Ever thought about text message marketing for your law firm? This episode takes you into the heart of this powerful communication tool with our guest, Alex Levin, Co-Founder and CEO of Regal.io. Alex is an expert in B2C technology and he shares enlightening insights into how law firms can leverage text message marketing to foster meaningful customer relationships.
In this episode, we cover key strategies for gaining contact permissions and customizing messages with data. We also delve into the critical role of AI bots in maintaining customer engagement. We also discuss the don'ts like why cold-calling or cold-texting can backfire and the importance of respecting customer contact boundaries. With Alex's expertise, you'll discover how to successfully navigate the complexities of SMS marketing and build trust with your clients.
Learn more about how Regal can help by visiting www.regal.io
Follow Spotlight Branding for more!
Facebook: www.facebook.com/spotlightbranding
Twitter: @spotlightlawyer
Instagram: @spotlightlawyer
TikTok: @spotlight.media
Visit www.spotlightinsider.com for additional content to help your firm grow!
Ever thought about text message marketing for your law firm? This episode takes you into the heart of this powerful communication tool with our guest, Alex Levin, Co-Founder and CEO of Regal.io. Alex is an expert in B2C technology and he shares enlightening insights into how law firms can leverage text message marketing to foster meaningful customer relationships.
In this episode, we cover key strategies for gaining contact permissions and customizing messages with data. We also delve into the critical role of AI bots in maintaining customer engagement. We also discuss the don'ts like why cold-calling or cold-texting can backfire and the importance of respecting customer contact boundaries. With Alex's expertise, you'll discover how to successfully navigate the complexities of SMS marketing and build trust with your clients.
Learn more about how Regal can help by visiting www.regal.io
Follow Spotlight Branding for more!
Facebook: www.facebook.com/spotlightbranding
Twitter: @spotlightlawyer
Instagram: @spotlightlawyer
TikTok: @spotlight.media
Visit www.spotlightinsider.com for additional content to help your firm grow!
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Speaker 2:This is Center Stage putting your firm in the spotlight by highlighting business owners and other industry experts to help take your firm to the next level. Hey everyone, and welcome to Center Stage. I'm your host, john Henson, and this week we are talking about one of the more emerging marketing strategies out there right now. It's been around for a couple of years, more and more businesses are using it and that is text message marketing. A lot of you may already get some text message marketing sort of messages in your phone, and a lot of you likely will, as election season Gets a lot closer. As we discussed in last week's episode, a lot of candidates are using that now.
Speaker 2:But your firm really does have a big opportunity to utilize text messaging in your communications and your marketing, and our goal this week is to kind of enlighten you and show you how you can do that. And so my guest this week is someone who helps businesses with text message marketing and other aspects of their marketing, and that is the co-founder and CEO of Regal IO. That is Alex Levin. Thanks for joining us this week. Thank you for having me. So, yeah, right off the bat, tell us a little bit about yourself, your background and what Regal IO does.
Speaker 3:Sure. So my background is mostly working for B2C technology companies that have moved online and I've run marketing and growth teams in the past, so definitely have quite a bit of experience at scale with different marketing channels, including SMS. So, excited to talk about that, regal is something that came out of. Our experiences were particularly in more considered services things like legal services, health care insurance, lending, local services. We found that as they digitized, it was critical not just to have one way marketing channels where you were telling people what you wanted them to hear, but actually engage with customers in a conversation, and so there wasn't really a good tech stack to support that sort of interaction at enormous scale.
Speaker 3:So we built Regal around supporting those companies with technology to engage customers in channels like SMS, phone, email and then give that company's agents or reps the tools they need to treat millions and millions of customers like one in a million.
Speaker 3:Right, we know who he wants to be At the other end of a phone call. It's a spam where the person from the company has no idea who you are and it's just a waiting time. On the other hand, if you can, in the right moment, show up there for the customer and go, I understand the problem that you have and I'm gonna help you. That's very valuable and so with technology, that becomes possible. And today we serve both mid-market and enterprise brands, from AAA and insurance, sopai in lending, angie's List in local services, roman or Ford in health care, sort of across the spectrum. And actually in legal we serve a lot of firms that are getting larger at this point and have figured out how to leverage their digital presence to increase the number of potential customers they have and use online to find better ways of engaging with those customers.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and you know, I know, you know I've joked about this show, but it's not. It's not really a joke and they will admit this to legal pretty slow to adopt a lot of the newer technologies and I think text messaging is one of them. You know, I only know of a couple of firms that do this. You know, for a lot of years it was direct mail, you know, and a lot of firms still do that, especially in the personal injury, criminal defense space. Anytime you get a traffic ticket, you know you can just expect like a dozen different you know envelopes to show up in your mailbox. Then email came along. More and more people we're seeing are utilizing email a lot more now, which is great. But now text messaging is coming up. So you know from your, from where you're sitting. You know why is text messaging such a great tool that firms can use for their communication in their marketing.
