Best Times To Follow-up On Website Leads

Have you ever wondered if there’s a “best time” for getting in contact with those leads you receive from your website? If you’re not receiving leads through your website, that’s a whole different problem for discussion with Levelten's Internet Marketing department at another time. I’m talking about making contact with the individuals that are making inquires or are submitting for additional information from your company website. You’re probably saying to yourself, “Call those leads right away, don’t ever let them stew!” and you’re right but is there science behind that notion?

MIT did a study that set out to find the optimal day of the week, time of day and time from creation that was best to call back web-generated leads for contact and qualification purposes (close ratios were not included in the study). They examined 3 years of data across six companies that generate and respond to web leads, from over fifteen thousand leads and over one hundred thousand phone call attempts. They focused on one question for this study:

When should companies call web-generated leads for optimal contact and qualification ratios?

I did a little breakdown of the study based on insidesales.com's review on sales lead management.

• The odds of calling to contact a lead decrease by over 10 times in the 1st hour. The odds of calling to qualify a lead decrease by over 6 times in the 1st hour. After 20 hours every additional dial your salespeople make actually hurts your ability to make contact to qualify a lead.
• The odds of getting in contact with a lead if called in 5 minutes versus 30 minutes drop 100 times. The odds of qualifying a lead if called in 5 minutes versus 30 minutes drop 21 times.
• Wednesday and Thursday are by far the best days to call for contact (by 49% over the worst day, Monday) and to qualify (by 19.1% better than the worst day).
• 4-6pm is the best time to call to make contact with a lead (by 114% over the worst time block). 8-9am and 4-5pm is the best time to contact a lead to qualify over 11-12am by 109%.

There does seem to be a very steep drop off of response to calls after the 1hr mark which was probably no surprise but even more concerning the study found that over the 20 hr mark each additional phone call may actually hurt your ability to make a contact to qualify a lead. Maybe something to think about upon follow up with those old leads.