Effective web forms tend to accomplish more than just one objective for your practice. Beyond their basic intention to help potential clients get in touch with you, an optimized web form can keep you more organized, deliver invaluable data points about your leads, and help you to drive more business to your practice.
Read on for tips on creating the most effective web form for your practice based on your business goals.
Choosing the Best Web Form for Your Business Goals
Forms can be used for a variety of purposes throughout your law firm website. They can help encourage potential new clients to contact you, help with client intake once someone is already engaged, or facilitate client communication throughout their time with your firm.
The most basic type of web form is a contact form that helps potential clients get in touch with you. Offering a variety of ways to contact your firm in addition to phone and email makes you more accessible to your potential clients and increases the chances of contact. If potential clients don’t pick up the phone to call you, there’s a good chance they’ll contact you through your law firm’s website.
However, contact forms are just one way in which you can incorporate forms into your website to engage with potential clients. Other types of forms can help you collect newsletter subscriptions, initiate a drip marketing campaign, or administer gated content. Based on your goals and objectives, you may choose to use a variety of form types to engage potential clients on your website. Regardless of their purpose, effective web forms share a few common features.
Setting Your Web Form Up for Success
In order for your web forms to be successful, they need additional support. For example, the web form needs to be part of a compelling webpage on your law firm website. An effective web form cannot exist in a vacuum, instead it relies on a page with high-quality content to achieve its purpose.
The page or pages where you feature web forms should have:
- A clear directive. The page and the form should be easy for a potential client to navigate, understand, and use.
- An obvious answer to “why” a potential client should complete the form. Whether the purpose of the form is to get in touch with you or to subscribe to your newsletter, the call-to-action should be clear and to the point.
Crafting an Effective Web Form
After understanding what type of web form will best serve your goals and the best page(s) on your website to host the form, your next step is to start creating.
While crafting your web form, there are a few things to keep in mind such as:
- Providing a timeline. For example, giving potential clients a timeline on how long it will take for you to respond to their request helps to set expectations. This will not only put the potential client at ease, but will also work to deter them from moving on to your competition.
- Communication regarding how their information will be used. Your potential client should be able to understand what happens to their information once submitted, who is receiving it, where it’s going, and what their next steps are.
- What type of data you’re looking to capture. For some forms, a simple name and email will be enough to achieve its purpose. However, if your goal is to have a better understanding of where your potential clients are originating, you may create an additional field that asks how they heard about your firm. Or, if you’re looking to get a head start on your intake process, you may request a potential client to choose from a list of your practice areas the one that relates to their legal problem.
Supporting Your Web Form
In order for your web forms to be successful, they can’t act on their own. Once a potential client or client has submitted information, it’s important that your law firm can deliver on whatever promise that form makes. To do this, you will need to ensure that you have a system in place for completing the objective of the form.
If you have used your web form as a way to set expectations with a timeline for response, then it’s important that you have the ability to follow through with this. For example, if your contact form says that you’ll return calls within thirty minutes during normal business hours, make sure you have the infrastructure in place to do that. If your contact form says you’ll return calls within 10 minutes around the clock, make sure that the infrastructure to do that exists. In many cases, attorneys will employ a client intake and practice management software to help them manage web form requests.
Creating a Custom Web Form with LawLytics
The LawLytics system allows you to easily create and nest forms on your law firm website and in blog posts. There are several options for where you can place a web form, such as in-line with the text on your blog posts and practice area pages or in the sidebar of your web pages.
The LawLytics platform allows you to create a variety of different forms, from basic contact forms to complex client questionnaires, and there’s no limit on how many you can create or use on your site.
If you’re a LawLytics member and would like more information on how to create and use web forms on your law firm website, our support team is here to help. If you’re not yet a LawLytics member and have questions or would like a look inside the technology, schedule an interactive 20-minute demo with a product expert.
