Inbound inquiry response and follow-up statistics (2026), by vertical

About four in ten small-business inquiries get no reply at all, and most of the rest get no follow-up. Leadferno's June 2024 test found 42.6% of 225 contact-form leads unanswered after three weeks¹. DelPrete's August 2024 secret shop found 47% of online real-estate inquiries ignored³. Pied Piper's April 2026 mystery shop found 72% of 3,211 home-services inquiries got no follow-up within 24 hours². No public study yet measures inquiries answered once and then dropped, or any wedding vertical's no-reply rate.

This page lists each number with its sample, channel and year. It is updated quarterly. Use the table, not a single headline figure.

How to use these statistics without misquoting them#

Inquiry response statistics break when they are moved out of their channel or their year. Run three checks before you quote any row.

1. Match the channel. A phone missed-call rate is not an email no-reply rate. Check the Channel column. If your claim is about email and the row is about calls, do not use it.
2. Match the measure. Mean and median differ by hours. DelPrete's real-estate mean was 8 h 17 m; the median was 39 minutes³. State which one you quote.
3. Quote the n and the year. Every row below has both. If you cannot write "(Source, n, year)" after the number, do not publish it.

For the older figures that fail these checks, such as "21x within five minutes" and "78% buy from the first responder", see the lead-response statistics traced to their source. That page holds the retire list. This page holds the replacements, by vertical.

Inquiry response statistics by vertical (2026 table)#

The 2026 inquiry response table covers seven verticals and one cross-industry comparison. The last column says whether the study measured follow-up after the first reply. Most did not.

Vertical	Statistic	Source, year	n	Channel	Follow-up measured?
Local services (home, professional, medical)	42.6% no reply in 3 weeks; mean first human reply 17 h 49 m; 10.6% within 1 h; 3.1% within 5 min	Leadferno, Jun 2024	225 forms	Web form	Partly: about two-thirds of answered leads got one response only
Home services	72% no follow-up within 24 h; 28% offered an appointment	Pied Piper PSI, Apr 2026	3,211 locations, 31 brands	Phone, chat, web form	Yes, 24-h window
Home services	55% of businesses don't ask the caller to book	Invoca, Jul 2026	Call data	Phone	No
Home services	20% of pros reply to leads within the hour; over 70% of customers expect a same-day response	Jobber, 2026	1,050 owners (survey)	All	No (self-reported)
Real estate	47% of online inquiries unanswered; mean 8 h 17 m, median 39 min; 62% of open-house visitors got no follow-up	DelPrete, Aug 2024	100+ shops, 25+ brokerages	Online inquiry; open house	Yes, open houses only
Legal	Only 33% of firms responded to email	Clio, 2024	500 firms	Email	No
Healthcare, legal, home services, real estate	Missed-call rates 32%, 28%, 14%, 9%; "up to 85%" of unanswered callers won't call back	CallRail, Jan 2025	1.1M conversations	Phone	No
Online stores	Email median first reply 12+ h; after-hours wait about 15 h vs 2.2 h in hours	Gorgias, May and Jul 2026	Platform data	Email, chat	No
Marketplaces (services)	Reply within 30 min: 25% more likely hired than within 3 h	Thumbtack, Nov 2025	Platform data	Marketplace message	No
Marketplaces (freelance)	1-h delay: 46% lower hiring odds; 24 h+: 90% less likely	Management Science via Entrepreneur, Jul 2026	11M+ transactions	Marketplace message	No
Weddings (directories)	Couples contact 5 vendors per category; reply under 3 h, couples 2.2x more likely to reply	WeddingPro "Hello to Hired", undated	Not stated	Directory lead	No
Wedding venues	About 1 in 5 qualified inquiries book; under 30% to site visit is a warning sign	Indigo Digital, 2026	Benchmark, n not stated	All	No
Comparison: B2B cold outbound	Follow-ups produced 58.6% of replies	Belkins, Jun 2026	7.53M emails	Email	Yes (outbound, not inbound)

Sources: Leadferno¹; Pied Piper²; Invoca⁶; Jobber⁷; DelPrete³; Clio⁴; CallRail⁵; Gorgias⁸⁹; Thumbtack¹⁰; Entrepreneur¹¹; WeddingPro¹²; Indigo¹³¹⁴; Belkins¹⁵. Retrieved October 2026.

What percentage of leads never get a reply?#

The share of leads that never get a reply sits between 42.6% and 67% in every written-channel study since 2024. Leadferno's figure is 42.6% for small-business forms¹. DelPrete's is 47% for real-estate inquiries³. Clio's is the high end: only 33% of 500 law firms responded to email, so 67% did not⁴.

Read the scope before you generalise. Leadferno sampled businesses in the top ten local results with 25 or more reviews¹. Those are established firms, not struggling ones. Leadferno also found 4.8% of forms broken and only 15.6% sending an auto-reply¹. An auto-reply is not a reply. Do not count it as one.