Speaker 3:I mean, I'll just start by just take a step back. I don't think that law firms are slow to adopt technology. As an example, there's a product called Westlaw, which Thompson murders now owns, which was the sort of very early incarnation of taking every legal case that exists that used to be in a library, in a book, and putting it online, and it used to be a closed, you know system and now it's more of an open system but putting online and making available to lawyers so they could have the correct citation that every law firm in the world has a Westlaw term. And so law firms are actually very early, similar to financial firms on that side from from a data perspective, having technology that change their internal workflows. And when you look at the complexity of workflows around contracts and you know what you need to do, appliance billing actually adopted a lot of technology.
Speaker 1:So I wouldn't say that it's a bear slowed it up.
Speaker 3:Technology I think a lot of law firms in my experience, given their background, are nervous about the way in which they communicate with clients, especially when it's written. They're nervous about anything that is discoverable. They're nervous about recording a conversation. They're nervous about you know what the laws are on how you're going to get to somebody. So I think that's perfectly fair and particularly you know, I think when we talk to law firms, you know they have folks who are very good at the internal technology, but they may not have a person who works for law firm who's comfortable using some of these new marketing channels. So I think it's worth you know talking through even more than SMS, a little bit like how to think about moving into using all these marketing channels, if that's okay, and then I'm happy to be in this?
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely. So maybe take a step back. You know, if you are running a law firm today, you are a marketer, and it's a weird thing to think about. You didn't go to school to be a marketer. You want to be a marketer, but effectively you will have to be a marketer Right? You've got to go out there and convince people to buy your services.
Speaker 3:If you're only relying on person to person sales, you're missing a trick. You may be great at that, but you're missing something. So the advantage of marketing is that you can make it feel to your customers or prospective customers like you are the default institutional provider in your space. What I mean is if that person that you're targeting you think is your ideal customer leave their moment and see your billboard and they see a direct mail and they, when they Google, they see your app, they go to Facebook, they see your app, you call them and you're talking. All of a sudden they go. Oh, my goodness, I've seen X law firm seven times in the last two days. They must be the leader in this space. Now you don't have to tell me you only were marketing in that two block area because you knew those were your exact customers. We were only marketing that one segment because you knew they were ideal customer.
Speaker 3:But my point is it's not about going and doing national advertising and it's not about doing big tea blitzes. It's about figuring out who your customer is and finding ways to hit them six, seven, eight times, because that's how you're going to get them interested in you, your, firm, so that when you do have that, conversation to go oh, I know who you are.
Speaker 3:So the parallel I sometimes draw is you know those previous the benches that real estate folks always take out their picture on. It's actually not a crazy strategy, right? Because all of a sudden everybody who goes by the name goes oh, I know that, you know so, and so you know Sally Smith is the right person in this area for me. So think about the holistic strategy where you're doing multiple channels at once. I think you know to your point.
Speaker 3:People have been sort of nervous about SMS, I think, because it was something that was a little bit regulated than email. It was something that felt a little bit more personal email. But on the other side, I actually think both of those things are advantages in SMS, because it's more regulated, means there's less chat, there's less junk out there. So the engagement rate is much higher because it feels more personal. As long as you're using it correctly, you're able to get to, you know, get people to engage with you in a much more personal way than with email. On average, you know you send an email to somebody a marketing email might be a 2% or 3% click rate. Send a text message to somebody it's going to be a 10% or 15% click rate, so it's much higher engaging channel. We'll talk, you know, as we get into it, about sort of the strategies and how to make sure you do it correctly, but at a high level. It's not a bad thing that it's regulated and personal. Those are good things. You just have to know how to use the channel correctly.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's one of the things that's kind of a kind of a drawback almost with, maybe, direct mail or email is you could just get you know any address or any email and ultimately, like you can end up getting penalized for it, you know, with spamming and all of that. Whereas it's a lot, I think it's a lot more difficult to get phone numbers and have people even you know opt into that sort of thing. But also the other thing about it that I that I like about the text message is your phone number is like the one thing that you typically don't change as often. Right, people move to different addresses a lot. They change their emails a lot. A lot of people don't change their phone number nearly as much, and so that becomes just an even more valuable piece of marketing data if you can get that from a lead.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so let's start there. So you know, I'm not a huge proponent of cold calling or cold texting. Yeah, there are ways to do it. I'm not going to get into it because I just think it's not the right way to engage with people. What I think is very powerful is if you have people engaging with your brand, ask for their phone number and there's a lot of different ways to do it. You know and sort of you've seen these things that pop over a site and you know say you know, please give us your phone number so you can talk to whom being, or please give us your phone number. If it's in retail or at this council, there might have to be a give get of some kind.
