How To Increase Your New Cases By 87% Without Spending An Extra Dime

There are only two ways that I know, excluding referrals, to increase your case intakes:

1) Spend more money on your marketing efforts to obtain new leads or

2) Increase your conversion rate of the leads you’re already getting.
In this article I want to discuss a way to get more new leads without spending more money. I also want to show you how to increase your conversion of the leads you’re already getting without incurring any extra costs.

Increase The Number Of Leads

Let’s look at a hypothetical law firm “ABC”. They are taking in 400 leads per month on a monthly basis. They have a 25 percent conversion rate, thus they are signing up 100 cases per month. Now if they could increase those leads by 30 percent that would increase their number of leads to 520 versus 400.

So the question is: How can we do that without spending extra money? Well, the answer is quite simple.

Track What Is Working & Reallocate Your Marketing Budget Accordingly
You can ask people when they call you what prompted them to give you a call. I’ve been told often that people always lie about this. But I think one way you can get a more accurate indicator is to ask them what they were looking at when they dialed your number. This will give you a better objective sign of what the source of the phone call truly is when they call you. So although this is of little or no cost to you, other than your time, you can see that by reallocating your marketing budget to what’s working you could increase your cases significantly.

In the hypothetical example above, let’s say that “ABC” law firm is spending $50,000 per month on marketing which gives them a general overall cost of $125 per lead and an overall cost of $500 per case if they have a 25 percent conversion rate.

Let’s further assume that $25,000 of their marketing budget is spent on TV with a cost per lead of $260 and a cost per case of $800, and they get in 31 cases per month.

“ABC” Law firm Monthly Advertising Stats
$50,000 Monthly Spend 25% CONVERSION RATE

Let’s further assume that they are spending $10,000 on the SEO of their website which generates a $56 cost per lead and a $225 cost per case which equals 48 new cases a month.

They also are spending $10,000 on pay-per-click which renders $150 cost per lead and a $600 cost per case with a total of 17 cases per month. Lastly, assume they spend $5,000 on promos, donations and things of that sort, and they generate 16 leads per month which is a cost of $310 per lead and $1,250 per case for a total of 97 cases.

Reallocation

If we readjusted the budget and went from $25,000 to $10,000 for TV, you would only generate 13 cases. Then, if you upped your budget on SEO from $10,000 to $20,000, your allocation would be doubled but your case intake would be 88 and instead of $10,000 you spend $15,000 on pay-per-click which would generate 25 cases versus 17 cases. So you can experience an extra 120 leads per month with the same $50,000 budget times a 25 percent conversion rate would equal 131 which would be 34 more cases per month.
$50,000 Monthly Spend Reallocation of Budget
25% CONVERSION RATE

NOTE: Monthly leads increased from 387 to 528. This represents a 36% increase in new leads. New cases increased from 97 to 131 which is a 36% increase in new cases.

So you’re asking yourself, okay, this has increased it by 30 percent but you stated that we could double our new case intakes in four steps. Well, that is true. The above is only one step – there are three more steps you can take that will double your case intake.

Increase Conversions

The second step to double your case intakes is to increase your conversions. In our imaginary law firm above, we had a 25 percent conversion rate. What if we could increase that to 30 or even 40 percent? The first place to start is the intake process itself. You must be very careful in your selection of staff and test them for aptitude, as well as an outgoing and sympathetic personality. You also want to script out what they are to say and train them using role play. This will increase their ability to be a closer and get intakes converted to new cases. You can also choose to use “ghost calling”. This is no more than an imaginary client which you can do yourself or hire somebody like Chris Mullins or Ryan Pitz to do it for you and record it. Finally, have weekly accountability sessions with your intake staff to make sure they understand that by increasing just 5 percent with 400 leads could lead to 20 more cases, 10 percent to 40 more and so on.

$50,000 Monthly Spend Reallocation of Budget
30% CONVERSION RATE

The third thing you can do is improve your homepage conversion on your website or create a better one altogether. You can do this by using certain colors, a change in layout, having a great call to action and simply keeping the homepage clutter-free. The same can be done on your pay-per-click advertisements. By split testing headlines and landing pages, using video on some, having strong calls to action, split testing your opt-ins and monitoring the click-through rates for your PPC ads, you can increase the conversion rates. You must remember though, the key to split testing is that you must only test the conversion rates of these pages by A/B split testing one variable at a time. If not, you won’t know what really increased the conversion rate so you won’t know what you need to modify. This should be an ongoing monthly plan of attack.

The fourth thing you can do to increase conversions is use follow-up sequences for new leads. You should an opt-in on your website which leads into 5 to 7 follow-up emails or auto responders that offer or deliver special free reports. This will enable you to get the lead or at the very least get them to feel that they can trust you. You want to become the authority. You want to become their friend. You want to become their trusted legal advisor. By doing this you can increase your conversions twofold if not three or fourfold over a period of time along with using A/B split testing.

If you take the hypothetical law firm we had above and we increase the leads from 400 to 520, we add an extra 120 leads. But what if we increased the conversion rate to say 35 percent from the 25 percent that the imaginary law firm was doing? By doing all the things outlined above, you would get 183 new cases that would convert out of 520, thus you have nearly doubled your new cases by following these four simple and inexpensive steps for handling your intakes.

$50,000 Monthly Spend Reallocation of Budget
35% CONVERSION RATE

This is just one of the subjects that we cover in our Mastermind meetings and other PILMMA events including our Internet Domination Boot Camp for Lawyers coming up in September. Hope you take these steps into consideration and start implementing them in some way shape or form now. These four simple steps can make all the difference in the growth of your caseload.