A Case Study in Booking Appointments for an Immigration Attorney

In the early parts of 2024 we were contracted by an Immigration Firm in the Central Valley of California to get them qualified prospects to come into their office for a free consultation.

The qualification parameters included things like excluding for immigrants with multiple entries into the USA, people with felonies, and other similar disqualifying items.

The firm is a great firm with two lawyers and various support staff that have a very high Google rating and many years of excellent track record serving their local community as well as immigrants around California.

Through word of mouth, Google search, and roughly $20k per month in Google Ads the firm was getting about 30-40 appointments per week. The firm offers an initial consultation that is free.

Because of this free consultation they typically expect that about 30-40% of their free, initial consultations won’t show up.

The Plan

The plan was to design and run Facebook ads with messaging for a broad immigrant audience, have a bi-lingual phone operator employed and trained by us call the leads, pre-qualify them over the phone, and then book them into a free consult at the office.

The initial plan called for a low budget test to determine if this plan had merit.

The Execution

From day one of starting the online campaign leads came in at a very low price.

The lead price fluctuated but averaged roughly $6 per lead.

For those familiar with paid advertising, you can always count on a portion of those leads never responding to any outreach.

In addition, the operator would qualify out certain applicants due to disqualifying factors the firm set.

At the end of the first month we were averaging about $15 per appointment booked.

On paper, this looked like a huge success.

The Good and the Bad

The good, of course, was that the lead flow was consistent, many of the immigrants the operator spoke with were qualified according to the standards set by the law firm, and, with a low budget, we were getting close to 2 booked consultations 7 days a week.

These consultations were being booked at roughly 1/8 the cost of what they cost with Google Ads. Amazing, right?

Kind of sounds like I’m setting it up for the other shoe to drop, right?

Well, yes. Kind of.

The first problem we ran into was a low show up rate.

The prospects were happy to book the evaluation but they weren’t showing up at a high rate.

As we worked with the business owner we were able to determine that their staff had been extra busy and were not reminding people about upcoming appointments.

Once they started back up with reminders, however, the prospects started showing up at an improved rate.

Which led to challenge number two.

The people who were showing up had a lower rate of being qualified to be helped by an immigration attorney.

The immigration system is incredibly complex and there are countless factors that can make an immigrant qualify for various laws or programs or not.

The ‘Not’ being, there is nothing a lawyer can do to help them in their current situation.

Unfortunately, too many of these initial prospects were in this category where they had need, came in for the appointment, were interested in working with the lawyers, but there was literally nothing the lawyers could do to help them.

In meeting with the owners we asked for additional disqualifying factors that our operators could use to make sure better prospects were coming in.

It was at this point we got to a bit of a bottleneck.

The owners had already trained us on what a quality prospect is. Our operators were handling each lead well according to the recorded calls the lawyers listened to.

The problem was that the only way to REALLY dig deeper into qualifying questions was to be a lawyer with deep understanding of the law.

The Adjustment

Given how well the campaign was producing leads we didn’t want to scrap it.

What we decided on doing was to get much more specific in WHO we are able to serve in the Facebook ads.

We decided on reaching out with our ads, primarily, to two groups of people:

1- Asylum seekers that already had a court date to meet with a judge.

This is a group that needs a lot of help but also typically doesn’t have a lot of disqualifying things in their background that would preclude an immigration attorney from being able to help.

In most cases, the court is going to require them to show up to court accompanied by an attorney so it’s obligatory that they find representation.

2- Green card holders looking to naturalize.

As with asylum seekers, green card holders often have less challenges in their background that would preclude an attorney from being able to help them.

The very fact that they have a green card means that they’ve been in good enough status with the immigration apparatus to have recognized benefits.

And by becoming a citizen the prospects will enjoy much more freedom and privileges they didn’t have by just being a green card holder.

Where We Are Now?

The adjustment has worked.

The attorneys were clear that they’re still happy for us to book any prospect that fits their parameters, whether they’re within these two groups or not.

But in the time following the first test over 95% of prospects have been people in one of these two categories.

These are qualified prospects and because their need is so much more specific and, in some cases, urgent, the show up rate has increased.

The ad cost per booked appointment has gone up from $15 to $25 but this is WELL within a range that makes the attorneys happy given that Google ads typically return an appointment at $100-$200 per consult.