Speaker 3:But I do recommend, high in the funnel you know in your digital experience getting your phone number. Once you have that phone number, as you're getting it, make sure that your terms are setting up for success. What I mean by that is explicitly tell the customer that you're going to be using an ATDS and automated telephonic system to send them text messages, calls, pre-reported voicemail. Those are three different channels in the United States and you technically have to ask for permission for all of them. All that means is you need a sentence that says you know you give us permission basically to use an automated telephone dialing system to contact you via all text messages and pre-reported voicemail. Usually we suggest having a checkbox so the person actively checks it and then hits next. There are some situations in which that's not necessary, but that's a whole different conversation. Let's assume you now have permission from this person. Now, if their phone number your permission to engage with them you know, now you need some tools. So their sort of certainly is the ability to like manually text somebody for your phone.
Speaker 3:But that's not a scalable strategy. So I highly recommend getting a product like Griegel that allows you to send high-volume outbound SMS from a long number, not a short code. So you don't want to be sending text messages from short codes anymore because people know that it's spam. Right, you want a long number. You want a system that is going to allow you to customize the messages based on what you know about the customer. Hi, first name this is lawyer name. I see you're living in, you know city and you're interested in product. Let's pat on D. Right, you can do that in a huge scale, but you need to have a product that can allow you to customize that. And then you know that's one way. You also want the same product to have the ability to do two at many of the person engages.
Speaker 3:You want some way to respond, and I think that's quite hard to find products that do both. Griegel does. And then the last thing is you want a product that ideally has an AI bottom. So great If you're there to respond, wonderful. But if you start setting up these programs, somebody responds and you're on vacation for two days. Now that customer is disappointed. So having an AI bot allows you to make sure you're engaging the person at night, on weekends, when you're away, when you're busy, and you know, move them through the funnel and then make sure that they're not left alone. So again, griegel has that as well. It's very rare. I don't think I know no products that have all three the marketing SMS, the two SMS and an AI bot all together. So you know that makes it a very useful package for people. Yeah, once you're, you're sort of doing all that.
Speaker 3:Usually what I suggest the goal to be is find the handraisers and qualify them, and if you have a high enough value product that you're selling, you may want the handraisers to be going directly to a human being whether it's you or somebody else on the team to talk. If it's not a high enough value product, maybe the first step is when you know the handraiser that's interested, you send them a tech message saying what's your annual income or do you? You know, if it's mass tort like, do you have a? You know, did you live in this area between this date and that date? So qualify them and then pass them to a human so you can do a lot in an automated way. You can even do all these automated things to get them actually call you, or you can automatically schedule a call to them and get them on the line before you're wasting any human time. So depends on the scale that you're operating, but you can get very efficient when it comes to actual campaigns.
Speaker 3:Usually we suggest a few. So when you first get the lead, speed to lead is very important and you need to engage that person right away. Be the first firm that engages them in these sort of services. You know, assume that person is going looking at two or three lawyers, but where's the first to get to them the largest majority of the time it's a crazy thing, but the signal to that customer that you're more interested and they are tend to stop engaging as future people try to reach out to them. A regal, for instance. We even have a deal with the cell phone carriers to brand calls on cell phones so that when you're calling them they know it's you and they answered them much higher rate. So another value but now you know you're, you're sort of doing that upfront, trying to engage them.
Speaker 3:Other sorts of campaigns we highly recommend are two things. One, re-engagement so if that person who you think is a good prospect goes away but your system sees they click on your website or they click on an email or they are doing something that shows you you think they're engaged again, you know have a text message or a call that goes out in that second. So you need systems that are hooked into your website, your email marketing, to make sure that you know when they're showing signs of engagement to reach out again. And then the last campaign is a nurture campaign. So you know you should be setting up you know three, six, 12 months of drips of text messages and emails even that try to keep the person interested. Show them your areas of expertise, highlight things that as a firm you're doing. Explain the value proposition due to a long period of time, particularly for emotional decisions like education or certain legal services. It's not a decision that's going to be made overnight. It's something where you want a steady drip of information to that customer to slowly win them over.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so you know one of the things, one of the things that I hear a lot, especially as it relates to like email and even like social media posts, which is odd the a lot of a lot of lawyers are very concerned about annoying their audience, right? So when we talk about you know maybe some right and wrong ways to use text messaging, I mean, how would you address that concern where it's like I don't want to you know, I don't want to be too intrusive, I don't want to annoy you know my leads by texting them. You know, like, how do you address something like that? So a couple things.
