By now you (should) know that when it comes to lead conversion, you need a follow-up strategy in place to successfully turn leads into prospects into clients. But how often should you email or call a lead before giving up?

A new study out from Velocify, derived from data of almost 3.5 million leads, reveals the best contact strategies for optimizing your lead conversion efforts. The four key takeaways from this report:

The single largest driver of lead conversion is speed to call.

The gold standard for making the first call is within one minute. The study showed that making that call within a minute will increase the likelihood of conversion by almost 400%. It drops off to 160% the second minute and down from there:

To achieve optimal conversion rates, the magic callback number is 6.

Previous research by Velocify has shown that 50% of leads are only called once. Their new study shows that 93% of all converted leads are reached by the 6th call, meaning that only 7% will eventually convert after more than six calls — a significantly diminishing return and indication you should move on. Also, the study showed that leads that require more than 7 calls to reach are 45% less likely to convert.

Properly timing contact attempts can dramatically increase conversion rates.

For an optimal contact strategy, you need to straddle the line of being persistent vs. being annoying. Here is what Velocify recommends for the best calling strategy:

Combining calls with emails can yield exceptional results.

We know for a fact that combining calls with emails yields great results because we do it all the time for ourselves and our clients. The Velocify study showed that the optimal number of emails to send is 5, staggered as follows:

According to the study, here is what the ultimate contact strategy looks like for optimal lead conversion: