How fast should you reply to a website lead? Faster than you think

Leads go cold quickly

In a widely cited Harvard Business Review study of online sales leads, companies that tried to contact a lead within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to qualify it as those that waited even an hour longer, and far more likely than those that waited a day. (Harvard Business Review, "The Short Life of Online Sales Leads", March 2011)

That research looked at companies' sales leads in general, not trades in particular, but the pattern will feel familiar. A homeowner with a leaking roof doesn't wait politely by the inbox. They fill in a few forms, and the first business to respond properly gets the conversation.

Why most replies are slow

Very few businesses are slow on purpose. Website requests land in an email inbox that someone checks at lunch or at the end of the day. The owner is on a job. The office is busy with phone calls. By the time anyone replies, the customer has booked someone else for Thursday.

The instant reply

The fix starts with an automatic reply the moment a request comes in, by text and by email. It should:

• Confirm it arrived. "Thanks, Maria, we've got your request for a furnace repair."
• Say who you are. Use your business name, and send the text from your business number, not an unknown one.
• Set an expectation. "We'll call or text you within the hour during business hours."
• Offer a faster path. "If it's urgent, reply to this text or call 905-555-0100."
• Include an opt-out. "Reply STOP to opt out" for the text.

A confirmation like this is part of answering the customer's own request, so keep it to that. A discount offer or newsletter sign-up turns it into marketing, which needs consent.

Then a person, quickly

The automatic reply buys you a little time. It doesn't replace a person. Within that window you promised, someone should reply with a real next step: a question about the job, a price range or a time to visit.

A few habits make that reliable:

1. Make it someone's job. Name who covers web leads each day, including who covers when they're on a job.
2. Use a shared inbox. Leads should land where the whole team can see them, not in one person's email.
3. Reply by text. Customers see a text sooner than an email, and they can answer between other things.
4. Cover the evenings. Decide what happens to leads at 8 p.m. A next-morning reply is fine if the automatic reply says so.

Measure it

You can't improve what you don't measure. Check how long new leads waited for a first reply this month: the average, and the slowest few. If the number is hours rather than minutes, look at where leads waited and who was meant to pick them up.

Our guides on why contact forms lose jobs and quote request forms that bring better leads cover the forms themselves.

This article is general information for business owners, not legal advice. Survey figures are US consumer research where noted; we are not aware of equivalent published Canadian surveys and do not present them as Canadian data.