Speaker 3:So there's the legal side of it, which is you have to get opted and if the person wants to stop, you have to opt them out, and you need to respect that and there are certain rules that you cannot violate. Then there's customer preference. The funny thing is actually, when you do interviews with customers, they prefer text message from brands that they want to engage with.
Speaker 3:So, as I say, I'm not talking about cold calling, cold SMS. Different world don't want to engage on that. But if you're doing something with somebody who's an interested prospect, this is something that they prefer, as long as you're demonstrating that it's actually a channel that they can use to reach out to. Now if you open up an SMS conversation with them and they respond and you never respond back, that's a black eye, right. If they give you a phone number and you're just sending them, you know they would clearly were interested in. You know services around. You know divorce and you're constantly telling them about. You know child protective services and again, you've lost them.
Speaker 3:But people like and expect SMS of the channel. So that's not the issue, it's just how you use it. I think the last piece is you know, as a firm, figuring out what is the cadence on which customers want to hear from you, and it depends by product. So you know, retail is very well established at this point where you have lots and lots of skews, it's probably okay, if it's a brand that they like, to be sending pretty regular text messages with different skews. That might be interesting. You know different products and they'd be interesting in the person, especially if there's discount. So if you're a big fan of Patagonia and Patagonia sends you a text message about the product you're looking at with you know special offers, you're going to be very excited and that could be every week, I think. On the you know other spectrum, you know, if you're a dentist, we're sending you text messages every week. You would probably say this is annoying, right? All you want from your dentist is to make sure that every six months that you're.
Speaker 3:You know they're engaging with you to align you to get that appointment schedule. You need your teeth cleaned every six months, so you know figure out for your business what the right cadence is and you can also test into it.
Speaker 3:So as you start sending text messages, if you watch the unsubscribe rate, the rate of people saying stop, and it goes over 1% for a text message, it probably assigns a bad text. You know, if over time you're you're seeing that you know the click rate on links you're putting in, it is sub, we call it 10%, probably a bad text. And so it's iterative, you can learn. Obviously, like you can't re-subscribe those people, you've lost them. But for future customers you can always do better. So you know, I think like the last idea I'd leave you with is you know, for customers they have choice, so you're not doing anything that they can't get out of. So if you're trying to engage with a customer that you think is a great prospect on the cadence, that you think is respectful, and they don't want to participate, they're just going to write back stop and they're out of it. So it's not really that problematic.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I would agree with that. And you talk about building the cadence and everything like that. I mean, I think, even beyond marketing, especially in the legal space, for me I think there's a really big opportunity for law firms to really improve their customer service, cause, like one of the biggest knocks that I hear a lot and I've even experienced this myself is that law firms just do a really bad job of staying in touch and keeping people updated, even on their case. And so for me and I don't know if you've seen this, but to me I think you set up, you have this text messaging system a great and easy thing to do is to just send some regular update text about how people's cases are going. And that's not really. It's kind of a marketing thing, but it's not. It's more of a customer service thing, cause they've already signed, they're already a client. But what other ways are you seeing businesses kind of utilize text, even beyond some various marketing communications? Yeah, so there's a couple of critical distinctions.
Speaker 3:First, legally there's a distinction between what are called transactional messages and solicitation or marketing messages. If all you're doing is saying you have an appointment tomorrow, you don't need to be opt in you can just send it, the person can unsubscribe from it, but you're not allowed to do marketing in that message.
Speaker 3:If you're soliciting, meaning like you're asking them to do something, asking them to pay some money, then there's different rules. I'd say a lot of firms are underutilizing just the sort of transactional reminder messages, and that's a real shame because I do think they can be very helpful to customers. Hey, you have an appointment tomorrow. Hey, your court case moved to the next step.
Speaker 1:And it's not that much work Again.
Speaker 3:system like it goes, very easily handles the messages. Because we allow firms to connect to us all their data sources on what's happening, we can automate the text messages, so nobody needs to think about it.
Speaker 1:But you know.
Speaker 3:I'll give you an example in another industry, where you can sort of personalize it a little bit. So instead of just sending your, packages on the way we have some companies that will say hi, this is Julia. I spoke to you last week. I see your packages. You know, just left our warehouse and I'm watching it for you.
