You’ve gone to a lot of trouble to get visitors to your website. You may buy clicks from Google or pay a third-party provider for search engine optimization services. You might use other traffic generation strategies such as banner advertising, online sponsorships or even “follow you around” retargeting campaigns. There are multiple online and offline methods to get interested prospects to visit your website.
The optimal result you hope to achieve when a prospect visits your website is a conversion of some kind. The best result is a direct phone call from the visitor to you. Optionally, a visitor might engage by filling out a contact form on your website. And this is where—after a form submission—you can dramatically improve your conversion results.
Here’s how: Upon receipt of a Web-based lead, you need to respond quickly. The evidence is clear. If you do, your odds of success improve significantly.
In a study of 3.5 million Web-based leads, speed-to-call was the most significant driver of improved conversion rates. The findings of the Leads360 survey found that the simple act of making a phone call to a prospect within one minute of his or her form submission improved the likelihood of conversion by almost 400 percent. For each subsequent minute that passed before making the first call, the likelihood of converting that client reduced dramatically to the dismal possibility of just 17 percent at the 24-hour mark.
In another study documented in the Harvard Business Review, researchers audited more than 2,000 companies measuring the length of time it took to respond to a form submission. The average response time was 42 hours. The same research team conducted a related study of more than 1 million leads and discovered that firms who tried to contact prospects within one hour of receiving a query were seven times more likely to qualify the lead as those who waited more than an hour and 60 times more likely than those who waited 24 hours or more.
In a competitive environment, the speed of your response might mean the difference between getting a new client and completely losing them. But if you wait too long to respond, your significant Web marketing investment might just be wasted.
This new information should cause you to immediately implement rapid response calls to all form submissions through your website from now on. Can you really afford to do otherwise?
Tom Adams is a records and information management and information destruction marketing expert. Check out his regular marketing and training tools at TomAdams.com/SDB.