What is the average lead response time by industry?#

Average lead response time by industry is published for only three written channels, and the averages hide a long tail. The figures are 17 h 49 m mean for small-business forms¹, 8 h 17 m mean for real-estate inquiries³, and a 12+ hour median for online-store email⁸.

Watch the after-hours split. Gorgias found after-hours questions waited about 15 hours, against 2.2 hours in business hours⁹. If your own average looks fine, check the inquiries that arrived on a Friday evening. That is where the tail lives.

Customer expectation is faster than any measured average. In Jobber's 2026 survey of 1,050 home-service owners, over 70% of customers expect a same-day response, yet 20% of pros reply within the hour⁷. Couples set a similar bar. A thread in r/WeddingPhotography (60+ comments, c. 2020) put it as "a 24 hour response time is ideal"¹⁶.

How many inquiries get a follow-up?#

Follow-up after the first reply is the least measured step, and where it is measured, it is mostly missing. Three studies touch it.

• Home services: 72% of inquiries got no follow-up within 24 hours; 28% were offered an appointment where scheduling was the natural next step².
• Real estate: 62% of open-house visitors got zero follow-up³.
• Local services: Leadferno reports that about two-thirds of the leads that got a reply received only that one response¹. Its materials give the figure as both 65.5% and 65.9%; quote it as reported.

The cost of stopping at one message shows up in outbound data. Belkins found follow-ups produced 58.6% of all replies across 7.53 million B2B emails¹⁵. That is cold outbound, not inbound. Use it only as a comparison. For how many follow-ups to send, see how many times to follow up with a lead.

How many wedding inquiries go unanswered?#

No neutral study has measured how many wedding inquiries go unanswered. That is the plain answer. The figures that circulate ("50% book the first vendor", "40% hear nothing in five days") have no located primary source; the trace is in do 50% of couples book the first vendor.

What does exist is narrower. WeddingPro reports couples contact 5 vendors per category, and that a reply in under 3 hours makes couples 2.2 times more likely to reply¹². Indigo Digital puts qualified venue inquiry-to-booking at about 1 in 5¹⁴. Indigo also calls median first response "the one most venues have never measured"¹³. Use these. Do not invent a no-reply rate for weddings from home-services data.

The missing number: answered once, then dropped#

The answered-then-dropped rate is the share of inquiries that got one reply and nothing after the customer went quiet. No study in the table reports it for inbound written inquiries. It is the step between Leadferno's no-reply rate and Pied Piper's no-follow-up rate.

The Lost Lead Audit is the method that measures it. Valet could publish this rate by vertical from anonymised audits once enough exist; none are published here, and no figure on this page comes from Valet. Until then, measure your own. It takes one afternoon.

1. Pull 90 days of inquiries. Search the inbox for form notifications, directory leads and direct emails. Verify: your count matches your form tool's entry count. If not, fix delivery first.
2. Classify each one. Use five outcomes: never answered, answered once and dropped, time offered, booked, lost with a reason. Verify: every row has exactly one outcome.
3. Compute three rates. Never-answered share. Answered-once-and-dropped share. Time-offered share. Verify: all five outcome shares sum to 100%.
4. Compare to the table. Use the row that matches your vertical and channel. If no row matches, compare to Leadferno's 42.6% and say so.

The full template, with formulas, is in the 90-day Lost Lead Audit.

Three failure modes when citing these numbers#

Citing inquiry statistics fails in three common ways. Each has a quick fix.

Failure mode 1: the channel swap#

The channel swap is quoting a phone figure as an email figure. Trigger: you cite CallRail's "up to 85% won't call back"⁵ in an article about contact forms. Fix: use Leadferno for forms¹, CallRail for calls. If you need both, give both, labelled.

Failure mode 2: the mean quoted as typical#

Quoting a mean as the typical case overstates the delay for most inquiries and hides the worst ones. Trigger: "businesses take 8 hours to reply." Fix: give the median beside the mean where one exists (DelPrete: 39 minutes median³). For your own data, report the p90 too.

Failure mode 3: the vertical borrow#

Borrowing a vertical means applying one sector's rate to another. Trigger: "72% of wedding inquiries get no follow-up." Pied Piper measured home services². Fix: write "in home services, 72%..." and state that no wedding-specific figure exists. Accuracy beats a cleaner headline.

Where Valet fits#

Valet is a small business's own AI assistant for written inquiries: email, contact forms, directory leads and requests on the owner's free Valet page. It answers from the owner's own facts, offers and holds real times from the calendar, and follows up at most twice by default, each time with something useful. Every inquiry has a state (New, Answered, Time held, Followed up, Booked, or closed with a reason), which is the answered-then-dropped measurement kept as the work happens.

To see your own rates against this table, start with the free lead check: forward 10 to 20 recent inquiries, or show them on a call, and see what went unanswered, what stopped after one reply, and what it was worth.