· 7 min read · Jason Youngjin Koh
Call them back the same day
The least glamorous factor in paid advertising is also the most decisive. If enquiries sit until Monday, the budget that produced them has already been spent on somebody else's customer.
How fast you reply decides more about your advertising results than your targeting, your creative or your budget. Ads buy enquiries. Enquiries are not customers. Almost everything in that gap is response time and follow up, and both of those live inside your business, not inside the ad account.
This is the least interesting thing anybody will tell you about paid media, and in most Australian small businesses it is the single biggest lever available.
An enquiry is a moment, not a record
Someone searched, found you, weighed up three or four options and filled in a form. For that stretch of time the job was the thing they were thinking about. Twenty minutes later they are back at work, on a site, at school pick up, or in a meeting. The intent has not disappeared, but the attention has, and attention is what your reply needs.
Assume they contacted two or three businesses, because that is what people do with a comparison shopping tool as good as a search results page. It costs them nothing to enquire four times. So your reply is not landing in an empty inbox. It is landing in a queue with your competitors in it.
The first useful reply very often wins that queue, and it wins regardless of price. That has little to do with laziness. The first person who answers gets to frame the job, ask the questions, book the site visit and become the reference point everyone else is measured against. The second caller is arguing with a decision that has already half formed.
What the research actually shows
The most cited study on this is not new and not Australian, but it is real and it is worth knowing. In March 2011, Harvard Business Review published an audit by James Oldroyd, Kristina McElheran and David Elkington of 2,241 United States companies, each sent a web generated test enquiry with the reply timed. Firms that attempted contact within an hour were about seven times more likely to have a meaningful conversation with a decision maker than firms that waited just one hour longer, and around sixty times more likely than firms that waited a day or more.
7x
How much more likely firms were to reach a decision maker when they made contact within an hour rather than an hour later. Harvard Business Review, The Short Life of Online Sales Leads, March 2011.
Treat the multiples as direction, not as a promise about your suburb, your trade or your price point. The internet is full of speed to lead percentages with no study behind them at all. You do not need those. The mechanism is enough on its own: enquiries are made in parallel, attention decays within the hour, and the first substantive reply gets to set the terms.
Where the ad budget actually goes
Run the arithmetic on your own numbers rather than anyone else's. Say you spend $4,000 a month and it produces 50 enquiries, which is $80 an enquiry. Of those 50, twelve come in after five o'clock, eight land on a Saturday, and six arrive while everyone is on the tools with the phone in the ute.
That is 26 enquiries, more than half the month, whose outcome is decided by what happens when nobody is at a desk. You paid $2,080 for them. If they get answered on Monday, you did not buy 50 enquiries. You bought 24, at $167 each, and the other $2,080 bought somebody else a customer.
The fixes, all of them unglamorous
One named person owns the reply
Not the team, not the shared inbox, not whoever gets to it. A name, with a backup name for their days off. Enquiries that belong to everybody belong to nobody, and shared inboxes are where accountability goes quiet. Write the name on the wall if that is what it takes.
Phone first, email second
A phone call is a conversation and an email is a queue position. Call, and if they do not pick up, leave a voicemail saying who you are and that you will text, then text immediately. A missed call with no follow up is worse than no call, because you have used up the surprise without saying anything.
If you are a trades business and genuinely cannot answer while working, a missed call text back is close to free and buys you the rest of the day. Most phone systems and mobile plans in Australia will do it, and if yours will not, a simple automation attached to your business number will.
An automatic acknowledgement buys you time
An instant reply confirming the enquiry arrived, naming the person who will call, and saying when, holds your place while the customer waits. It never replaces the call itself. Give a window you will actually hit. Within two hours during business hours, first thing tomorrow otherwise. A promise you miss is worse than no promise.
A follow up sequence for the ones who do not answer
Most enquiries do not answer the first call, and most businesses stop there. One attempt is a coin toss dressed up as a process. Four or five touches across a fortnight, mixing call, text and email, cost you nothing and recover a meaningful share of the enquiries you already paid for.
| When | What you do | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Within minutes | Automatic acknowledgement naming the person and the callback window | Stops the wait feeling like silence |
| Within the hour | Phone call, voicemail if unanswered, text straight after | Catches them while the job is still the thing they are thinking about |
| Same day, later | Second call at a different time of day | Different hour, different chance of a free hand |
| Day 2 | Short text with one specific question about the job | A question is easier to answer than a pitch |
| Day 4 | Email with a price guide, a photo of similar work, or availability | Gives them something to act on without a conversation |
| Day 10 to 14 | One last call or text, then close the record | People who went quiet were often just busy |
Record what happened
Every enquiry gets an outcome written against it: booked, quoted and lost, never reached, not a real enquiry. A spreadsheet is enough to start with. Without it you have no conversion rate, and without a conversion rate you cannot tell a bad campaign from a good campaign answered badly. Those two look identical in a bank statement and need opposite responses.
The never reached column is usually the one that changes minds. Owners expect it to be small. When they count it properly for a month it is frequently the largest column on the page.
The part an agency cannot do for you
An agency can put the right offer in front of the right person in the right suburb at the right moment, and can make the enquiry cheaper and more qualified. Nobody outside your business can pick up your phone at 4:50 on a Friday, know whether you can get to Penrith on Tuesday, and speak to a customer with your authority.
This is worth saying plainly because it is the most common reason a campaign that did not work actually did work. The enquiries arrived. They were the right kind. They were answered two days late by someone with no context, or not answered at all. The ad account gets blamed because the ad account is the thing with a dashboard.
Before you turn the campaign off, count how many of last month's enquiries were called back the same day. If the answer is under half, you have not tested advertising yet.
What to check this week
- Pull last month's enquiries and write the time each one arrived next to the time it was first answered.
- Count how many arrived outside business hours. That is the portion of your budget currently decided by your voicemail.
- Put one name against the reply, with a backup, and tell the rest of the team it is not their job.
- Turn on an instant acknowledgement with a callback window you will actually hit.
- Write a five step follow up sequence and use it on everyone who does not answer the first call.
- Record an outcome against every enquiry so that next month you are arguing from numbers instead of impressions.
Once you know your true conversion rate from enquiry to customer, you can work out what a customer is worth to you
None of this needs new software, a bigger budget or a rebrand. It needs one person, a phone, and a rule that an enquiry gets answered today. That rule is worth more than most of the optimisation work that gets done on top of it.