Your Winback Questions, Answered Straight

Six months is the threshold — and the reasoning matters. A customer who last called five months ago may still be in a natural seasonal cycle. Push them too early and you look like you're blasting a list. Wait past 12 months and response rates drop unless you lead with a strong, specific hook.

Six months hits the sweet spot: long enough that the customer has had time to need service again, short enough that they still remember your name and had a decent experience.

That number isn't locked in. Trade type matters. HVAC customers cycle on a predictable 6-12 month maintenance rhythm — spring tune-up, fall tune-up. Plumbing customers are event-driven; they call when a pipe bursts, not on a schedule. Drain cleaning and water restoration typically have longer gaps between calls. We adjust the dormancy cutoff by trade so the campaign hits people at the right point in their cycle — not just because they crossed an arbitrary calendar date.

Not 'we miss you.' Generic blasts get ignored. Your past customers get trade-specific, time-relevant messages that give them a concrete reason to respond today.

The message hooks pull from things your customers actually care about: water heater age, seasonal timing, open maintenance windows — not coupons, not discounts, not relationship fluff. The goal is to make the message feel like a useful heads-up from a contractor they already trusted.

Here's a representative example for a plumbing context:

"Hi [First Name], this is [Business Name]. Water heater failures spike in fall when hot water demand goes up. If yours is 8+ years old, a quick inspection now costs a lot less than an emergency call in December. Reply YES and we'll get you on the schedule. Reply STOP to opt out."

Short. Specific. A clear reason to act. An obvious opt-out.

The tone is direct and useful — no 'limited time offer' pressure tactics, no fine print. You review and approve every message sequence before anything sends. Nothing goes out until you sign off.

Texting past customers is legal in most contexts under federal rules — but conditions apply.

The legal basis is prior business relationship. If a customer hired you to replace their water heater, that transaction gives you a recognized basis to send relevant service messages. This falls under the framework established by the Telephone Consumer Protection Act.

Three conditions govern how messages go out:

• Quiet hours: Messages only send between 8 a.m. and 9 p.m. in the recipient's local time zone. The system enforces this automatically — nothing fires at 6 a.m. because you scheduled a campaign the night before.
• Opt-out: Every message includes a plain-language opt-out instruction. When a contact replies STOP, removal is immediate and permanent.
• Content scope: Messages stay relevant to the type of service you already performed — not unrelated promotions.

Most lists are a mess — duplicate entries, partial names, old landlines, numbers with no names attached. That's normal. It doesn't automatically kill the campaign.

Here's what we can work with: first-name-only contacts, missing email addresses (SMS doesn't need them), duplicate entries (we deduplicate before launch), and numbers that need a mobile-vs-landline check (we run that scrub during setup).

What gets removed: landlines (untextable), disconnected numbers, and any contact already on a suppression list from a previous campaign you ran.

If you're above 50 cleanable mobile contacts, we assess list quality during onboarding and give you an honest count of what we can actually work with before you commit to anything.

You don't log into anything. You watch your calendar.

When the reactivation campaign books a job, that appointment shows up in your existing calendar — the same tool you already use. The booking is attributed to the campaign so you know which jobs came from winback outreach versus inbound calls.

Once a month you get a plain-English SMS summary: how many past customers were reached, how many responded, how many booked. At the end of the first 30-day campaign cycle, we send a written report — contacts worked, messages sent, bookings attributed, estimated revenue recovered.

No logins. No new dashboards. No software to learn. You run your business and we send you a scorecard.

The lost customer reactivation service is part of the flagship package: $9,997 one-time setup + $497/month. The setup fee covers sequence configuration, list scrubbing, message creation, your approval walkthrough, and full launch. The monthly fee covers ongoing campaign operation, list maintenance, automatic opt-out management, and monthly performance reports.

The performance guarantee applies to the full system — AI Receptionist, Missed Call Text Back, and reactivation together. The promise: $5,000 in recovered or booked revenue within 60 days of go-live, or you don't pay the monthly fee until we hit that number.

For the reactivation component specifically, 'recovered revenue' means booked appointments that trace directly to a reactivation-triggered conversation — a past customer who responds to a campaign message and books a job. We track that attribution and include it in the 30-day written report.

The full terms, measurement methodology, and what specifically counts as recovered revenue are on our guarantee page. Read them before you sign up — we want you to know exactly what we're promising and exactly how we prove it.

Yes. If you run plumbing and HVAC under the same business, your past customers don't all get the same message — they get a message matched to the service they hired you for.

During list setup, contacts are segmented by the service type on their previous job. HVAC customers get HVAC-specific seasonal hooks. Plumbing customers get plumbing-specific messages. If a customer used both services, we route them into the highest-value sequence for their profile.

A generic 'hey, it's been a while' message sent to your entire list performs worse than one that speaks directly to what the customer already bought. 'Your furnace tune-up reminder' lands differently than a drain cleaning pitch on someone who only ever called you for a water heater replacement.

Multi-trade segmentation is handled during onboarding. You tell us what services you offer — we build the sequences.

One reply ends it. A customer replies STOP — or any standard opt-out keyword — and three things happen immediately: the message thread stops, the contact is flagged as suppressed, and they are permanently removed from every future campaign sequence in the system.

Permanently means permanently. Not 'until the next campaign list gets built.' Not 'unless someone forgets to pull the file.' The suppression is automatic and carries forward into every campaign you run going forward.

You don't maintain a do-not-contact list. You don't manually pull contacts out of future campaigns. Opt-out compliance is built into the workflow — not something you have to manage.

If a suppressed contact calls your business directly and books a job on their own, that's their choice. But they stay off your outbound list unless they explicitly re-opt in.