Speaker 3:Really excited for you to get this, no that was an automated text message, that was transactional those sales but it felt much more personal because I made sure that it came from the last person I talked with. You know, because we use that variable, and it felt like I could respond to it, maybe even such that I go thanks, julia, really wanna buy this next thing, can you chat with me about it? Or I wanna engage on another project. So, even with the sort of more transactional, be smart about how you're doing it. I would say, on the to your point on solicitation, there's a lot of different key moments through that customer's journey. You know there's, you know, the new customer onboarding, there's retention, there's upsell, cross-sell, win back.
Speaker 3:So outside of even the case that you're talking about, there's a lot of different things in sort of something like legal, I think it's fewer and far between, let's say it's hopefully you don't have the need for legal services all the time, but I still think people appreciate the kind gesture, maybe once a year, somebody they work with reaching out and sending a Christmas gift, sending a nice text message. So that's very common in service industries like legal, where you take your top 50 customers and you send them a gift. You take the next 50 and you send them a nice random note. You take the next 50 or maybe the next 5,000 and you send them all a nice text message with an image. So it's something that can again just expand your reach. So, whatever you're doing to service your top 50 customers, how do you replicate that using technology across your top 5,000 so that they all feel that personal touch?
Speaker 3:and don't feel left out.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think for me, I think, the biggest thing is, you know, maybe some of the younger Gen Xers, most of the millennials, definitely Gen Z, that's just how we've been conditioned to communicate. You know we communicate more via text than we do via phone call or even email, and so you know to your point, you know, being able to have that not just as a convenience factor but to feel like we're making more of a connection with that business and streamlining that a lot more, I think really does make it more valuable. And I know, just speaking from my own personal experience, like that's just how I would prefer to hear from someone like I may not be available all the time to take a phone call or, you know, interrupt what I'm doing to take a phone call, but if I can see a text real quick, perfect, and you know, that's all I'm gonna say.
Speaker 3:Part of the advantage of Regal is that our system allows texting calls from the same number. So historically one of the challenges with the text message marketing is that again, it was only one way, and even if you do two way, you still can't get them on the phone because it's just a texting system.
Speaker 3:Well, we've got the ability to do one way messaging, two way messaging the AI and phone all from the same system. So you can say in your text message hey, here's the update, you know, call me whenever you have a chance. Or we even have automation where we will say hey, you know, right back, yes, and I'll call you right. So, based off of the customer responding to a text message change, we can sort of make sure that somebody's calling them back. So those are just again opportunities to leverage technology to treat somebody better at more scale. When it was just a small practice and you had your shingle out and you know there were two lawyers, you could give that level of care to your clients. As you grow and get larger, you're gonna need support, you're gonna need technology to be able to offer that same level of service to more clients, and that's perfectly okay. Again, you can wow clients very easily now using these tools.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. So great transition there. Let people know a little bit more about how to learn more about all the things that Regal does and where they can go.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so please go to regalio. You can email me at hello. At regalio we serve a lot of law firms across different sorts of practices. I think you know if you're one or two lawyers there are probably simpler tools out there. If you email me I'd be happy to recommend them. But as your, you know, as your sort of maturity grows on the marketing, we can really help have a lot of impact from moving firms from very basic one-on-one type SMS usage to very sophisticated, personalized, customized, segment-based and journey-based messaging, and you know it has an enormous impact on people's business at scale.
Speaker 2:Love it. I just a lot of good stuff there. I love all the insight that you shared and, just you know, try just kind of shining the light on just how much opportunity really is there for text message marketing. One final question for you, though, before we wrap up If you had one final piece of advice for our listeners, what would it be?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean go back to the point I made at the beginning. Everybody is a marketer.
Speaker 3:You know I think you know I talked to so many folks who sort of go on really great, you know X, you know peaks, maybe it's just sales or they're very good at direct mail or very good at whatever, but they're missing the opportunity to expand to more channels. And it takes time, I understand, but I definitely think it's worth the investment to sit down, figure out exactly those you're right customer and figure out how you reach that customer across different channels, because it is going to have a massive impact on your business.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. Just. You know, understanding that client's journey, you know through their entire experience with your firm, you know, and just the different tools that you can use to help them out really does make all the difference. And so, alex, thanks so much for joining us. A lot of great stuff, you know, that you shared with us and hope you guys check out Regal and see if there's an opportunity there for you to start using more text messaging in your communications, whether it's marketing or even just case updates along the way. Whatever it is, and that's going to do it for us this week, please leave your rating and review If you have not done so yet. It really does help the show out and that's it, alex. Thanks so much for joining us, thank you.
Speaker 3:Thanks for listening. To learn more, go to spotlightbrandingcom. Slash center stage.