Use our benchmarks to assess and improve your response and set rates with leads from Home Depot, Costco, and Lowe's.
Speed to lead is critical in the trades, but not every campaign performs equally. So, what makes a successful one? We analyzed 30,455 Speed to Lead campaigns for retail lead sources using Hatch for Q1. Here's what we found.
A Speed to Lead campaign in Hatch is used for reaching out to inbound leads. Hatch integrates natively with each of your lead sources so that as soon as the lead fills out a form, they'll immediately get enrolled into a sequence of texts, emails, and either ringless voicemails or live phone calls—that sends out over the course of several days, according to the cadence that you set. This multi touch automation maximizes response rates while sparing your team from endless outreach.
Unsurprisingly, Speed to Lead is one of our most popular campaign types in Hatch, since
Once the contact responds, a conversational AI CSR qualifies the lead and either books it on the calendar or passes it off to a human for booking.
Hatch Speed to Lead is used for Angi, Google LSA, Yelp, HomeBuddy, Modernize, website leads, and more.
The source we're looking at in this study is retail stores. In particular, we're looking at leads from Home Depot, Lowes, and Costco.
And the way these leads get into Hatch is through our integration with the WinGen app, which consolidates retail leads (both in-store and online) into one place and then sends them into Hatch, where the instant outreach gets triggered.
Now that you understand retail speed to lead campaigns, let's look at the data.
For starters, the distribution of lead sources in this study is as follows:
This distribution isn't surprising, given that Home Depot and Lowes are solely home services, and the Costco lead generation program works differently from those two programs.
To understand these numbers, it will be helpful to understand what a campaign is. When a lead fills out a form and that initiates a series of messages to them through Hatch, that is considered one launch within that campaign.
To calculate response rate, we took total number of responses as a percentage of total number of launches for each campaign. Here's what we found for retail lead campaigns:
In our Speed to Lead Response Rate Data Study across all speed to lead campaigns, the average response rate was 60%, so this 68% is above average—most likely due to the fact that retail store leads, which are comprised of people already shopping for a product, are likely to have higher intent.
But the average number is really not the number to focus on here. It's the fact that some campaigns are getting 80-90% response rates. What does it take to get there?
We cover this in more detail in the above-linked study, but in short, the best performing campaigns are the ones that use our standard Speed to Lead campaign template. That's because our data shows, time and time again, that response rate comes down to:
Our templates are structured and worded based on what the data shows. That's not to say that other cadences and/or verbiage won't work— as long as they stick to these data-backed SMS messaging best practices.
There are factors outside of Hatch that impact your response rates, including:
So if you're using our template and all the best practices but still not seeing high response rates, it doesn't necessarily mean that you're doing anything wrong in Hatch. There are likely other factors at play—some within your control, some not so much.
Even still, if you'd like to talk with someone on our team about this, you can reach out to your Account manager here. And if you're not a Hatch customer, you can book a consult with us here.
Here are our top performing speed to lead templates for in-store leads and online leads. Note that the templates for in-store vs online are not that different, it just refers to a service request rather than a form submission, and uses the retail store's name in the initial outreach.
Notes on these templates:
To calculate set rate, we took the total appointments set as a percentage of the total number of campaigns launched. Here's what we found:
And once again, we focus not on the average set rate, but on the excellent set rate. What does it take to be best in class?
The Hatch accounts with high set rates have three core things in common:
They have high response rates. This sounds obvious, but it's not as obvious as you might think.
Yes, the more people that respond to your speed to lead campaign, the more opportunities you have to book an appointment. So, following the best practices above is core to getting higher set rates.
But here's what happens when we plot response rate against set rate for these retail campaigns:
As you can see, not all campaigns with high response rates had high set rates. Part of that is because not every response is a positive response. The other part of that is because maximizing your response-to-appointment set rate comes down to the customer experience.
Yes, implementing the outreach best practices we shared above will naturally provide a solid customer experience. But it's crucial to continue that level of service once they respond to your outreach.
Here's what the top performing teams are doing:
They have the right tone: When it comes to your customers, they're not lucky to have you; you're lucky to have them and you want to earn their business. This mindset is essential throughout the entire customer journey. It seems simple, but you'd be surprised at how many representatives aren't providing this experience, or at least not consistently.
They reply back immediately: Automated outreach is great because leads will get reached out to by your business immediately. But what's more important is, how long is it taking you to reply back once a customer responds to that initial greeting? In Hatch, we call this metric "Average User Reply Time." And that's what we're covering next.
Once again, we want to clarify that reply time is not "speed to lead." It's how long it takes someone from your business to reply back to a contact, once that contact has responded to your outreach campaign.
In this study, we found that:
It makes sense that companies using Hatch AI agents have faster average response times, because AI agents respond within seconds, bringing down the overall average. They also reduce burdens on staff, freeing humans up to respond more quickly to contacts.
When you respond immediately, you demonstrate that you're engaged, you're interested and attentive to your customer, and that you want to earn their business—which, in turn, keeps your customers engaged.
And this is one of the biggest value-adds of Hatch AI CSRs. They are always-on, providing fast, pleasant, and accurate responses to your customers no matter what time of day it is, no matter how many other conversations they're having at once.
This isn't always possible for humans, and it isn't fair to expect that out of them day in and day out, asking and answering the same questions over and over again.
With Hatch AI, we've seen the time it takes to book an appointment get reduced from days (between all the back and forth messaging, it accumulates), down to just minutes.
What this means is, companies using Hatch AI are not only able to process a higher volume of leads, but those leads are getting a faster and more convenient experience which is improving booking rates. Hear it from Chelsea Muniz of Point Loma Electric & Plumbing, who was able to increase their booking rate 14%:
If you're interested in Hatch AI, you can
Just as is the case with response rates, there are factors other than your outreach and engagement strategy that impact your set rates, including your level of brand awareness, the quality of the leads you are generating, seasonality, and more.
As you can see, there isn't one silver bullet that makes an effective Speed to Lead campaign. It's a combination of factors that captures the response and the appointment. Use the takeaways and templates we've provided here and in our Speed to Lead Playbook so you can start getting a higher ROI on your lead spend.
Have more questions?
I share the below resources throughout this post, but here is the full list so you can rest assured you got them all:
These performance metrics were collected by analyzing 30,455 Speed to Lead campaigns launched for retail lead sources by Hatch users over the last 3 months.
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