In today’s digital world, legal leads can emerge from a variety of marketing channels, including phone, web, chat, email and even text. What’s more, these leads can come in any day and at any time.In order to effectively capture and convert leads from each of these unique sources, law firms need to implement comprehensive intake practices – or risk losing valuable clients. With the right guidelines in place, you can efficiently handle leads from every marketing channel used by your firm, thus increasing your marketing return on investment (ROI).

The Value of Timely and Efficient Responses

Numerous studies have shown that reducing delays in your lead response time is one of the most critical factors in closing a sale. The longer you take to reply to a lead, the colder it gets, which ultimately hurts your conversion rate.

About 35 percent of the time, phone calls from prospective clients go unanswered, as reported by Lexicata. Instead, the caller may receive an automated message or get transferred to voicemail. Additionally, law firms take an average of three or more days to respond to leads 42 percent of the time. If your prospects don’t receive a prompt response, they will simply move on to the next firm. That sort of delay contributes to lost opportunity and negatively impacts your firm’s reputation.

Fortunately, these statistics reveal specific problems that are fairly simple to fix by acquiring the right level of support.

Capturing Phone, Web and Chat Leads

While responding promptly and strategically to each inquiry may seem simple, your legal staff is likely already consumed with other tasks that require their specialized skills. In addition, many attorneys are swamped with work as it is, which leads to a reliance on voicemail, lost messages, and unanswered inquiries. With their time already spent, and no overflow or after-hours support, firms risk letting valuable leads go cold and missing out on revenue. Below are effective ways to capture leads that come in through phone, web or chat.

Phone Leads

The best solution to handling phone calls from potential clients is to acquire 24/7/365 support from expert legal intake specialists. This allows you to provide a live response to every caller, improving your ability to immediately capture leads and convert them on the initial call.

In most cases, legal answering services can answer phone calls with minimal delay. At Alert, for instance, we can respond with live answer solutions within 15 seconds or in less than three rings. We take it a step further by providing Spanish language support. Forty percent of our call agents are bilingual, which means we can answer calls in either English or Spanish to help you better communicate with your prospects.

Web and Chat Inquiries

When it comes to web and chat inquiries, timeliness is also key. Firms should respond to these messages with an immediate, outbound call to prevent those prospective clients from losing interest and shopping around. This is an area where Alert also excels. Our intake specialists combine live outbound calls with text- and email-based responses to reach prospects through the various platforms they use. We also focus on persistence, “chasing” or following up with leads we are unable to reach on the first try. This perseverance pays off, usually enabling firms to increase web conversion rates from 42% up to 75%.

Setting Up Support Services

Understandably, law firms are busy and can’t always capture every incoming lead from their various marketing channels. That’s where Alert Communications comes in. Outfitted with the latest technology and staffed by legal intake conversion experts, we have served thousands of attorneys and firms, aiming for a 99% lead capture benchmark for all clients. We are poised to help your law firm fill in the gaps and capture more legal marketing leads, increasing client conversions and maximizing your marketing ROI.