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In this article I'd like to focus on how you can encourage your website visitors to engage with you by taking an action that converts on your website.
To justify its investment your Law firm website needs to generate qualified leads and acquire new clients. There are a number of ways to do this but first let’s define what we mean by “actions & conversions” and conversion rate optimisation.
What are website actions and conversions for law firms?
Actions and conversions refer to something a visitor does on your website as part of their reason for visiting. Once these actions take place they are called a conversion. Here are three examples of actions your visitors could take on your website;
- Completing an online enquiry form
- Downloading a whitepaper or report behind a subscription page.
- Subscribing to a newsletter.
Your conversion rate is a direct reflection of how well you guide your website visitors with the tasks they came to perform.
What is conversion rate optimisation for law firms?
The “conversion rate” is the number of actions through your website, divided by the number of website visitors over a set period of time.
“Conversion rate optimisation”, CRO, consists of a number of techniques that guide potential clients to take an action on your law firm website.
You will find the most effective way to improve your conversion rate is to make small, incremental improvements and analyse what happens over a period of time. That way you can isolate each iteration to see how it’s improved your CRO.
Why you use Conversion Rate Optimisation as part of your law firm marketing mix?
Law firms can get obsessed with the number of visitors to their website using techniques like Search Engine Optimisation. That in itself if fine, but you could be wasting your budget if they are being directed to poorly designed pages, without much thought into who is visiting and appropriate calls to action.
Law firms spend less than 1% of their marketing budget on Conversion Rate Optimisation and the majority getting visitors to their website, with only 3% of visitors converting into customers at best.
Where do we start with website conversions?
Previously we have discussed knowing who your clients are and their intent. When you know this you can specifically target content and actions that appeal to them. Typically this could be whitepaper downloads, this format could be used to gather email addresses before a visitor downloads documents - this is sometimes referred to as "Gated Content".
Nurturing website visitors gives you the opportunity to;
- Weed out poor quality leads.
- Educate your prospects with your expertise.
- Increase transactions with your prospects.
- Help form a relationship.
- Build trust for when they are ready to buy.
What can you do to help your website visitors convert?
You now know website conversions are about guiding specific visitors towards completing a specific action – but how is this achieved?
This can be done with design triggers, a good starting point is removing visual clutter and creating a strong value proposition headline.
- Establish a visual hierarchy of colour or tone that gives users visual cues to the importance of tasks.
- Draw the users' attention with white space around your buttons.
- Add social proof - others have done this and they achieved this.
- Offer them something of real value and helps solve their problem – you know what that is because you have asked them, right?
What to avoid on law firm website landing pages
Law firm web pages often use jargon and complex language, but for your landing pages you should keep it short and use the same language your clients would use.
Most landing pages in the legal industry are not easy to read and your conversion rate could start to reduce if your word count is too high. Again think about the mind set of your potential clients – it’s unlikely they will want to read lots of text in their moments of need.
There is evidence to suggest negative words and emotions could generate lower conversion rates on legal landing pages. So try to emphasise your professionalism and positive outcomes generated by your teams work.
You may want to start making decisions about implementing changes based on what you have uncovered about your clients. Remember, the smaller incremental change the better, that way you can build and test one assumption at a time.
There are too many poorly optimised law firm websites that with basic Conversion Rate Optimisation techniques will see improved performance. After these simple steps a more sophisticated approach can be taken to keep improving conversion rates further.