Ep. 38 - A/B Testing for Law Firms: The Secret Weapon You’re Probably Ignoring

In this episode, I take a break from all the AI buzz and get back to one of the most underrated, old-school strategies that still crushes it today: A/B testing.

If you think you know what works in your law firm’s marketing - what headline grabs, what colors convert, what copy convinces -think again. 

I’ve seen sleek, high-budget campaigns tank…while a plain-text email from an intern breaks records.

📲Get The Support Your Law Firm Needs: https://www.thelawfirmgrowthprofessor.com/

I explain how A/B testing is like an eye exam for your marketing - "Option A or Option B?" - and how those tiny tweaks (like a button color or headline tone) can mean the difference between a new client and a lost lead.

You’ll learn what to test, how to test it, how to read the data, and why most digital agencies get it wrong. 

More importantly, I’ll show you how A/B testing reveals something powerful: that your law firm’s growth doesn’t come from guessing - it comes from learning faster than the competition.

Tune in and learn how to turn marketing uncertainty into clarity, one smart test at a time.

Want to learn more about how our agency can help your law firm grow? Speak with John Rizvi ☎️

Transcript

John Rizvi 0:00

This is PodPompy Life, Podcast for the people. Welcome to the Law Firm Growth Professor Podcast. I'm John Risby, the Law Firm Growth Professor. And if you're a long-term listener, welcome back. This professor loves to have you in his virtual classroom. And if this is your first time tuning in, well, welcome to the show that breaks down the science and soul of law firm marketing without putting you to sleep or selling you snake oil. In my podcast, I share the strategies for growth that have worked for me in growing my law firm from a startup with just me, a laptop, and a cell phone operating out of a spare bedroom to where we are today, a team of 60 professionals generating over 10 million a year in revenues from our 10,000 square foot headquarters. Now, I know I've been talking a lot about AI lately. Like a lot. AI this, AI that, machine learning, ChatGPT, large language models, deep fakes, shallow fakes, and everything in between. Part of this is because let's face it, AI is everywhere right now, from writing your kids' book reports to making your Netflix recommendations eerily accurate. It's seeping into every corner of our digital and real lives. But there's another reason too. I'm legitimately worried about where AI is going to take us, especially in the legal industry. Nvidia CEO Nelson Huang recently dropped the tooth bomb when he said you're not going to lose your job to an AI, but you are going to lose your job to someone that uses AI. Let that sink in for a second. That's not science fiction. That's right now. That's your competition. But today we're going to shift gears a bit. Yes, we should keep a wary eye on AI. Make sure it stays our tool and not our boss. But today I want to talk about something a little more old school, something that's been around way before ChatGPT, before Google, even before Bill Gates wore glasses. Today I want to talk about A B testing. Now, if you just groaned and reached for the skip button, hang on. I promise this is going to be way more interesting and more useful than it sounds. Because if you want to grow your law firm and if you want to understand your audience and if you want to know what actually works in your marketing, you need to understand A-B testing. A B testing is a lot like going to the eye doctor. You've probably been to the optometrist before, right? They sit you down, flip through a bunch of lenses and say option A or option B. You squint and say uh A. And then they do it again. A or B. What's better? You answer, and then they tweak over and over until suddenly, boom, you can read the bottom row of the eye chart. That, my friends, is exactly what A B testing is. Except instead of fine-tuning your vision, you're fine-tuning your marketing. You're asking your audience, hey, do I like this version of my ad or this one? And they answer, not with words, but with clicks, scrolls, time on page, and bounce rates. Now you might think, okay, John, sounds logical, but do I really need to test everything? Yes. Yes, you do. We need A B testing today more than ever, because even if you think you know your audience, what they like, what they want, what will make them call your office, you'd be surprised how often you're wrong. I've seen law firms invest thousands into slick branding and creative campaigns that completely tank, while some plain text, black and white email from the intern gets triple the conversions. It's not about what you think looks good. It's about what your clients respond to, and you don't know what they'll respond to until you test it. Let's break down how AI testing works to the bare bones. AI testing starts with a concept. Maybe it's a landing page, a Facebook ad, a Google headline, or even an email subject line. Then you create two different versions of it. Just two, version A and version B. Maybe version A has a blue button that says contact us, and version B has a red button that says book my free consultation. You send both versions out into the wild, let them run for a while, and you see which one gets better results. It's like a bake off. Two pies go into the judging tent, but only one gets the handshake from Paul Hollywood. Now you might be thinking, okay, but what kinds of things should I test? The answer? Almost anything and everything. Headlines. What are people clicking on? What are they ignoring? What's the difference between them that makes the one getting clicks better or more engaging than the one that's fading into the background? Calls to action buttons, how do they look? Where do they lead? Do they work the way they're supposed to and give clickers information? Or do they dump them somewhere that makes no sense based on the context of the ad that they've clicked on? If your call to button action uh doesn't do what it's supposed to, you've already you're already behind the eight ball and you haven't even gotten started yet. Colors and layouts, design and aesthetics, these things matter. If you're using orange comic sans text on a lime green background, you've got an eyesore that no one's going to take seriously on your hands. Your uh layouts should be balanced, they should be symmetrical, and they