Referrals Are The Best Clients… Why Aren’t You Getting More?

Yeah, yeah, I know you get lots of referrals…

…but do you get 80% of all your new clients from past Client referrals? Aha! I thought not.

Is this even possible?

Just ask Jeff Witten, a car accident attorney out of the vancouver, canada area about how he uses a monthly newsletter to his past clients that gets him 75-80% of ALL HIS NEW BUSINESS.

What if you didn’t need to spend thousands monthly on yellow pages, SEO, google pay per click, jailer mailers, TV, radio, billboards, facebook, twitter, or other black box marketing?

Black Box Marketing (adverb, noun): A marketing method Or media in which an attorney puts money in, but what comes out is not tracked, makes no sense, doesn’t correlate to actual money made or lost, and isn’t much but a trickle of some brown, nasty liquid, not clients.

I am sure you agree that the highest quality, best clients you’ve ever retained were from referrals – either other attorneys, past clients, or friends / family of past clients referred these people to you.

You didn’t have to pay to get them – they just showed up, signed up, and you made money with a smile on your face.

So why not FOCUS ON getting more referrals from past clients and other sources? If they’re the best clients, then this should be your focus, not an afterthought.

Here’s how to do it:

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*Send out a monthly printed newsletter by post office MAIL, not just EMAIL. YES, by physical, paper and ink mail, once a month, to all your past clients.

So how many past clients DO you have from the past 2 years, for instance? (these are the most likely people To be still contactable by mail)

Average answer I get is 200 clients (100 / yr). Let’s look at the costs to keep your name in front of these people:

200 people * $1.50 per newsletter, including postage = $300 per month.

If you get 1 referral every 3 months, you’ll break even from this activity – maybe even 1 referral every 4 months.

But here’s what actually happens…

Your past client, John Smith isn’t just an orphan. He has an extended family, possibly a wife and kids, maybe his parents are alive, maybe he’s got sisters, brothers, cousins, people at work, on Facebook, and in his social circles.

You represented John a year ago on a DUI case and got him a good result he was happy with. Now John starts getting your monthly newsletter and nothing happens… but in month 3 of getting your newsletter, his cousin Mike Jones gets into a fight with his girlfriend, it gets loud, and the police are called.

Mike gets arrested and charged with domestic violence and is freaking out. He ends up on John’s couch because there’s an order of protection and he can’t go home. John tells him, “look Mike, call my guy Attorney XYZ. He helped me out on when I got busted for DUI – here’s his info – call him”.

Voila! Referral to you when John might easily have instead said, “Mike, I had this guy who helped me out a year ago, but I don’t remember his name… I think it was… ahh, nevermind, just look on the computer and you’ll find someone”.

What Should Your Newsletter Contain?

Since you’re likely to be extremely busy day to day, I know you’re not going to be writing up a whole newsletter each month and sending it out yourself.

Here’s how to cut down the workload to almost nothing:

Ideal newsletters are mini Reader’s Digest-type publications. They are a predetermined, template-based affair, consisting of:

  • A recipe
  • a crossword puzzle, Sudoku, and a word jumble
  • an article & pictures about a current celebrity or event
  • an article / pictures about a current legal event you comment on
  • an article on what’s going on with your firm or personal life
  • an ad for your practice, prominently placed, but not intrusive

This format appeals to a wide swath of people with varied interests, it isn’t pushy, it’s informative, interesting, entertaining, and keeps your name in front of your past clients without boring or scaring them to death about legal issues.

All you have to do is take a current legal event in the news and comment on it from your perspective and write a short article about what you and/or your practice and what’s new with you.

Not hard at all – takes about 60 minutes a month… LITERALLY.

You write the 2 articles, get stock recipes, crosswords, etc from a databank of this stuff, and hand it to your secretary to assemble and mail out.

What’s that? You don’t have time to write, assemble, and mail out a newsletter to your past clients or you want a referral on who can get this done for you so you have to do nothing?

Richard Jacobs
Author: “Secrets of Attorney Marketing
Law School Dares Not Teach”
(now available on Amazon)
Speakeasy Authority Marketing
Call me: <888> 225 – 8594