Legaltech marketing

The JC pontificates about technology An occasional series. Go Premium Technology Comments? Questions? Suggestions? Requests? Insults? We’d love to 📧 hear from you. Sign up for our newsletter.

In which the JC ventures into the unusual case of dispensing marketing advice to legaltechbros. This comes not from a place of wishing legaltechbros well, but rather wishing his inbox were clear of their jokey spam mailshots. Evidently attending legaltech start-up conferences means one is prone to such marketing blitzes, because you get scanned wherever you go, even if it is on a furtive free swag and branded pen-nicking excursion with your South African attorney.

In any case, paying for a stall at a legaltech start-up conference with the sole intention of gathering email addresses just so you can spam them is, it seems to us, bad business. People have made the effort — minimal though it maybe, and in with the aim of nicking swag as it undoubtedly is — of showing up bodily at your stall and submitting to your QR scanners. The least you can do is make an effort back at them. Adding email addresses to a spam database does not, we suggest, count as making an effort.

Instead, manually review your gathered prospects: 1. Bucket them as follows:

(i) Yes: those who are likely to be interested in your product;

(ii) No: those are not, and

(iii) Maybe: Those about whom who you are not sure.

2. Next:

(i) Call the Yesses: Call those who are: you know, in person, on the telephone: put in some effort: show a commitment signal. See if you can arrange a demo or something. Sending out form emails with “click here to meet with us” or “click on this button to see our demo” is lazy. It shows a lack of interest in the customer. Why should the customer make all the moves, off your lazy spam?

(ii) Ditch the Nos: Delete the email addresses of all the Nos. Do it now. They are no use to you: irritating their personnel with jokey spam will not win you business, and may impede your business should those personnel move somewhere that might be interested in the future.

(iii) Email the Maybes: Email, individually, those about whom you are not sure, asking them whether there might be a business case for your product. They will tell you.

3. Then, deal with replies from the Maybes:

(i) Yesses: see (i) of the previous step.

(ii) Noes: see (ii) of the previous step.

(iii) No reply: Is a No. See (ii) of previous step.