How to follow up with website visitors: a UK sales playbook
Triage identified companies by fit, signal and confidence, then send messages that never mention browsing.
Before following up an identified visit, check the confidence band and the reason: a corporate network match with several pages viewed is worth contacting, an ISP-level match is not. Triage on fit, then signal, then confidence. Never reference their browsing, and stop after two or three touches over about two weeks.
In short
- Check the confidence band and reason line before acting on any identified company.
- Triage on fit first, then signal (pages, return visits, search queries), then confidence.
- Never reference browsing: let the visit inform timing and topic, not wording.
- Two or three touches over about two weeks is enough, and an objection means stop at once.
- Measure replies and meetings per confidence band to set your own threshold.
Knowing how to follow up with website visitors matters more than the identification itself. A company name in a feed is only useful if you can decide quickly whether it deserves a message, what that message says, and when to stop. This playbook sorts identified companies by confidence, fit and signal, then gives you three short templates that never mention browsing.
What should you do first when a company appears in your feed?
Check how sure the match is before you do anything else. A visit is identified from the network it came from, and some networks say much more than others. An office connection registered to a manufacturer in Sheffield tells you a lot. A home broadband or mobile connection tells you almost nothing about the employer.
Scout gives every identified company a confidence score from 1 to 99, a band and a one-line reason. The bands on the confidence page are high (70 to 99), medium (40 to 69) and low (1 to 39), and a match from a consumer ISP, mobile, VPN or data-centre network "can never score above the low band".1 The page's own advice is to contact high-confidence companies first, review the pages and reasoning on medium matches, and verify low matches before pushing them anywhere.1
Whichever tool you use, the rule holds. Read the reason line, then decide:
| Band | What it usually means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| High | Corporate network, clear company match | Act this week if the fit is right |
| Medium | Likely match, weaker signals | Check pages viewed and fit first |
| Low | ISP, mobile, VPN or shared network | Do not contact on the visit alone |
A high-band match from your ideal sector that read three product pages is worth a call. A low-band match from a broadband provider is not a lead at all. Our explainer on why ISPs show up as website visitors covers the reason.
How do you decide who to contact?
Triage on three things, in this order.
- Fit. Is this a company you could sell to? Sector, size and location rule most companies out before any other signal matters. A perfect engagement pattern from a company too small to buy is still a no.
- Signal. What did the visit actually involve? Several pages, a return visit within a few days, or a specific search query all say more than a single bounce from the home page. If you connect Google Search Console, Scout shows the search queries associated with each company, which is often the clearest clue to what they were trying to solve.
- Confidence. Only then ask how sure the match is. A strong fit with a strong signal but a low-band match is a reason to watch, not to write.
Scout rolls these into a lead score from 0 to 100 per company, blending match confidence, engagement, search demand, fit with your ideal customer profile and whether you can reach contacts. A score is a sorting aid, though. The judgement of whether this company needs what you sell is still yours.
What do you say?
Lead with something useful about their situation, not their behaviour. The visit tells you when to reach out and roughly what they care about. It should not appear in the message.
This is where UK advice differs from much of what ranks for visitor follow-up. A widely read set of templates from Leadfeeder warns against being too specific, saying "don't write something like: 'I saw you spent three and a half minutes on our latest blog post...that would be weird.'" Yet one of its templates still opens with "I saw that your company was checking out details on our pricing page."2 We would drop that line too. You do not know who visited, only which company's network the visit came from, so the person reading it may never have been near your site. It also invites the question of how you know, which is not the conversation you want to start.
Keep three rules in every message:
- Say who you are and give a clear way to stop. The ICO says B2B marketers must "not disguise or conceal your identity" and must "give a valid address for business to opt-out or unsubscribe".3
- Write to a role that fits the pages they read. Someone reading implementation guides is a different audience from someone reading pricing.
- Offer one small, useful thing: a guide, a benchmark, a short call.
The legal side is covered in is it legal to contact companies that visited your website?, including sole traders, privacy notices and call screening.
Three follow-up templates
Each template assumes you have found a contact whose role fits, for example through a business contact search. In Scout that is a Forager search at the identified company. These contacts are people at the company, not the person who visited.
1. A new company, high confidence, good fit
Subject: Cutting lead times on custom enclosures
Hello Tom,
I lead sales at Example Ltd. We make custom steel enclosures for UK control-panel builders, usually on shorter lead times than imported stock. As head of procurement at Ridgeway Controls, you may be reviewing suppliers ahead of next year's projects.
