If you want to connect with the leads you're paying for, you need to be reaching out to them within five minutes.
Don’t worry—it’s easier than you think.
In this guide, I'm going to equip you with everything you need to make this mark, including:
- Why lead response time matters
- 10 ways to reach out faster
- 4 tips to get responses
- 6 message templates
- Lead response time stats
You should strive to get back to every lead within 5 minutes.
Why lead response time matters
In other words, if you're not reaching out fast, you're losing revenue.
You can skip to the bottom for more stats, but here are some highlights:
- Lead aggregators sell the same lead out to four or five businesses at once.
- 78% of homeowners go with the first business that reached out to them.
- Your contact rates drop by 900% after the first five minutes.
You make big investments to get leads from the internet, you should be responding with internet speed.
How to increase your speed to lead
Alas, only 7% of companies are reaching out within five minutes. Here's how to be one of them:
1. Make real-time options available
First and foremost, before even considering reaching out to leads, you need to ensure your leads have a way of reaching out to you—in real time. Your website, listings, and social media profiles need to provide ample opportunities for direct engagement.
Here are the best ways to open up direct lines of communication with leads:
- Live chat: Consumers expect live chat options on business websites today. Plus, before you engage in the conversation, you can collect their contact information.
- Facebook Messenger: This is a free option you can add to your Facebook Business Page.
- Tap to text or call: We’ll get to this later, but consumers prefer texting now. Plus, mobile traffic has exceeded desktop. Your website should have your phone number with a tap-to-call or tap-to-text option.
2. Optimize your website for lead capture
This is another walk-before-you-can-run tip. In addition to the direct contact methods above, your website should also be optimized with lead capture forms.
Your contact us page shouldn’t just have an info@yourdomain.com for leads to email you. Use a form! This way you can:
- Capture the information you need to reach out to them with context and personalization.
- Enter them into your workflows (we’ll get to that later).
You’ll want to have lead magnets and lead capture forms throughout your website. You can also use popups, banners, and static sidebars.
Just remember that user intent is not the same on every page. A person visiting a blog post may not be ready to fill out a form for an estimate, but may be receptive to an ebook. Your homepage, however, will attract higher intent visitors and should have a prominent CTA for an estimate.
You can try out different types of offers and lead magnets on your site:
- Contact us page: Contact us for more info, learn more.
- Homepage, pricing page, services page: Get a quote/estimate, request service, get a consultation, learn more.
- Blog/resource pages: Download an ebook, whitepaper, or checklist; use a free tool, subscribe to our blog or newsletter.
- About us page: Contact us to learn more.
3. Have a CRM
Being able to reach out to a lead ASAP will do you no good if you don’t have the contextual information you need to have a quality conversation with them.
Plus, you have a lot of leads coming in, and even though you’re reaching out to them with speed, they may not respond right away. If it takes a few days for them to respond, you need to be able to easily pull up their information.
This is where a CRM/customer database comes in—one central platform where you can keep track of all your contacts: leads, prospects, and customers, all of their contact information, and all of their engagement history with your business.
CRMs enable customized communication with your contacts, which leads to more appointments, sales, and upsells. They will also enable you to use automation, which we’ll get to shortly. For help deciding on a CRM, check out this list we compiled of the best CRMs for home improvement businesses.
Speed to lead offers no benefits if you can’t cater your communication to the individual.
4. Schedule your ads accordingly
One effective paid method of generating leads for your home improvement business is to run ads with live messaging features such as through Facebook click-to-messenger ads and Google Local Services Ads. But make sure that you’re scheduling these ads to run only when you’re available to answer their calls and texts.
This will ensure you can respond to them with speed and also that you’re not wasting budget.
5. Set up alerts
Whether you’re using an automation platform or even just plain email and text, make sure you set up notifications on your mobile phone, desktop, and other devices so you can know as soon as a lead comes in. Remember that lead aggregators and lead generation websites will give leads to four or five contractors, so seconds matter here!
6. Use texting
You can be the first to call or email a customer, but if you’re not the first to text them, you may as well be writing a snail mail letter to them.
Text is the preferred method of communication for consumers these days. Don't believe us? Let's review some numbers:
- 97% of people ignore phone calls from unknown numbers.
- 90% of marketing text messages are read within three minutes
- 90% of people want to have text conversations with businesses
- Americans check their phones 96 times a day, or once every 10 minutes.
- The response rate for texting is 45% compared to email at 8%.
- Most consumers (58%) of customers say texting is the best way to reach them.
Catch more benefits of text messaging for home improvement businesses here.
7. Set up lead scoring and routing
This is another reason to have a CRM. Lead scoring is a feature that allows you to assign point values for particular actions taken by leads. You can then mark leads as marketing qualified or sales qualified according to their score. This way, if there is an abundance of leads, sales reps can know which ones are the most important ones to reach first.
Similarly, you can also set up leads to route to particular reps based on certain conditions. This useful tip from Workato ensures no leads fall through the cracks and also that you're harnessing your team's strengths for maximum speed to lead.
Maybe your fastest rep gets a higher percentage of leads than newer or slower reps. Or maybe you route leads based on time zones or subject matter expertise.
