Law Practice Tip: Understand Your Conversions

Do you know where your clients are coming from? How did they find you?

Lawyers spend thousands of dollars trying to get new clients in the door every year. Plenty of channels exist to help you find clients: the Yellow Pages, Internet advertising, newspaper ads, and television commercials have all become familiar turf for attorney marketing. But how do you know which channel will work the best for you? Unless you know how the cost per acquisition for each channel you invest in, and you know exactly how much profit you made from that one case, your marketing efforts are probably far less than optimal.

So, what can you do to get a handle on your finances?

1. Figure out how much money you allocate to each marketing channel each month.
2. Find out how many leads vs. paying clients come from each.
3. Find out how much money you are able to make on each paying client, per channel.

For example. You spend $1000 per month to place your ad in the Yellow Pages. That ad brings in 15 leads. Of those 15 leads, only 4 turn into paying clients. And (for simplicity’s sake) each of those paying cases earns you $500.

Once you have this knowledge, you can calculate the following for each marketing effort:

• Conversion rate: How many leads do you have to push through before you secure a paying client?
• Effectiveness: How profitable is each channel? This is your return on investment (ROI).
• Concentration: Which marketing channel provides the best ROI?

Once you determine your conversion rate, effectiveness, and concentration, you will be able to make an informed decision to focus your marketing budget on proven marketing methods. Methods that, by reviewing your data, you know will work. By doing this, you can maximize your ROI, save yourself the headache of worrying over ineffective marketing channels, and (most importantly) stop wasting money on dead-end advertising efforts.

Want to go a step further? Start tracking where your quality clients are coming from.

While “quality” is a relative term, it can also be an extremely useful one—but you will need to define it. So before you get started, decide what a “quality client” means to you. From there, you can work out the perfect intersection between the marketing efforts that provide you with 1) the greatest number of quality clients and 2) the best return on your investment.  

Authored by Peter Clarke, Content Manger for LegalMatch.com.