How Fast Should You Follow Up With a Lead?
Follow up in minutes, not hours. A new lead should get a real reply within five minutes, a phone attempt inside the first hour, then six to eight touches across two weeks before you stop. Leads that sit until the end of the day book with whoever answered first. Done for you: Ziwi Engage from $99 a month.
This is the cheapest fix in local marketing and the one almost nobody owns. You already paid for the lead: the ad click, the ranking, the website. Response time decides how many of those leads you keep, and it costs nothing to change. Below: the target response windows, a full follow-up cadence you can hand to your front desk, what each message should say, and what to do about the leads that arrive at 9 PM.
How fast should you follow up with a lead?
Within five minutes for the first reply, and within the first hour for the first phone attempt.
Five minutes is the standard because that is roughly how long a person stays on the task of hiring someone before they move on to the next tab. After that you are no longer answering a question, you are interrupting someone who has half-forgotten they asked.
The most-cited research on this is a Harvard Business Review study of 2,241 US companies by Oldroyd, McElheran and Elkington, published in 2011 as The Short Life of Online Sales Leads. It found that firms attempting contact within an hour of an inquiry were about seven times more likely to have a meaningful conversation with a decision maker than firms that waited just one hour longer, and more than 60 times more likely than firms that waited 24 hours or more. The study is old and the finding has not aged badly, because the behaviour it measures is human, not technological.
What does a follow-up cadence look like?
Six to eight touches over two weeks, across text, phone and email, at different times of day. The reason to write it down as a cadence is that the second, third and fourth attempts are the ones that get skipped when the week gets busy, and those are the attempts that produce most of the bookings. Hand this table to whoever owns the phone.
| When | Channel | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Within 5 minutes | Text | Instant reply that names the service they asked about and offers two specific times |
| Within 15 minutes | Call | First call attempt. No answer: a 15-second voicemail, then a text saying you called |
| Within 1 hour | The same offer in writing, plus a booking link, your address and your review profile | |
| Same day, different hour | Call | Second attempt. If the first was midday, try after 5 PM |
| Day 2 | Call | Third attempt, at a third time of day. Most contacts happen here or earlier |
| Day 4 | Text | Short and low pressure: still want a time this week? |
| Day 7 | Useful, not a chase: what to expect, the price range, what happens on the first visit | |
| Day 14 | Text | Close-out: you will stop reaching out, they can reply any time |
| Day 30 onward | Email and SMS | Long-term nurture, monthly, until they buy or unsubscribe |
Two rules make that cadence work. Vary the time of day, because a person unreachable at 11 AM every day is reachable at 6 PM. And stop cleanly at day 14 with a message that says you are stopping, which is the single most replied-to message in most cadences.
How many times should you follow up before giving up?
Six to eight attempts, then move the lead to long-term nurture rather than deleting it. Most local businesses stop after one or two attempts, which means they pay full price for a lead and then abandon it before the point where most contacts actually happen.
A lead that never answered is not a lead that said no; it is usually a lead that was at work.
What should each message say?
Name what they asked about, offer specific times, and ask one question. Vague follow-ups get vague results, and any message that could have been sent to anyone gets read as marketing rather than as a person answering.
- Name the request back to them. "You asked about a roof inspection on Wilson Street" beats "Thanks for your interest in our services."
- Offer two times, not availability. "Thursday at 9 or Friday at 2" gets an answer. "Let us know when works for you" gets nothing.
- Ask exactly one question per message. Two questions halve your reply rate because the person now has to compose rather than tap.
- Text before you call, and text after a missed call. A missed call from an unknown number is ignored. A missed call with a text attached is a callback.
- Say who you are every time. By day four they do not remember your business name, and an unnamed text reads as spam.
- Send the review profile once. A link to your Google reviews inside the first email does the trust work you cannot do in a text, which is why the review profile matters to follow-up as much as it matters to search.
Want every lead answered in seconds?
How do you answer leads at 9 PM without hiring anyone?
You automate the first reply and keep the human for the conversation that follows. Leads arrive while your team is on a roof, in an operatory, driving, or asleep, and those are exactly the hours a homeowner sits down to sort out a problem. A five-minute response standard that depends on a person being free does not survive a busy Tuesday, let alone a Sunday night.
That is what Ziwi Engage does. Engage is $99 a month: a missed call gets a text back in seconds, website chat is captured, and every new lead gets an instant text answer. Engage Pro is $299 a month: it answers questions in your voice by text and call, qualifies the lead, and books it onto your real calendar, 24/7, with your team able to take over any conversation at any point. AI usage is billed at cost with no markup on both. The full explainer on why the first responder wins is in the speed to lead guide.
| What happens to a new lead | Engage, $99 a month | Engage Pro, $299 a month |
|---|---|---|
| Missed call | Text back in seconds | Text back in seconds, and a call back |
| Web form or chat | Instant text reply | Instant reply, then a real conversation |
| Their questions | Captured and passed to you | Hours, service area, pricing and your common questions, answered in your voice |
| Qualifying | Your team does it | Built in, politely, before it reaches your calendar |
| Booking | Handed to your team | Qualified leads booked onto your real availability |
| Nights and weekends | Answered | Answered and booked, 24/7 |
| Records | Transcripts, yours | Transcripts, yours |
What should you measure?
Three numbers: median time to first response, the share of leads that got all six to eight touches, and bookings per 100 leads.
If those numbers do not exist anywhere today, that is the first job, because a response time nobody measures drifts back to hours within a month. Ziwi's call tracking and attribution is included in every plan, so response time and bookings sit in the same report as the ad spend that created the lead.
Fixing follow-up is the rare change that makes every channel better at once, because it books more of the leads you already generate without buying a single extra click. If you want it running by itself, Ziwi Engage starts at $99 a month, Engage Pro at $299 a month, both month to month with no long contract, and the transcripts and the numbers stay yours. Published prices are on the answering service cost page.