Man, so many small businesses suck at business 🤦🏻‍♂️ @AaronWeiche analyzed 225 small business websites in various industries, tracking contact form responses for 3 weeks. Here are some surprising stats from the research: ☠️ 42.6% of leads got NO response. Um, what? 🐌 The average response time was 17 hours and 49 minutes. 🗣️ 65.9% of businesses made just one attempt to contact the lead. ☎️ 71.3% of businesses used only one communication method (phone, email, or text). ❌ 4.8% of contact forms were broken. 📧 Only 15.6% sent an auto-reply email. 💬 Only 20.1% used text messaging in their reply attempts. Here’s how Aaron says you can fix this for your business (or your clients’ businesses): 🔹 Simplify your contact form by using only the necessary fields. 🔹 Enable auto-replies to confirm submissions and set expectations. 🔹 Ensure immediate notifications of new leads. 🔹 Improve response times. 🔹 Make multiple follow-up attempts. 🔹 Use multiple communication channels to engage leads. 🔥 Bonus tip: Aaron’s company, @leadferno, just launched a brilliant contact form feature that solves many of these problems. In my YouTube series with Anne Kibler, many of her contact form leads weren’t even getting to her email inbox, and she had to remember to check for leads multiple times per day manually. Leadferno’s new Leadform feature solves this problem with its smart contact form to SMS messaging functionality. Anne will get an instant notification and respond via SMS straight to the customer’s phone. I’m definitely setting this up for her! 💡 Takeaway: I know we're all focused on SEO, but this is money. When you optimize the lead management process, you're DIRECTLY impacting the bottom line for your or your client's business. That's much more valuable than tinkering with title tags, implementing schema, or putting up a new page of content. So don't neglect working on this. #localseo #seo