23 September 2026 · 5 min read · Oscar Markham
What to do about enquiries that arrive at nine at night
Look at the timestamps on your enquiries and you will usually find a large share arrive between seven and eleven at night, plus a cluster on Sunday afternoons. That is when people deal with their house. If your response starts at eight the next morning, you are last in a queue by then.
How much it actually costs
In most trades, the business that responds first wins a disproportionate share. Somebody who enquires at nine at night has frequently sent the same message to two or three businesses.
You do not need to answer at nine. You need them to know you exist and that you will ring, which is a different and much easier problem.
The cheap version
An automatic reply that says when you will be in touch, from a real business rather than a robot. 'Thanks — I will ring you before ten tomorrow morning' holds a lead far better than silence.
On Meta, an instant reply on Messenger does the same job. On the website, a confirmation message rather than a blank page after the form submits.
- Auto-reply that gives a specific time you will ring
- Instant reply set on Facebook and Instagram messages
- A confirmation on the website after a form is sent
- Voicemail that states when you will return the call
- WhatsApp as an option, because many people prefer to message
What not to automate
Quoting. Diagnosis. Anything that needs judgement. An automated system that gives a price and gets it wrong creates a worse problem than a slow reply.
Keep automation to acknowledgement and expectation-setting, and keep the judgement human.
Whether to actually answer at night
For emergency trades, yes, and it is frequently the whole business. For everything else, no — and pretending otherwise leads to burnt-out owners answering the phone at bedtime for a job that could have waited.
The aim is not to be always available. It is to be reliably responsive at a stated time.
Check your own system
Send yourself an enquiry at nine at night and see what happens. A surprising number of businesses discover the auto-reply was never set up, or goes to a mailbox nobody reads.
It takes two minutes and it is the most common quiet failure in small business marketing.
Written by Oscar Markham, founder of Dublin Growth Digital. We run lead generation for Irish estate agents and trades, reported every Friday in enquiries and booked work.