How to Follow Up With Website Visitors

Those visitors showed intent. They searched for something you offer, clicked through to your site, and spent time looking around. They're not random strangers. They're potential customers who just weren't ready to commit yet.

The Follow-Up Options

There are three main ways to follow up with website visitors: remarketing ads, email outreach, and direct contact. Each works differently and fits different situations.

Remarketing ads show your ads to people who previously visited your site as they browse other websites or social media. You've experienced this yourself when you look at a product and then see ads for it everywhere. It works, but you're paying for every impression and you can't personalize the message much.

Email outreach requires having the visitor's email address, which traditionally meant they had to give it to you through a form. But visitor identification tools can now reveal emails for many anonymous visitors, opening up this channel for people who didn't convert.

Direct contact means calling or texting identified visitors. This is the most personal approach and can be highly effective for high-intent visitors, but it requires having their phone number and doing it in a way that doesn't feel intrusive.

Most contractors who get serious about follow-up use a combination of all three.

Remarketing Basics

Remarketing lets you stay in front of people who visited your site without knowing who they specifically are. You install a tracking pixel, build an audience of past visitors, and show them ads.

Google Ads remarketing shows your ads on other websites in Google's display network. Facebook remarketing shows your ads on Facebook and Instagram. Both can be effective for home services.

The advantage of remarketing is simplicity. You don't need to identify individual visitors. You just need to install pixels and create ads. The platforms handle matching visitors to ad impressions.

The downside is cost and lack of control. You're paying for every impression or click. You can't personalize messages to specific visitors. Remarketing works best as a baseline layer of follow-up.

Visitor Identification Changes the Game

Traditional remarketing treats all visitors as anonymous. You know someone visited your site, but you don't know who they are.

Website visitor identification changes this by revealing the identity of many anonymous visitors. When someone lands on your water heater page, you can see their name, email address, phone number, and often their home address.

This opens up much more targeted follow-up.

Instead of showing generic remarketing ads to everyone who visited your site, you can send personalized emails to specific people based on the exact pages they viewed. Instead of hoping they come back, you can call them directly.

The catch is that visitor identification doesn't work for every visitor. Match rates vary, but you might identify 30-50% of your traffic. That's still a massive improvement over the 3-4% who fill out forms.

Segmenting by Intent

Not all website visitors are equally valuable. Someone who spent 10 minutes reading about furnace replacement is a better prospect than someone who bounced from your homepage after 5 seconds.

Effective follow-up requires segmenting visitors by the intent they demonstrated.

High-intent signals include:

• Visiting pricing or quote pages
• Viewing multiple service pages in one session
• Spending significant time on high-value service pages
• Returning to the site multiple times
• Viewing location-specific pages for areas you serve

Low-intent signals include:

• Single page visits with quick bounces
• Only visiting blog posts or informational content
• Coming from broad non-commercial search terms

High-intent visitors warrant faster, more direct follow-up. Low-intent visitors should go into longer-term nurture sequences.

Speed for High-Intent Visitors

When someone demonstrates high intent, speed matters enormously.

Studies consistently show that responding to leads within 5 minutes generates dramatically higher contact rates than waiting even 30 minutes. The same principle applies to identified visitors showing buying signals.

If someone spent 15 minutes on your AC replacement page looking at different system options, they're probably getting ready to make a decision. If you call them within an hour while they're still in research mode, you have a real chance of earning their business.

Wait until tomorrow and they may have already scheduled estimates with two other companies.

Email Nurture for Everyone Else

Most identified visitors aren't ready to buy immediately. They're researching, comparing, thinking. These visitors should enter email nurture sequences.

A good nurture sequence provides value while keeping you top of mind. It's not a series of "hire us" messages. It's helpful content that builds trust over time.

For a plumbing company, this might look like:

• Email one shares tips for preventing drain clogs
• Email two explains when repairs make sense versus replacement
• Email three covers what to look for in a plumbing contractor
• Email four offers a seasonal maintenance special

Space these out over several weeks. You want to stay present without being annoying.

Making Phone Follow-Up Work

Calling identified visitors can feel awkward. They didn't ask you to call. Won't they be creeped out?

The key is how you frame it. Don't say "I saw you were on our website." That feels surveillance-y. Instead, position it as helpful outreach based on their apparent interest.

"Hi, this is Mike from ABC Plumbing. We help a lot of homeowners in your area with water heater issues and I wanted to see if you had any questions I could help with."

This is honest, doesn't mention tracking, and leads with value. Most people will either engage if they're interested or politely decline if they're not.

Text Message Follow-Up

For some visitors, text works better than calls. It's less intrusive and lets them respond on their own time.

"Hi [Name], this is Sarah from XYZ Electric. Noticed you might be looking into panel upgrades. Happy to answer any questions or send over some info if helpful. No pressure either way."

Keep texts conversational and low-pressure. Give them an easy out. People who are interested will engage, and you haven't annoyed those who aren't.

Text is particularly effective for younger homeowners who often prefer messaging over phone calls.

Building Automated Workflows

Manual follow-up works when you have a handful of identified visitors per day. As volume grows, you need automation.

Most CRM systems can automate workflows based on visitor behavior. When someone is identified viewing your commercial services pages, they automatically get tagged as commercial and routed to a different sequence than residential visitors.

High-intent visitors can trigger immediate notifications to your sales team. Lower-intent visitors enter automated email sequences.

Staying Compliant

When you're contacting people who didn't explicitly request contact, you need to be thoughtful about compliance.

Email should always include an unsubscribe option. Phone calls should respect do-not-call lists. Text messages should make it easy to opt out.

The principle is simple: make it easy for people to stop hearing from you if they want. This protects you legally and ensures your energy goes toward people who might actually become customers.