The average business takes 42 hours to reply
Researchers at Harvard Business Review audited 2,241 American companies to see how long they took to answer a web inquiry.
The average first reply took 42 hours. Almost a quarter of the companies never replied at all. Only 37 percent answered within an hour.
Read that again, because it is the whole opportunity. Answer within an hour and you are ahead of nearly two thirds of your competitors. Not by being better at the work. Just by picking up.
Why five minutes beats thirty
A separate study, done at MIT, looked at what happens inside that first half hour. It tracked more than 15,000 leads and 100,000 calls.
Calling a lead within five minutes rather than thirty made them 21 times more likely to be qualified. Not 21 percent. Twenty-one times.
The reason is simple and has nothing to do with sales technique. At five minutes they are still sitting there, still thinking about the problem, probably still on your website. At thirty they have moved on, and quite possibly filled in two more forms.
Whoever answers first usually wins, because the customer stops looking as soon as somebody helpful turns up.
First, find out how long you actually take
Nobody thinks they are slow. Test it instead of guessing.
Fill in your own contact form from your phone, using a name nobody at your business will recognise. Then put the phone down and note the time.
How long until somebody replies? Did anything arrive at all? Did the email land in a spam folder that nobody checks?
Do the same with your phone number and see how many rings it takes, and what happens if nobody picks up. Most owners find at least one thing broken, and a fair number find the form has not been reaching anyone for months.
Get the lead onto your phone, not into an inbox
The usual setup is that the form sends an email. That is where the delay comes from.
Email is where things go to wait. It gets filtered, buried, and read when you are back at a desk. For anyone who works with their hands, that means the evening, if at all. This is why the lead arrives at 7pm and your reply gets written at 9am.
The fix is to make the lead interrupt you the way a phone call does. A text, or a push notification that buzzes in your pocket. You do not have to answer it immediately, but you get to decide, which you cannot do if you never saw it.
- Send yourself a text or push alert the moment the form is submitted, not just an email
- Send the customer an automatic reply too, so they know a human exists and stop shopping
- Set up missed-call text-back, so a call you could not take turns into a conversation instead of a voicemail nobody plays
- Check the form still works after any website change - this is the failure nobody notices, because a broken form looks exactly like a quiet week
The tool we built for this
We kept setting this up for clients and kept hitting the same wall. Doing it properly meant a Twilio account, carrier paperwork, and a monthly bill. All for something that should be simple. So we wrote our own.
Easy Text Notifications sends the lead straight to your phone the second the form is submitted. It works on WordPress, or any PHP site. No Twilio account, no Google service behind it.
We use it ourselves. It is also sold to other agencies, which is a better recommendation than anything we could write here.
What to say in the first reply
Speed only helps if the reply is worth reading. It does not have to be long. It has to prove a person read it.
Use their name. Repeat the thing they asked about, in their words, so it is obvious this is not automatic. Say what happens next and when. Then ask one question that moves it forward - when they are free, or what the address is.
Two sentences beats a quote. The quote can come later. The first message is only there to stop them looking elsewhere.
Set it up yourself, or we will do it
Everything above is doable on your own, and most of it costs nothing. Test your form, get alerts onto your phone, write a decent first reply. That is the bulk of the benefit.
If you would rather it was just working, we set this up as part of website care. We will tell you first whether your existing setup already does it. Plenty do, and nobody ever checked.
Common questions
How fast should I reply to a website inquiry?
Inside five minutes if you can. Inside an hour at the very worst. MIT research found that calling within five minutes rather than thirty made a lead 21 times more likely to qualify. And a Harvard Business Review audit of 2,241 companies found the average first reply took 42 hours. Answer within the hour and you are ahead of roughly two thirds of your competitors.
What is a good average lead response time?
Under an hour is good, under five minutes is excellent, and anything over a day usually means the lead is gone. The Harvard Business Review audit found only 37 percent of companies replied within an hour and 23 percent never replied at all.
Why does responding faster work so well?
Because the customer is still thinking about the problem. At five minutes they are probably still on your website. At thirty they have moved on and may have contacted two other businesses. Whoever answers first usually wins, and it has nothing to do with being cheaper.
How do I get contact form leads sent to my phone?
Set the form to send a text or push notification as well as an email. We built Easy Text Notifications for this - it works on WordPress or any PHP site and does not need a Twilio account. Most form plugins can also be wired to a phone alert with some setup.
How do I know if my contact form is even working?
Fill it in yourself from your phone using a name nobody there will recognise, then wait. If nothing arrives, or it lands in a spam folder nobody checks, you have found the problem. Do this after any website change - a broken form looks exactly like a quiet week.