Q.01
How do you get more jobs from customers you already have?
Pull the list of everyone you have worked for, sort it by the date of their last job, and contact the ones who are overdue for work you already know they need. You paid to win these people once. Reaching them again costs a text message and five minutes.
The list almost always exists already. Invoices sit in the accounting software, numbers sit in the office manager's phone, job notes sit in a folder on a truck laptop. What is usually missing is anyone whose job it is to open that list on a Tuesday and work it.
Reactivation is not a clever campaign. It is a list, a specific reason to reach out, and somebody who follows through when the phone rings back. The third part is where most of these attempts fall over.
Q.02
Which past customers should you contact first?
Start where the next job is predictable: maintenance that is overdue, equipment you installed that has reached the age where it needs service, and every estimate you wrote that never got a yes or a no. Those three groups are warmer than anything you can buy.
Unanswered estimates are the fastest money on the list. Somebody invited you to their house, you spent an hour there, you sent a number, and then the thread went quiet. A quiet estimate is not a no. It is a homeowner who got busy, and one call finds out which of the two it was.
Florida compresses service intervals. An air conditioner here runs most of the year rather than four months of it, irrigation runs through a wet season and a dry one, and exterior surfaces take sun and salt all twelve months. Anything you sold on a maintenance schedule comes due sooner than a manufacturer schedule written for a milder state implies.
- Maintenance agreements that lapsed in the last 24 months
- Anyone whose last job was 12 to 36 months ago
- Estimates you sent that never got a yes or a no
- Customers who left you a review and have not been back since
- Jobs where you fixed one thing and flagged a second for later
Q.03
What do you actually say to a past customer?
Name the job you did, name roughly when you did it, and give one specific reason you are reaching out now. No campaign language and no discount in the first line. A message that names the house and the work reads like a person wrote it, because one did.
A workable text is two sentences and a question. Something close to: Hi Maria, it is Dave at Coastal Air, we put your system in back in March 2023 and it is due for service before the summer load. Want me to put you down for a morning this week?
That message does three things a blast cannot. It shows you have a record of the job, it gives a reason tied to their house rather than to your quarter, and it ends with a question that takes one word to answer. If you cannot write that sentence for a given customer, they belong further down the list.
Q.04
Can you legally text or call your past customers?
Yes, within limits. Federal rules bar solicitation calls to residential numbers before 8 a.m. or after 9 p.m. local time, and Florida law requires prior express written consent before you use an automated dialer or a recorded message. A person texting from a phone and a platform blasting a list are treated differently.
The federal rule most relevant to reactivation is the established business relationship. Under 47 CFR 64.1200(f)(5) that relationship runs for eighteen months after a purchase or transaction, and three months after an inquiry or application. A customer whose last job was two years ago sits outside that window.
Florida section 501.059 is the stricter one on automation. Subsection (8)(a) makes it unlawful to place an unsolicited sales call using an automated system for selecting and dialing numbers, or a recorded message, without prior express written consent, which the statute defines as a signed written agreement clearly authorizing calls, text messages or voicemail. Subsection (8)(d) presumes that a call to a Florida area code reached a Florida resident, so not knowing where somebody lives is not a defense.
On opt-outs, the Federal Communications Commission rules that took effect on 11 April 2025 require you to honor a revocation sent by any reasonable means within ten business days, to treat words such as stop, quit, cancel and unsubscribe as revocations, and to keep any confirmation to a single message sent within five minutes with nothing promotional in it. The broader requirement that one opt-out apply across every kind of message you send has been delayed again and is now set for 31 January 2027.
None of this is legal advice. If you are about to load thousands of numbers into a dialer, have your attorney read the statute first.
- No solicitation calls before 8 a.m. or after 9 p.m. local time
- Automated dialing or recorded messages need prior express written consent in Florida
- Honor stop, quit, cancel and unsubscribe within ten business days
- One confirmation message, within five minutes, nothing promotional in it
- Screen against the Florida no sales solicitation calls list before an unsolicited call
Q.05
How often can you reach out without wearing people out?
Tie every contact to something real and the frequency sorts itself out. Service due, a season change, a follow-up on something you flagged on the last visit. Two or three reasons a year per customer is plenty. If you cannot state the reason in one sentence, do not send it.
The Florida calendar hands you the reasons for free. Cooling systems get checked before the summer load rather than during it. Roofs, gutters and loose exterior work get looked at before June. Pressure washing and exterior paint follow the wet season rather than fight it.
Build the year once, on one page, and the campaign stops being a decision somebody has to make each month. That is the same planning logic as our guide on seasonal demand planning for Florida home-service businesses, applied to the list you already own instead of to your advertising.
Q.06
What does this cost compared with buying leads?
Run it with your own numbers rather than somebody else's. Take what you paid per lead last month, count how many past customers an office manager can actually reach in an hour, and compare the two. The acquisition cost on the old list was paid years ago, so the only new cost is the time to work it.
Five figures give you the comparison and you already have four of them. Nobody needs a benchmark from a marketing company to do this arithmetic, and a benchmark drawn from somebody else's market would not tell you much about yours anyway.
- Your cost per lead last month, from your own ads dashboard
- How many reachable past customers are actually on the list
- The hours it takes to work it, at what that person costs you
- Your close rate on a past customer versus a cold lead
- What one average job is worth to you
Q.07
How do you keep the list clean enough for this to work?
One place, one format, updated the day the job closes. Name, mobile number, address, what you did, when you did it, and whether they have asked you to stop contacting them. If that lives across three systems and a notebook, the campaign dies at the export step.
The opt-out column is not optional bookkeeping. Under the federal rules above you have ten business days to act on a revocation, and you cannot act on something that was written on a sticky note and thrown away. Whatever tool you use, the opt-out has to be a field that travels with the record.
Q.08
What makes a reactivation campaign fail?
Usually the phone. You wake up a list, the callbacks arrive during a week that was already full, several land in voicemail, and the list is now colder than before you touched it. Do not start until you know who is answering and how fast.
This is the same problem covered in our guide on why missed calls cost home-service companies real jobs, except that reactivation concentrates it. A normal week spreads inbound calls out. A campaign puts them in a two-day bunch, during working hours, when everybody including the office manager is out on a job.
Decide before you send: who picks up, what happens to the ones that ring out, and what the text back says. Our guide on what to say in a missed-call text-back covers that last piece. The other common failure is sending to everyone at once, which turns a set of specific, personal messages into a blast and produces a run of opt-outs you cannot undo.
If you want a second set of eyes on the phone side before you wake up a list, our free audit looks at how calls are handled today, what happens to the ones nobody catches, and what your profile and site look like to somebody deciding whether to call you back.
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