia, who is co-owner of WeDoWebContent.com, said that the concept of a “lead magnet” on a firm’s website is the keystone to converting visitors into clients.
DigitalMarketer.com defines a lead magnet as “an irresistible bribe offering a specific chunk of value to a prospect in exchange for their contact information.” Think of the lead magnet as the start of a relationship – a dangling carrot that offers value that site visitors can take with them and that gives the firm their email address in return, which the firm can use to deliver additional content and eventually convert them into clients. The practice area of elder law is ripe for these types of “nurtured leads,” Valencia stressed, because elder law clients are long-term, not short-term. Firms can continue educating and informing their site visitors and have them come back for more information again and again.
Valencia highlighted the following statistics from the online marketer Hubspot: “Companies using email to nurture leads generate 50% more sales-ready leads and at 33% lower cost And nurtured leads, on average, produce a 20% increase in sales opportunities compared to non-nurtured leads.”
The idea is “to keep [the site visitor] engaged and create that brand awareness,” Valencia added.
Location, Location, Location
The first thing to do is to identify your high-traffic pages and create magnets for the users that are landing on those pages. They are coming there anyway, so why not give them something additional? A lead magnet could be a checklist (“Five Essentials for Your Elder Parent’s Move to a Nursing Home”) or an e-guide (“Seven Myths About Medicaid”), or it could be a webinar on a topic of interest to potential clients. Whatever it is, it should leave the user wanting more information.
Once you’ve positioned the lead magnet on your site, Valencia believes that the best way to deliver it is as an attachment through email. You can use a link or host the download in something like Dropbox or Google Docs, but “I’d stick to email,” he advised. “That way you can track it and see everything that’s coming through.”
The nurturing relationship might go something like this: Email #1: an eguide. Email #2: “Thank you for downloading the ebook, here’s a link to a recent blog post on something specific to elder law.” Email #3: “Here’s an additional content offer," possibly something in reference to the eguide, or an invitation to schedule a consultation. Using an automated email system from a provider (see below for names), you can schedule the messages at preset intervals. “It depends on how aggressive you want to be and how the user is responding to it,” said Valencia.
Seven Emails, Tops
As a rule of thumb, Valencia said it’s not a good idea to go beyond about seven emails, and the emails should be spread out over a total of about two weeks so the user has time to absorb them and doesn’t feel overwhelmed or harassed. And at some point you want to deliver an email that invites them to your social channels and to your newsletter because those don’t end.
The series of emails and responses are all automated. Depending on which links in the email the user clicks on, they may fall into a different marketing funnel, a switch the autoresponder does internally through the email marketing system. “You can get super-targeted based on what they’re downloading,” Valencia said.
As for the names of services to do all this, Valencia ticked off Infusionsoft, MailChimp, Drip, Constant Contact, ActiveCampaign, VerticalResponse, and Campaign Monitor. Valencia mostly uses Infusionsoft, which he said has robust capabilities. But he added that it’s pricey -- $2,000 at minimum, which includes someone to train you to use the system and help you develop a few campaigns. Valencia said his own firm can offer lead magnets that start at $145 and go up to $6,000, depending on the design factors and how much content is developed, and then the email marketing campaign itself costs about $85 an hour. A seven-email sequence would take about 15 hours. Valencia’s company built a full-featured autoresponder system for a law firm doing Social Security work that he said increased the firm’s client retention by 42 percent in the first month and a half.
However, Valencia said firms may want to get their feet wet with a test of a simple lead magnet like a checklist using a less expensive service like Constant Contact, which he said would be free or $69 a month to use their autoresponder system.
Valencia’s webinar is part of an ongoing series of webinars titled “The Elder Law Marketing Funnel.” For more information about the funnel and upcoming and past webinars, click here.
To view Valencia’s 44-minute webinar, click here.
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