Marketing Effectiveness for Process Servers & PIs
Identify your most effective marketing and advertising initiatives
What is Marketing Effectiveness?
There are a number of ways to market your legal services, investigation or process serving business. Options include print media, direct mail and of course, the Internet. As you spend more and more on marketing your business, it is of utmost importance to know which advertising initiatives are having positive results and which are not. Tracking the results of your marketing efforts is known as “Marketing Effectiveness”.
Outlined below are a number of marketing effectiveness components in which process servers and investigators should engage.
Answer the Phone
A process server’s, lifeline to new customers is the telephone. Regardless of how much you market your company, if you don’t answer your calls it is unlikely the full value of your advertising will be realized.
Missing a phone call can mean missing a high margin rush serve, investigative case or losing out on a potential long-term client. In many cases, lawyers and paralegals don’t have time to wait for you to call them back. If you don’t pick up your phone it is very likely that they will not leave a message and will contact another process server.
Many process serving companies are small businesses, making it impossible to be in the office to answer phones during the day.
“When I first started my company I had an answering machine to take calls while I was away from the office. I would come home and see numerous missed calls, but no messages,” says Keith Hollen of Eagle Eye Detective Agency in Charlotte North Carolina. “Now we make sure that when we leave the office the phone calls are forwarded to our cell phones so we can answer any time. This has improved our business very much.”
A missed call is a missed opportunity, and this is clear to the industry as a whole. According to a poll in the ServeNow.com Process Servers Group, 83% of process servers state that their phones are answered by a live person at least 75% of the time.
(View current poll results – you must be a member of the Yahoo! Group – it’s free)
Track your Calls
Tracking where your customers find you is vital to your marketing effectiveness. The calls come in, but where are they coming from? Tracking your calls determines what is working and what is not and the only way to get this information is by asking.
This sounds easy, but getting accurate information can be much more difficult than it sounds.
With traditional marketing such as trade journals or magazines, tracking the response is easy. When a customer is staring at your ad on paper they know where they found it. Online, it isn’t as simple.
The nature of the Internet (a “web” of sites) can make it difficult to track your online marketing. Customers do not always remember the path they took to find your phone number. They may have visited five or six sites before actually finding your contact information. When you ask, they may say, “I found you on Google” or “I found your web site.” Does that mean they did a search for “dallas process server” and found your web site in the search results? Or, did they find a site where you advertise?
You may not even have a web site, which means they found your information elsewhere – but where exactly?
“If you can accurately assess where your customers are finding you 50% of the time or more, we feel you are doing a good job,” states ServeNow.com co-founder, Adam Camras.
Asking the Question – How did you find me?
The job of a lawyer or paralegal can be very hectic – they may not know where they found you. Therefore, some are hesitant to ask.
It can be fairly easy, however, to present this topic in a way that won’t annoy or put off your client. For example:
“Thank you for your business. We are marketing our business in a number of ways. Would you mind telling me how you found us today?”
Some people will know exactly how they found you and will be quick to respond. If they are not exactly sure where they found you, its probably best not probe too much. Asking them for more details could be frustrating.
In another poll in the ServeNow.com Yahoo Group, 52% of process servers stated they always ask their customers how they found them, while 18% said they never ask. (View the current results)
Training your Staff
Many of you are fortunate to have hard-working and dedicated front office staff that are the lifeline of your business. They are the people answering your phones and interacting with your clients. As you spend more to generate new business, you must educate them on the importance of tracking your marketing results.
Having a place where they can aggregate this data, such as a spreadsheet or call sheet, is a good way to achieve this. In addition, having a sheet in front of you will serve as a reminder to ask your customers where they found you. Here is an example of a call sheet you can download and print: Call Tracking Sheet to Download: Call Tracking Spreadsheet (PDF)
Results of our Marketing Polls
The ServeNow.com Yahoo Group is a group of nearly 700 process servers throughout the U.S. and worldwide. The group was asked a number of questions related to their marketing practices. Please click on the poll question to view the current poll results.
Note: you must be a member of the group to view the results – it’s free to join. Click here to join.
• What percentage of new customers contact you VIA EMAIL rather than phone?
• What percentage of your phone calls are answered by a live person?
• When your customers call, do you ask them how they found you?
• How much do you spend per month on advertising your process serving business?
• Where do you advertise?
• Do you feel you know which marketing initiatives are working best for you?
If you would like more information on Marketing Effectiveness, or if you are interested in getting listed on the ServeNow.com Process Server Directory, please contact us via email at info@serve-now.com or toll free at (877) 737-8366.