Would a one-page comparison of our standard lead times be useful? If not, reply "no thanks" and I will leave it there.
Sam Carter, Example Ltd We found your details in a business contact database. Privacy notice: example.co.uk/privacy
2. A returning company
A company that comes back several times over a couple of weeks is more likely to be comparing options. The message stays the same in tone and moves one step further.
Subject: A quick checklist for choosing an enclosure supplier
Hello Tom,
Teams choosing a new enclosure supplier usually get stuck on the same three questions: tolerances, certification and lead time. We wrote a short checklist that covers all three, and I thought it might be useful for Ridgeway's next project.
Happy to send it over, or to talk it through for fifteen minutes. If the timing is wrong, just say.
Sam
3. A company that searched a specific term
If Search Console links a company to a query such as "IP66 enclosure lead time", write about the topic, not the search.
Subject: IP66 enclosures in under three weeks
Hello Tom,
Many panel builders tell us IP66 enclosures are where lead times slip most. We hold stock blanks so we can usually turn IP66 builds around in under three weeks.
If that is relevant to anything Ridgeway has coming up, I can send our current schedule.
Sam
None of these says "I saw you". Each would make sense to a prospect who had never visited, which is exactly the point.
Which channel should you use?
- Email to a role that fits the pages viewed. It is the easiest channel to keep compliant and the easiest for the recipient to ignore politely.
- LinkedIn for a named contact you already have a reason to know, such as a past conversation or a shared connection. Keep the same rule: no references to browsing.
- Phone only after a screening check. The ICO says to "screen against both the CTPS and TPS registers, as well as your own 'do not call' list" before calling businesses.3
How long should the sequence be?
Two or three touches over about two weeks, then stop. A website visit is a signal to start a conversation, not proof of intent, and a short sequence respects that. If someone asks you to stop, stop straight away: under UK GDPR the right to object to direct marketing is, in the ICO's words, "an absolute right and there are no exemptions or grounds for you to refuse."4
If the company comes back to your site weeks later with a new pattern of visits, that is a new reason to get in touch, and a new, short sequence is reasonable.
How do you measure it?
Track outcomes against the band and the signal, not just the total. The useful questions are simple:
- How many replies and meetings came from high, medium and low matches?
- Which signals (return visits, specific search queries, product pages) preceded the meetings?
- How long after the visit did the first message go out?
After a month or two this tells you where to set your own threshold. You may find medium matches from your core sector convert as well as high matches from elsewhere, or that you should ignore everything below the high band.
To keep the record straight, push identified companies into your CRM rather than working them from a spreadsheet. Scout can send companies to HubSpot and post Slack or email alerts, so the visit, the message and the outcome sit in one place.
Put it into practice
Start with this week's high-band matches that fit your customer profile. Read the reason line, pick a contact whose role matches what they read, and send one useful message that would make sense even if they had never visited. If you are still weighing up whether a tool can show which companies visit your website reliably enough to act on, the confidence score is the thing to judge it by.
Every Scout match comes with a score and a reason. Try it on your own traffic free for 14 days, no card needed.
Frequently asked questions
Should I mention that I know they visited my website?
No. Visitor identification tells you which company's network a visit came from, not who the person was, so the recipient may never have visited. Referencing browsing also feels intrusive. Use the visit to decide when to write and what topic to lead with.
How fast should I follow up after a visit?
Within a few working days is sensible for a high-confidence match with a good fit, while the topic is still live for them. Speed matters less than relevance, so it is better to send one well-aimed message a day later than a generic one within the hour.
What if the visitor was a competitor?
Leave it. Competitors, suppliers, existing customers and job seekers all show up in visitor feeds. Filter them out or tag them in your CRM so nobody sends them a sales sequence.
Should I contact low-confidence matches?
Not on the strength of the visit alone. Low-band matches often come from home broadband, mobile or VPN networks, so the company named may not be the one that visited. Wait for a stronger signal, such as a later visit from a corporate network or a form fill.
Sources
- Scout: How the confidence score works scoutmetrics.co.uk
- Leadfeeder: 10 sales email templates for reaching out to anonymous website visitors leadfeeder.com
- ICO: Business-to-business marketing ico.org.uk
- ICO: Right to object ico.org.uk