should draw the eye where you want it to land. Images or no images. A picture is worth a thousand words, but sometimes it can actually muddle the message. Show a couple having fun on a beach makes no sense if you're telling people why their divorce attorney uh is should be you. If you're not sure if the image you're considering works with your message, you might just want to skip it. Short copy versus long copy. For an outline ad, shorter is always better if you can manage it. Quick and concise is what you're after. But there's a limit. Read this now isn't going to move the needle much. But if you say something like, Do you have an invention? You should read this now. It conveys the same message but speaks to the intended audience's interests. Now, testimonials on the top versus the bottom. I've never cared for testimonials at the top personally. It seems like a lot like saying, Hey, I'm a great attorney, and you can trust this random stranger you've never met to tell you that. But sometimes it makes sense. If one of your clients happens to be Kevin Harrington, uh one of the original sharks on Shark Tank, and you're w working in the patent law field, a testimonial from him could make a great introduction. Even different emotional tones. You might play fear versus hope or urgency against calm reassurance. You need to protect your estate from the government now has a completely different uh resonance than you want to protect your estate from the government. Our firm can help you safeguard your legacy. See how those are different? Now here's the kicker. The magic isn't just in what you test, it's in how you interpret the results you get from the testing. This is one area where AI, or at least automation, is your friend. Like it or not, we still need the machines to help us do the math and crunch the numbers to find out what people are responding to in our ads. Because unless you're planning to personally call everyone in your county and ask, hey, what did you think of my ad, you're going to need some digital tools to analyze the data for you. You can't interview every single person on the street or camp out in someone's living room to see how they interact with your website. That's not marketing. That's a lawsuit waiting to happen. Not to mention, really creepy and expensive and impractical. So let's not do that. Instead of courting professional lawsuits, we rely on machines to give us the metrics we need to figure out what's going on. But not all metrics are created equal. Let's break down the ones that matter. First, click-through rate, sometimes abbreviated CTR. Let's say you run two ads. Ad A is seen by a hundred thousand people. Only a hundred of them click through to your website. That gives you a CTR of 0.1%. That's not just low, that's sub-basement low. Ad B, though, gets a 3% CTR. Let me put that in perspective. Anything above 2% is considered decent in marketing terms. If you're hitting 5%, you're crushing it. So a 3% CTR means your ad is doing its job, attracting interest and driving traffic. CTR is your best canary in the coal mine. If it's low, something's off. Either the ad doesn't grab attention or it doesn't connect with the right audience. Whatever it is, you need to figure out a fix for it, or your campaign won't even get off the ground, which means you won't have to worry about the next point, which is time on page. A lot of marketers overlook this one. They'll focus on clicks and forget about what happens after the click. Let me tell you, time on page is crucial. If someone clicks your ad, gets on the landing page, and bounces after three seconds, that's not a win. That's a misfire. It could just be an accidental click for all you know. They meant to click on their friend's latest tweet on X and they got to your ad by mistake. Maybe they were reaching for their coffee and goosed their phone at exactly the wrong time. It could just be the online marketing equivalent of accidentally swiping right on a Tinder profile when you just thought, oh no, this person's totally wrong for me. But if they stay for three minutes, that tells you something. They're reading, they're absorbing, they're considering what they're seeing. The three-minute mark is critical, and visitors that are that stay that long or longer are the ones who are actively shopping for lawyers in your field and area. Three-second visitors could just be the people that accidentally tapped your ad while reaching for their coffee. And we're not worried about them unless all you're getting are three-second visitors. That's a whole other problem you'll have to wrestle with. And it means that something is fundamentally wrong with your content. So now we move to the next item: bounce rate. This one gets thrown around a lot, but it's often misunderstood. Bounce rate tells you what percentage of visitors come to your landing page and then leave without visiting any other pages. A bounce rate under 40% is great. Between 40% and 55% is average. Over 60% and you've got a problem. But here's the nuance bounce rate doesn't always mean your content is bad. Sometimes it just means it wasn't the right fit for that particular visitor. That's why we look at the exit rate. Exit rate tells you what page on your website people are leaving from. This can tell you a lot about what pages are hitting the right notes with people and which ones are leaving them cold. Now, ideally, your visitors exit from the contact us page after they fill out a form or call your office. That's the dream, right? But let's say you have a page on emotional support resources after a divorce. That might be a high exit page, and that's okay. Why? Because someone might have come looking for help for a friend. They're not your client, but they might refer you to the person who is, and that's a win. Sure, it's not the instant gratification we all hope for when we launch an ad campaign, but it's still a win. Think of it as a way to establish your bona fides as someone who's genuinely interested in the well-being of your clients beyond the courtroom or the final judgment or that last check they mail in. So we don't just look at the number in a vacuum. We have to ask, why are they leaving from that page? If you want to know that, you've got to get inside your client's head. But before we can do that, we have to talk about something fundamental. Your perfect client, not your average client, not just anyone who happens to stumble onto your website. I