How Quickly Should You Follow Up With a Website Lead?

A web enquiry is not a lead in the traditional sense. It is somebody mid-decision, usually with two or three other tabs open, who has just given four different suppliers the same information.

Minutes, not hours

Treat anything over an hour as late and anything the next day as lost. The first supplier to have a real conversation frames the requirement, and everyone who follows is quoting against a specification somebody else shaped.

Phone first, email second

An email reply joins three other email replies. A phone call within ten minutes, from a named person who has read what they sent, is a different experience entirely — and it lets you qualify while the requirement is still fresh.

Build a routine that does not rely on goodwill

1. 01Enquiries alert a named owner, not a shared inbox nobody owns.
2. 02An automatic acknowledgement goes out immediately, saying who will call and when.
3. 03The owner attempts a call within the hour, and logs the attempt.
4. 04Five further contact attempts across two weeks, mixing phone and email.
5. 05Unconverted enquiries go into a reactivation list rather than the bin.

Cover the hours your buyers actually enquire

Look at when enquiries arrive. If a meaningful proportion land in the evening or at weekends, decide deliberately who handles them — even if the answer is a short acknowledgement and a first-thing call.

Measure it

Record time to first contact for every enquiry and review it monthly alongside conversion. It is the cheapest performance improvement available to most sales operations, and the only cost is discipline.