Q.01
Can I text my old customers in Florida without consent?
Sometimes, and that is the trap. Florida's statute carves out people you already did business with, so a text to a past customer is often lawful. The phone carriers do not care. They check registration and consent before your message moves, so legal and delivered are two different tests.
Three rulebooks are stacked here, and most owners have only heard about one. Florida has a statute. The FCC has federal rules. The phone companies run their own approval process, and theirs is the strictest. You can clear the first two and still watch eight hundred texts disappear into a filter.
We are not lawyers and this is not legal advice. What follows is what the primary sources say, with the subsection numbers, so you can take the real language to your own attorney instead of taking a vendor's word for it. The checklist at the end is stricter than the legal floor on purpose.
October is when this question lands. The summer rush is over, the snowbirds have not arrived, and the cheapest lead you will ever get is the customer whose water heater you replaced two years ago. Texting that list is the obvious slow-season move, which is why it is worth getting right.
Q.02
What does Florida law actually require?
That a text counts as a sales call, and that written consent is required when a system both selects and dials the numbers. Florida Statute 501.059 defines a telephonic sales call to include a text message, and subsection (8)(a) ties the consent requirement to an automated system for selection and dialing.
The definition of consent is specific. The statute requires a written agreement bearing the signature of the person called, clearly authorizing those messages, naming the telephone number the person authorizes, and carrying a clear and conspicuous disclosure that signing is not a condition of buying anything.
Then comes the exclusion that matters most to a contractor. The statute's definition of an unsolicited telephonic sales call does not include a call to a person with whom the solicitor has a prior or existing business relationship, and (8)(a) only reaches unsolicited calls. That is what a reactivation campaign to past customers rests on, and the sentence worth reading against your actual list, because a name in your CRM from a quote you never won is not a customer.
Two provisions are specific to texts. Subsection (5) prohibits messaging anyone who has already told you they do not want your messages, with no business-relationship escape hatch. And before anyone can bring an action over a text, subsection (10)(c) requires them to reply STOP and give you 15 days to cease. Damages under (10)(a)(2) are actual damages or $500, whichever is greater.
- A text message counts as a telephonic sales call under the statute
- Written consent needs a signature, the authorized number, and a disclosure that signing is not required to buy
- The (8)(a) consent requirement reaches unsolicited calls using an automated system for selection and dialing
- A prior or existing business relationship takes a call outside that unsolicited definition
- Subsection (5) bars messaging anyone who already told you to stop, relationship or not
Q.03
What do the federal rules add on top?
A consent standard of their own and a hard clock on opt-outs. The FCC's rules at 47 CFR 64.1200 require prior express written consent for telemarketing to a wireless number using an automatic telephone dialing system or a prerecorded voice, and they state plainly that a call includes a text message.
The part nobody gets told about is paragraph (a)(10), on revoking consent. A customer may revoke by any reasonable method. Replying stop, quit, end, revoke, opt out, cancel or unsubscribe counts on its own, and so does using a website or phone number you designated for opt-outs. You have to honor it within a reasonable time not to exceed ten business days.
Two consequences bite in practice. You may not designate an exclusive means of revoking, so honoring only the word STOP is not enough when somebody emails your office instead. And when a customer texts STOP, the FCC treats consent as revoked for your robocalls too. One word in one channel shuts off both.
Q.04
Why do my texts stop getting delivered even when they are legal?
Because the carriers run an approval layer of their own. T-Mobile states that all entities that wish to send sanctioned 10DLC messaging traffic must be registered before their campaign messages will be approved for delivery on its network, and that unregistered traffic is subject to spam filtering.
You cannot do that registration yourself. The Campaign Registry, which the carriers rely on, says brands cannot register directly and must work with a registered messaging service provider, so the who and the what of a campaign are known before anything sends. Your business gets verified once, then each campaign separately.
On top of registration sits the industry's consent code. The CTIA Messaging Principles and Best Practices say senders are expected to obtain express written consent specifically to receive marketing messages, that an opt-in should not be transferable or assignable and should apply only to the campaign and sender it was obtained for, and that senders should not use opt-in lists that have been rented, sold or shared.
Read that last clause twice if anybody has ever offered to sell you a list of homeowners in your zip code. A bought list is exactly the traffic this system was built to catch, and the damage lands on your sending number's reputation, which follows you into every campaign after it.
CTIA also sets what the first message carries: the program name, customer care contact, how to opt out, a disclosure that messages recur and how often, and clear language about any fees.
Q.05
What counts as proof of consent if somebody complains?
A record, not a recollection. CTIA's principles list what a sender should be able to produce: the timestamp consent was acquired, the medium it came through, a capture of the experience used to collect it, the specific campaign, the IP address, the phone number, and the identity of the person who consented.
Almost no home-service company has this, and it is the cheapest item to fix. If your opt-in is a line under your contact form, screenshot the form as it looks today and keep the file. If it is a clause in your service agreement, keep the version history. The point is being able to show what the customer saw on the day they agreed.
Wire the opt-in into the places customers already touch: the web form, the estimate, the invoice, the service agreement. Texting people to ask them to opt in has the same flaw as the blast itself, which is that it needs consent to send.
Not every text is a marketing text, and the categories matter. The automatic reply to somebody who just called you sits elsewhere, because they contacted you first, and our guide on what to say in a missed-call text-back covers that wording. Review requests are their own category, with Google's policies layered on top, and our guide on asking for Google reviews the right way covers what is allowed there.
- Timestamp of when the consent was acquired
- The medium, plus a capture of the form or screen the customer saw
- The specific campaign the opt-in was given for, since an opt-in is not transferable
- The IP address, where consent came through a web form
- The phone number, and the identity of the person who consented
- A log of every opt-out and the date you honored it
Q.06
What should you do before a slow-season reactivation blast?
Six things, and the first four are paperwork. Confirm the number is registered for 10DLC, confirm you can produce consent records for the list, scrub everyone who ever said stop, put the opt-out language in the message, then send small batches and watch delivery before you release the rest.
The order is deliberate. Registration first, because an unregistered campaign is not a legal problem, it is a silence problem, and silence is harder to notice than a complaint. Consent records second, because that is the one that turns into a claim. The scrub third, because Florida's subsection (5) and the FCC's revocation rule both make a previous stop permanent, and neither cares that the tool you bought last month never heard of it. Then the message, then the test batch.
It is also worth asking whether a text is the right move at all. Reactivating past customers is one of the few things in this business that costs almost nothing and reliably works, and ours runs $499 as a one-time project on our pricing page. Email carries less regulatory weight. A call from an actual person carries more than either and still books the most work.
If you want somebody to look at how your texts, your phone and your follow-up behave before you point a campaign at eight hundred old customers, our free audit covers all three.
- Confirm the sending number is registered for 10DLC through your provider, not just that the software sends
- Pull your consent records and see whether you could actually produce them for the list you plan to text
- Scrub every number that ever replied stop, in every tool you have used, and keep that list
- Put the opt-out instruction in the message, and do not treat reply STOP as the only path you honor
- Send a small batch first and watch delivery before you release the rest of the list
- Make the ten-business-day opt-out clock somebody's job, not a setting you assume is on
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