We’ve spent this month talking about the things you should be doing to win and increase repeat business. Namely, we’ve been talking about the benefits of communicating regularly and meaningfully with your former clients to create a welcoming environment for them to re-engage with your firm.
Which brings us to this week’s topic. What not to do when you’re communicating with your clients. Continue reading below to find out what your clients hate to receive or, at the very least, ignore when it shows up in their inbox.
Communication Meant For Someone Else
All clients aren’t created equal. Some are businesses, some are individuals. Some are 65-year-old insurance executives with real estate conveyancing needs while others are medium-sized firms with bill collection issues. You wouldn’t provide the same service to each of your unique clients, so why would you use the same marketing material?
Instead of sending all of your former clients the same communications that can’t possibly apply to all of them, segment your email list into groups that make sense. How exactly you do that will depend on the nature of your firm, but at the very least you want to create groups with common pain points and needs.
Once you’ve segmented your email list, send each segment a communication that actually matters to them. Send your small business clients emails about how to find a good bookkeeper. Send your real estate clients information about how to reduce their property taxes. Each segment should receive communication that is relevant and personal to them.
Communication Meant For You
Some firms make the mistake of confusing what’s important to themselves with what’s important to their clients. Did your firm just celebrate an anniversary? Well, that’s all well and good, but why should your clients care? Unless you can find a way to make that anniversary matter to your clients, don’t even bother to inform them of it. Your marketing needs to speak to your clients, not to you.
Communication Meant For Everyone
Similar to our first point, communications meant for everyone are emails and letters that are so bland they could, theoretically, be sent to anyone. The problem with these sorts of communications is that they don’t engage anyone.
In order to speak to someone, communications must give them something of value. And different kinds of clients find very different things valuable. So if you find yourself sending communications, like emails and letters, that contain identical content to all of your clients, take a closer look at how you could personalize and segment your client list into smaller groups.
Final Thoughts
There are wrong ways to reach out to your clients. Failing to treat them as individuals with their own unique business and legal needs is one of those wrong ways. Look for ways that you can increase the specificity of your emails and letters in order to increase the effectiveness of your communications.