Is y
our website all beauty and no brains?
Worse yet, is your site ugly and dumb? I may sound a bit harsh, but I will explain fur
ther. Basically, a pretty website is useless if it doesn't help to accomplish useful tasks. We call these electronic brochures. This same idea extends to your legal website contact form.
The Basic Contact Form
The overwhelming trend for most legal professional's websites tend to be a static contact form that collects basic information about a potential client. The client enters their name, email, phone number and a brief description of their problem. While these are essential elements necessary for the legal professional to contact the potential client, a great deal of opportunity is lost in the process.
The Intelligent Contact Form
An intelligent contact form does much more than collect a few pieces of information from a potential client and email a notification to the legal professional. It is crucial for the legal professional to remember that the act of completing a contact form is an invitation to deepen the business relationship between the legal professional and the potential client. As such, you must seize the moment and maximize subsequent contacts.
Sample of an Intelligent Form
Consider the following sample of an intelligent contact form. It is a very scaled down version of a contact form that may be used at a family law firm. It is semi-functional so that you can try it out. This form will not record any of your information.
Multiple Objectives
As you can see, the intelligent form is much more capable than the basic contact form. Here, we can integrate marketing processes (with the potential client's consent), segmentation, and a seamless user experience.
Backend Processing
In future posts, I will demonstrate ways to make this simple contact form a tool for a powerful first impression and the foundation for structured, systematic marketing techniques. Some of the possibilities include the automatic interim delivery of eye-catching legal information emails based on the client's specific selections, in-house recursory conflict checking, multiple attorney/paralegal notification, persona-driven design integration, and much more.
Summary
As you can see, the contact form process can be used to seamlessly integrate complex procedures while providing a comfortable and enjoyable experience to your potential client.