Nobody writes to a business for fun. The person who emails at 7pm asking whether you can fit them in on Thursday has a Thursday problem, and they are solving it with a list. Your address is on the list. So are two or three others. Whoever answers first gets the Thursday.
This is the thing a reply-time figure never shows you. An unanswered email does not look like a loss. It looks like an email. The customer does not write back to say they went elsewhere, and the money that did not arrive leaves no trace. The arithmetic below is a way of making it visible, and it uses only numbers you already have.
The four numbers
- Emails per week that are asking to buy or book. Not every message — the ones with intent. Count a week by hand if your mail client does not tell you.
- The share you answer within an hour today. Be honest. For most small businesses the honest answer is "the ones that arrive while somebody is at a desk."
- Your close rate when you reply fast, and when you reply slow. You may only have a feel for this. A feel is enough to start; the gap between the two is the number that matters.
- Median job value. Not the best job. The one in the middle.
Multiply the weekly count by the share you answer slowly, by the gap between your fast and slow close rates, by the median job. That is roughly what slow replies cost you a week in first jobs. Multiply by your repeat rate and you have the real figure.
Why the first hour is the one that counts
The gap between fast and slow is not a gentle slope. A study published in Harvard Business Review in 2011 looked at how quickly companies followed up on inbound leads and found that those who responded within an hour were about seven times as likely to qualify the lead as those who waited even one hour more — and more than sixty times as likely as those who waited a day. The study is about sales leads broadly, not small-business email in particular, but the shape of the curve is the point: the value of a reply falls off a cliff, and the cliff is close. The article is here if you want the detail.
The reason is the list. A person with an urgent problem is not comparing proposals at leisure. They are working down the names in front of them, and the first one that responds becomes the one they are dealing with. By the time your reply arrives the next morning, the problem has a name on it and it is not yours.
A worked example
Take a landscaping company that gets 20 emails a week with real intent. Say 12 of those arrive outside the hours anyone is at a desk, and get answered the next morning. Say the owner closes about half of the fast replies and a quarter of the slow ones — a gap of 25 points — and the median job is $900.
That is 12 × 0.25 × $900, or $2,700 a week in first jobs that went to whoever answered at 7pm. Call it $140,000 a year. If a first job becomes a repeat customer even once on average, the figure doubles. It is not a small number, and it is the kind of number that does not appear anywhere until somebody works it out.
Where the slow hours actually are
- Evenings. People email after their own working day, which is after yours. For home services this is the highest-intent traffic of the week.
- Weekends. Two days of inbox, answered on Monday, when the Saturday emergency has long since been handled by somebody else.
- The crush. One person on site, one on the phone, and nine emails land between two and four in the afternoon. They get answered at six, in a hurry.
What to do with the number
If your figure is large, the question stops being about technology and becomes an ordinary comparison. Something that answers within a minute at 7pm, from your own website's content, and hands you the ones that need a person, costs from $19.99 a month. Against a weekly leak in the thousands that is not a close decision, and an AI customer service rep is one way to make it. The point of the arithmetic, though, is to know what the gap is worth before anybody sells you something to fill it.
And if your figure is small, you have learned something cheaper than any subscription: that your reply time is fine, and your attention belongs somewhere else.
Questions people ask
- How fast should a small business reply to a customer email?
- Within the hour, for anything with buying intent. The research on inbound leads shows the value of a reply falls sharply after the first hour and collapses after a day, because the customer is working down a list of names and the first to answer gets the job.
- Does this apply to businesses that do not sell by email?
- Only to the emails that ask to buy or book. Run the arithmetic on those alone. A business whose inbox is mostly existing customers with questions has a different problem — a service one — and a smaller number here.
- Is an auto-reply enough?
- An auto-reply tells the customer they are in a queue. It does not answer the question, and the customer still has the list in front of them. It is better than silence and much worse than an answer.
- What does an AI reply actually say?
- It answers from your own website and documents — whether you cover the area, what the process is, what the next step is — and hands the thread to you when the customer wants a person or asks something it has no material for. It does not invent prices or make promises. Here is a walkthrough.
Want help with your own numbers?
Send us your name and we will run the arithmetic with you, on your figures, before you buy anything.