Is Your Law Firm Making Enough Use of Internet Marketing Analytic Tools?

A key benefit of many Internet marketing technologies is that they are highly measurable. That is, all sorts of data potentially useful for business development is generated by everything from website traffic to email marketing campaigns.

Trouble is not all marketers are making use of this analytical data. For example, a recent study referenced by eMarketer shows that while 79% of businesses reported capturing Internet traffic information, only 30% of them actually modified their websites as a result of traffic analysis.

Another area where we see legal marketers falling short is email marketing.

For example, if your firm distributes an email alert on, say, a recent IRS tax ruling that includes a "teaser" introduction with a link to a complete analysis of the ruling on your website, your email marketing software will let you know who opened the email, and more importantly, who clicked the link to read the full article on your website. If the alert went out to 500 clients, and 200 clients opened the email, and then 50 clients clicked through to read the full article, those 50 clients are your "low hanging fruit" who demonstrated a meaningful level of interest in the topic - if they weren't interested, they wouldn't have clicked through!

What a marketer should be doing is exporting a list of the clients who clicked through to read the full article with names, email addresses and phone numbers, handing it to the relevant partner, and telling him or her, "Hi, here's a list of all the clients who were interested in your article on that new IRS tax ruling." Let the partner then decide how best to use this data for business development (e.g., calling some of those clients to inquire whether they require any advice on how the ruling affects their business).

Another interesting angle is integrating your email marketing software with a web analytics tool like Google Analytics. This integration would let you see, for example, where email alert subscribers navigate on your website after clicking through from an email alert or newsletter.