How quickly should a landscaping business respond to a web lead?

Within minutes, not hours, even though landscaping is a lower-urgency trade than plumbing or HVAC. The best-documented research on this (a study of 5.7 million inbound leads at 400+ companies) found contact odds 100x higher when the callback happens within 5 minutes versus 30, and conversion odds roughly 8x higher within 5 minutes versus 6+ minutes. In our own audit, only 9.9% of 154 landscaping businesses even promise a response time on their website.

Landscaping has its own version of urgency: a lot of the work (spring mulching, fall cleanup, storm damage) is genuinely seasonal, with a real window during which a given homeowner is actually shopping for it. A lead that sits for a week doesn't just risk losing to a faster competitor, it risks the whole job simply not happening this season.

"Respond" doesn't have to mean a completed conversation within 5 minutes, it means the lead knows someone's coming back to them that fast. An instant text confirmation the moment a form is submitted, followed by a call as soon as you're free, meets the research's own bar even if the full conversation happens a little later.

The gap between this bar and current practice is the real story here: 90.1% of the landscaping businesses we crawled make no explicit response-time promise at all, consistent with landscaping's overall standing as the lowest-scoring trade in our full report. A business that states a response-time promise, and backs it with an actual instant alert, stands out by default here more than in almost any other trade we audited.