Emails: Only some firms send regular updates
A “significant proportion” of large law firms are investing in content or ‘inbound’ marketing schemes that “simply do not work as they should” and could even be damaging their reputation, a report has found.
Researchers said a “staggering” 19% of top 100 law firms let people sign up for legal updates – often with quite complex preference forms – only to never actually send any.
Marketing consultancy ThoughtSpark said it was essential for law firms to develop inbound strategies to “engage and retain potential clients”, leveraging platforms and data to build a relationship in the digital world before any direct contact is made. Firms agreed with its importance.
“The essence of inbound marketing for legal professionals is to share a limited but engaging element of the law firm’s expertise with prospective customers.
“This could take the form of expert legal updates on core topics and sectors, where interested parties are invited to sign up directly and register on a firm’s website for the areas that are most interesting to them.
“The firm can then send each registrant relevant updates on a regular basis – personalised to their areas of interest.”
Researchers found that three quarters of the top 20 firms and 69% of the top 100 as a whole offered email sign-up for case/subject updates.
It was “not a problem” that the top 20 firms favoured weekly updates and the top 100 as a whole monthly, since larger firms had more to communicate.
However, only 38% of the top 100 firms sent updates at a consistent interval, rising to half among the top 20.
“The remaining businesses demonstrate an astonishing underlying level of poor practice. A staggering 19% of top 100 firms allow interested parties to sign up for legal updates