Most businesses take 47 hours to respond to a new lead. By then, the lead has moved on to whoever replied first.
Reaching someone within five minutes makes them ten times more likely to convert. When someone fills out your form, they're actively thinking about you. Wait a day and they've forgotten they reached out.
This is the first workflow I build for almost every client, especially agencies. It's called speed to lead.
Someone fills out your website form. Two minutes later, they get a personalised follow-up email with a link to book a call. You get notified with their details. The two minute delay is intentional: instant replies feel robotic, a short pause feels human.
How to build it in N8N
- Connect your form. Set up a webhook trigger. Point your form submission to that webhook URL. N8N catches the data: name, email, company, what they need.
- Log the lead. Send the form data to a Notion database or Google Sheet.
- Add a two minute delay.
- Research the lead. Pass the company name or URL to Perplexity (or any AI research tool with an API). Ask it what the company does, their industry, likely pain points. This is what makes the follow-up feel personal instead of templated.
- Send the email. Use Gmail to send a personalised reply. Pull in their name, reference their company, mention something from the research, include your calendar link. Something like: "Hi Sarah, I had a look at [company] and it sounds like you're doing interesting work in [industry]. Happy to chat about [their enquiry]. Here's my calendar: [link]"
- Notify yourself. Slack or email with the lead's details and research summary. If the automated email doesn't convert, you've got everything to follow up personally.
Six steps. One afternoon to set up and it runs forever. Most of the time goes into writing good email templates and tuning the research prompt.
If you're an agency and you don't have this running, you're losing deals to slow follow-up every day.