Most of the marketing advice we give is about getting more people to get in touch. But a fair number of the accounts we look at have a different problem: the enquiries are arriving, and they’re going cold before anyone replies. If you want to respond to enquiries faster, you don’t need a new tool or a bigger budget. You need a few habits and a couple of settings.
It’s an uncomfortable thing to look at, because the money has already been spent. Whether the lead came from Google Ads, your website or a recommendation, the hard part (getting someone to reach out) is done. Then it sits in an inbox for two days.
Why speed matters more than you’d think
When someone searches for a plumber, a solicitor or a landscaper, they rarely contact just one business. They send two or three messages in the same sitting, then get on with their day. Whoever replies first, with something useful, is usually the one who gets the conversation.
We can’t give you a neat statistic for how much a slow reply costs, and we’d be wary of anyone who does. But the pattern is clear from the accounts we manage. When a client tells us “the leads are rubbish”, it’s worth asking how quickly they were followed up. Quite often the leads were fine. They’d simply picked someone else by the time the phone was returned.
Someone who has just filled in a form is thinking about the problem now. A day later they’ve moved on, or they’ve had a quote from somebody else.
Start by finding out where enquiries actually land
Before you change anything, trace what happens to an enquiry. Fill in your own contact form on your phone and see:
- which email address it goes to, and whether anyone actually checks it
- whether it lands in spam or a shared inbox that nobody owns
- what the person sees afterwards (a thank-you page, or just a blank refresh)
- how a missed phone call gets handled out of hours
We’ve seen forms routed to an old address of someone who left the business a year earlier. It sounds daft, but it happens more often than people admit, particularly after a website rebuild. If you want a refresher on making sure your forms and calls are properly recorded, our guide to working out which marketing is bringing you enquiries covers the tracking side.
Set a realistic target and make one person responsible
Don’t promise yourself a reply “within minutes” if you’re on a roof all day. Pick a target you can actually keep. For many small businesses, “same working day, and within a couple of hours during office hours” is a perfectly good standard.
Then give it an owner. Enquiries that belong to “whoever sees it first” tend to belong to nobody. Name one person, and name who covers when they’re off.
Use an automatic reply, but make it useful
An automatic confirmation email is worth setting up on any contact form. It tells the person their message arrived, which stops them sending it again or giving up. The best ones do a bit more than say “thanks for your message”. They say when you’ll reply, and give something helpful in the meantime, such as a phone number for anything urgent or the details you’ll need for a quote.
Keep it short and write it like a person would. If it reads like a legal notice, it won’t reassure anyone.
On your thank-you page, do the same. Tell people what happens next. This is also a good place to measure form submissions properly if you’re running ads, because a dedicated confirmation page gives you something clean to track.
Make it easy to reply from your phone
A lot of small business owners deal with enquiries between jobs, from a phone. If the notification email is a wall of formatting with the message buried at the bottom, you’ll put it off. Check that the notification you receive shows the person’s name, phone number and message right at the top, so you can reply in thirty seconds from a van.
A few template replies saved on your phone help too. Not to sound robotic, but so you can send a decent first answer quickly and follow up with the detail when you’re back at a desk.
Don’t ignore the missed call
Phone calls are often the highest-value enquiries, especially from ads. A missed call is a lost lead unless you do something about it.
If you can’t always answer, make sure your voicemail greeting is clear and says when you’ll call back. If you use call tracking numbers, check that they forward to a number that’s actually answered. And if you run Google Ads with call assets, look at your ad schedule. If your ads promote a phone number at 7pm on a Sunday and nobody picks up, you’re paying for clicks that can’t convert. Our post on Google Ads assets explains how call assets work and how to limit them to the hours you’re open.
Follow up once, then once more
Replying fast is the first half. The second is following up when a quote goes quiet. People get busy, they forget, they mean to reply and don’t. A short, polite message a few days after sending a quote (“just checking this arrived and happy to answer any questions”) wins work that would otherwise drift away.
Two follow-ups is usually plenty. After that, leave the door open and move on.
If you’re paying for the enquiries, this matters more
If you spend money on Google Ads management, every slow reply has a price attached. A click that costs a few pounds, turned into an enquiry that sits unanswered, is simply wasted budget. When we review an account, we look at the website and the follow-up process alongside the campaign itself, because fixing the front half doesn’t help if the back half leaks. Our post on why your website is half of your Google Ads campaign makes a similar point from the website side.
A quick checklist to try this week
Submit your own contact form from a phone and time how long it takes you to notice it. Check the spam folder. Ring your own business number from a mobile when you’re out and see what a caller hears. Read your automatic reply as if you were a customer.
None of this is glamorous, but it’s often the cheapest improvement available. If you’d like a second pair of eyes on how your enquiries are tracked and handled, or you want to know whether your ads are bringing in the right sort of leads, get in touch and we’ll talk it through. We work with businesses across Gloucestershire, Cheltenham and Bristol, and we’re happy to give an honest view.
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