How do I stop spam and junk leads from wasting my time?
Filter spam before anyone reads it, so the leads that reach the owner are real people who want work done. Spam is the fake form fills, sales pitches, and robocalls that come in through the same doors as your customers. The goal is to keep that noise out of the list you work from, while making sure a real homeowner never gets thrown out with it.
What counts as a spam or junk lead?
A spam lead is an inquiry that was never going to become a job. On a web form it might be a message stuffed with links, a name made of random letters, or a pitch from someone selling website design or a business loan. On the phone it is the robocall about your Google Business Profile or the extended warranty. In a text inbox it is the offer to buy your company.
A slow lead is something different, and it is worth keeping the two apart. A homeowner who asks about a kitchen remodel they might do next spring is a real person with a real house. They may take a long time to decide, and they may never hire anyone, but they deserve a reply. Sorting out which real inquiries are serious is its own skill, and a general contractor deals with it every week. This article is only about the ones that were never real.
Why does spam cost a home service business more than a few minutes?
Each spam message only takes a moment to delete. The real cost shows up in what the pile does to everyone who reads it. When half the web forms in a week are junk, the person checking them starts to skim, and a skimmer is the one who misses the real homeowner buried between two sales pitches.
Spam also teaches people bad habits with the phone. An owner who gets several robocalls a day stops answering numbers he does not recognize, and a new customer calling for the first time is always a number he does not recognize. A roofing company after a storm cannot afford to let a real caller ring out because the last three calls were recordings.
Where do spam leads come from?
Most of it comes from automated programs that look for any form on the internet and fill it in. A contact form on a home service website is an easy target, because it is public and it goes straight to someone's inbox. The more places your business is listed, the more lists your phone number ends up on, and some of those lists get sold to companies that make sales calls.
More spam is usually a side effect of being visible. A busy website and a well-listed business attract more spam for the same reason they attract more customers, which is that they are easy to find. What your website needs is a way to let homeowners reach you easily while keeping the automated junk out of the way.
Is it safe to filter leads automatically?
It is safe when the filter is tuned to catch the obvious junk and a person can still look at what it set aside. The risk is a filter that is too strict and throws out a real homeowner because they typed something unusual or wrote their message in a hurry. A business that filters spam well keeps the caught messages somewhere it can check them now and then, so a real inquiry that got caught can still be found and answered.
The aim is a clean list of real people. When the owner opens the list of new inquiries, every name on it should be someone who might hire the company, so the time he spends reading it goes to customers.
What a fix looks like
In a business that has fixed this, the person who checks new inquiries reads each one properly, because the sales pitches and link stuffed forms were set aside before they got there. Once a week someone looks through what the filter caught and moves anything real back into the list. The owner's phone buzzes for a homeowner who wants a quote, and the morning list shows which of those homeowners are still waiting, so the replies go out before the crew leaves the shop.
The Home Service Guild Marketing Operations System provides that single list, the alerts, and the morning list as part of following up on every inquiry and quote.
Questions owners also ask
Should I take the contact form off my website to stop spam?
No, because many homeowners would rather fill in a form than call, especially in the evening. Removing the form cuts the spam and cuts those customers along with it. Filtering the form is the better trade.
Are leads from marketplace sites spam?
Usually they are real people, although some are shopping several companies at once and some have already hired someone by the time you call. Treat them as real inquiries and put them in the same list as everything else, so you can see which ones turn into jobs.
Should I block numbers that robocall my business?
Blocking a number that has called you with a recording is reasonable, and most phones make it easy. Be careful with tools that block every unknown number, because a first-time customer is always an unknown number.
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