A common problem we hear from residential and commercial cleaning businesses when it comes to online marketing is they have a hard time closing web leads.
We also know from years of experience generating high-value leads online for local businesses that tiny improvements over your cleaning competition can tip the scales in your favor in a major way.
When we see a 10% improvement we do a quick chair dance and then go mine for the next golden 10% increase.
Over time, all those 10% increases add up to massive results.
So when we find an easy way to get a 100-fold increase in lead effectiveness that requires absolutely no special skills, knowledge or training, some table-top river dancing may be on the horizon.
This is legit so put it on your schedule to start implementing right away! These are the facts from the Havard Business Review:
These results are especially shocking given how quickly online leads go cold—a phenomenon we explored in a separate study, which involved 1.25 million sales leads received by 29 B2C and 13 B2B companies in the U.S. Firms that tried to contact potential customers within an hour of receiving a query were nearly seven times as likely to qualify the lead (which we defined as having a meaningful conversation with a key decision maker) as those that tried to contact the customer even an hour later—and more than 60 times as likely as companies that waited 24 hours or longer.
If you take it a step further, additional research has shown that if you respond to web leads within 5 minutes you'll get a 100 fold (that's 10,000%) better response than if you wait an hour.
Responding in 10 minutes instead of 5 drops lead effectiveness 400%.
This is crucial improving your closing ratio!
You could be getting great leads all day long from your website but thinking they are "low-quality" simply because by the time you respond the customer has already done something else.
It’s almost not worth responding to a web lead if it takes you more than an hour.
Back in the days when Yellow Pages (the actual big, fat books) were a primary method for people finding service businesses, everyone knew that if you couldn't respond to inquiries quickly, they were just going to move down to the next listing, your competitor, and call him.
Another study has shown that up to 50% of people will buy from the person who calls them back first.
If I'm shopping online for someone to clean my home or office, I'm probably going to contact a few companies.
Heck, I may even decide to just hire the teenager down the street to clean for me this time.
If one of those companies responds to me before I look up the neighbor’s number, then I'm obviously going to trust them more than the guy I don't hear from until Monday afternoon.
How do you get your office to respond quickly?
- Show them the data in this email. Everyone responds better when they know WHY it’s important for them to do so.
- Record your phone calls. As someone who has listened to recorded calls from a lot of businesses, I promise you will learn things to improve. For $.10/minute I can start this for you right away.
- Hire teleXpertise to "Shop" your business. These are true professionals who know are well worth the $50 to learn areas for improvement.
- Consider a live answering service after hours like Gold Cross. They know when a call is a lead and can direct that to the proper rep via phone, email, and text.
- Make a list of your top 5-10 most common web inquiries your office staff receives and then write up the perfect email response for each. Then have each person save a copy of those responses in their email client and smart phone in “Drafts”. Now they can quickly copy and paste the best response for each inquiry while still having it come from an individual’s email address to make it personal.
- When your staff emails a response, have them CC the manager. That way he can see when the lead came in and how long until a response was sent. Put up a chart or whiteboard showing the average response times for each rep each week.
If you're not already responding to all of your web inquiries within 5 minutes, then make internet lead response time a high priority!
Our goal is to help you grow your cleaning business through generating a pipeline full of cost-effective, predictable online leads.
So as we come across great ways to help you get the best ROI out of your marketing, we'll continue to pass them along.