mean the one that you really want to work with or whose case or legal matter makes you drool just thinking about it, the one who pays on time, values your time, and refers others to your law firm. When I'm planning a campaign, I actually create a profile or persona for this perfect client. I give them a name, an age, a job, hobbies, fears, goals, what's their family situation and background? What's their educational level? Are they book smart or street smart or a combination of the two? I imagine what keeps them up at night. I picture what kind of car they drive, what their browser history looks like, even what podcast they listen to, hopefully mine. Because once I know them, I can speak directly to them. I can say, hey, you, yeah, you with the IP idea and the legal headache. I've got you. Click here. Let me tell you a silly example that's also dead serious. Maybe your ideal client loves pink letters on a navy background, but you in your infinite wisdom decided to go with bright green letters on a pink background. Oops, that's not just a bad aesthetic choice. It's a lost lead. You've turned off your prospective client. They're not interested in what you have to say just because of the way you chose to say it. Now losing one lead isn't catastrophic, but if you're losing 500 leads, your firm may be in serious trouble. And the tiniest change, sometimes font size, word order, uh, background color, all these things can make a big difference in how successful of a campaign you'll have. Audiences have a very strong reaction to certain colors and color combinations. We also react to different weights, sizes, and types of fonts differently. But pairing this color combination with that font may not work. The appearance of the text could turn off your audience before they even bother to read the message. In fact, I remember just the other day I was checking Facebook and I came across an ad so bad I had to laugh because it reminded me of a what not to do from 2002. The background was a really bright construction zone orange, which was bad enough. But the text at the top was even worse. It was this weird Sans Sheriff font. It was screaming red and it had an animated uh so it was bouncing up and down. I can't even tell you what the text said or what the ad was for. Just looking at it gave me a headache. Again, this was my reaction. And maybe the company A B tested and I'm an anomaly. That's why we test and test again. We want to avoid misfires and get our clients' attention in a positive way. But we remember uh that the good stuff doesn't always happen front and center. We have to think about what's going on off to the side as well to really develop that resonance with our potential clients because the magic happens in the margins. Here's the truth: most digital marketing agencies don't want to spend time doing A B testing. Or if they do, they do it once, shrug at the results, and move on. They think, okay, A is good enough, so let's go with that. They don't evolve, and again, they're not the ones paying for the ad spend, so they fossilize, they wither. And sooner or later they lose clients because of this, but they really don't care. This is just normal churn, and they will replace the lawyers that leave with new ones. If you are a lawyer, you have to insist that your digital marketing agency consistently tests and optimizes. After all, it's your ad spend, and that's how you win. Not because you're smarter, not because you spend more, but because you invest in learning faster by A B testing. Law firms that do this, they're the ones that understand their market. They pivot quickly, and they never assume that they've got it all figured out. They know that A was good enough and B was a miss, but they take what worked from A and they roll it into C, and that's how they get magic. They've embraced the idea that there's always something new to learn. There's always something that you can test or another angle that you can explore. They drill and refine and tweak and fluff and check and double check until they've achieved perfection. Then they start all over again. Yes, it's work. And if you do it yourself, it's time you could be spending developing your client base or reading briefs or digesting the latest court decision, but it's important work for growing your firm and it matters. And someone has to do this if you're going to win. If not you, your agency needs to do this. But for that, your agency has to understand it. A B testing helps tell your clients that you get them. You see them as people. You don't just see them as a case file and a fat stack of billable hours for the firm. You see them and what they need and what they want, and you want to be the one to help them get it. So let's bring this home. Yes, AI is powerful. Automation can save time and money. It can tell you a lot about what people are doing with your message and how they're seeing and responding to it. But you are the ultimate strategist, the storyteller, the connector. You're the one that the clients are looking for to have a heart, mind, and eyes. You may not be able to do the math like a machine, but you understand what drives your clients to come to you in the first place. And tools like A B testing is how you sharpen your message, how you move from good to great. So the next time you're building a campaign, ask yourself, what's my version A? What's my version B? What am I going to learn from both? Should I rest on my laurels with the winner? Or should I try to really knock it out of the park with a version C? There's nothing wrong with hitting singles all day, but who doesn't want to go for a home run when they're up to bat anyway? That's the mindset that grows law firms. That's the mindset that your digital marketing agency needs to have, and that's what builds lasting relationships. That's the mindset of the A students that follow me, the law firm growth professor. Thanks for hanging out with me today. If you found value in this episode, don't forget to subscribe, share it with a colleague, and leave a review. Until next time, this is John Risby, reminding you that smart, ethical growth is always within reach. You just have to know how to test for it. So when a new idea pops into your brain, call the patent professor. That's my name. I'm a long professor. An engineer too, I think that is the patent says your ideas not new attack. Right. So when a new idea pops into your brain, hold the package.