Somebody fills in your form at nine in the morning. You call back at ten past. It rings out. You leave a voicemail, mark the record as attempted, and the day carries on. Two weeks later they hire somebody else, and as far as your records are concerned they simply evaporated.
They did not evaporate. They were in a meeting, or driving, or they did not recognize the number, which most people under forty treat as a reason not to answer. The inquiry was real. The first attempt to reach them failed, and in most local businesses the first attempt is the only structured one there is.
First contact is a coin flip, and everybody plans for heads
A large share of inbound leads do not connect on the first try. That is not a sales failure; it is the ordinary condition of phoning an adult during working hours. The failure is that nearly every business has a detailed plan for what happens when the person picks up and no plan at all for when they do not.
What fills the vacuum is memory and goodwill. Somebody means to try again tomorrow, then three new jobs land, and the follow-up happens or does not depending on how busy Thursday was. Leads are not lost by decision. They are lost by nobody's decision.
The sequence that recovers most of them
You do not need a complicated system. You need a written default that runs whether or not anybody remembers, and for a local business it looks roughly like this.
- Immediately, automatically: a message confirming you have the inquiry, naming who will be in touch and roughly when. This goes out within seconds and its only job is to stop the person carrying on down the list of search results.
- Within minutes: the call. Speed is the whole game at this stage, and if it rings out, leave a voicemail that says what you are calling about rather than just your name.
- Two minutes after the missed call: a text. This is the highest-yield message in the sequence by a distance, because it arrives while the voicemail notification is still on the screen and it can be answered without a conversation.
- Later that day: a short email with something useful in it — what the visit involves, a price range, the two questions you will need answered. Not a chase. A reason to reply.
- Next morning: a second call at a different time of day. Somebody unreachable at ten past nine is often reachable at four.
- Day three, then day seven: one more text, then a final email that says you will stop here and leaves the door open. Say that plainly. It produces replies, and it is the honest thing to do.
- Day thirty and beyond: they move into the ordinary list and hear from you occasionally like everybody else.
Six or seven touches over a week sounds aggressive written down. It reads very differently on the receiving end, where it is two short texts, two emails and two missed calls from a company they contacted on purpose.
Why text carries the sequence
A text is read almost immediately and almost always, and more importantly it can be answered in four words while somebody is doing something else. A voicemail demands a call back — a commitment of ten minutes and full attention that the person has to schedule. A text asks for a thumb.
Keep them short, sign them with a human name and the business, and ask one answerable question. Not checking in. Try: are mornings or afternoons better for the estimate? The open rate is not the point; the reply rate is, and you can read more on that gap in the text message has a 98% open rate.
Most businesses do not have a lead problem. They have a second-attempt problem, and it is much cheaper to fix.
It has to run without anybody remembering
A sequence that depends on a person recalling to send the day-three text is not a sequence, it is a hope. The messages should be scheduled the moment the lead arrives and cancelled automatically the moment somebody replies — nothing makes a business look less attentive than a chase arriving an hour after the job was booked.
That means the inquiries all have to land in one place. Where web forms go to one inbox, calls go to a phone nobody logs and chat messages go somewhere else entirely, no follow-up plan survives contact with a busy week. Consolidating them is the unglamorous prerequisite, and it is the subject of one inbox for web chat, Messenger and SMS leads.
Set up properly, this is the cheapest lead source you have: people who already raised their hand, recovered for the cost of a few scheduled messages. We build these sequences as part of SMS marketing and email marketing. If you want yours mapped against what you are already paying to generate the leads, ask for a proposal.
Frequently asked questions
- How many times should you follow up with a lead?
- Six or seven touches across the first week, spread over call, text and email, then a clean stop with an open door. Most businesses stop at two, which is roughly where the recoverable leads start rather than where they end.
- Isn't texting a lead intrusive?
- Not when they contacted you first and gave you the number for that purpose. Keep it short, identify yourself immediately, and stop the moment they reply or ask you to. The complaints come from volume and vagueness, not from texting itself.
- How quickly does the first message need to go out?
- Seconds for the automatic confirmation, minutes for the call. The difference between a five-minute reply and a one-hour reply is dramatic and well documented, which is why an immediate acknowledgement is worth automating even if a person cannot call for another twenty minutes.
- What about the leads that never reply at all?
- Move them to a slow list rather than deleting them. A share of no-reply inquiries are people whose timing was wrong rather than people who were never interested, and they come back months later — but only to a business that is still politely in front of them.