How old is too old to contact?

For past customers there is no limit worth worrying about — a two-year-old customer with a real reason to hear from you is a better prospect than a stranger. For quotes that never closed, a year is a reasonable place to stop, mostly because contact details go stale rather than because interest does.

Will messaging an old list annoy people or get me marked as spam?

It can, and the cause is almost always relevance rather than frequency. A message that plainly relates to something the person actually did with you is welcome; the same message sent to everybody is not. Sort the list first, keep the unsubscribe honest and easy, and stop messaging anyone who uses it.

How much of this can run on its own?

The timing-sensitive parts should: the instant reply to a new enquiry, the text back after a call nobody answered, the reminder that a recurring service is due. The reactivation messages to old quotes are better written by a person, because the whole reason they work is that they do not read like a mailout.

Is this instead of paid promotion or as well as it?

As well — but do it first. Working an existing list has no cost per name, so it is the cheapest work available to you, and it also tells you something you need to know before spending more on acquisition: whether enquiries are being followed up properly at all. Buying more leads to feed a process that drops them is the most expensive mistake in this whole area.

The Cheapest Leads This Month Are Already in Your CRM

Every local business we look at is sitting on a list it has forgotten about. Somewhere between the phone system, the inbox and a spreadsheet on somebody's desktop there are a few hundred people who called once, asked what it would cost, said they would think about it, and were never contacted again. Nobody decided to stop following up. The job just moved on to the next thing.

That list is the only place you can get new work without paying to acquire anyone. You already paid for those names — in clicks, in answered calls, in the hour somebody spent writing a quote. Going back to them costs a message.

It is three lists, not one

The reason most attempts at this fail is that the whole database gets treated as one audience and everybody receives the same thing. The people on it are in three genuinely different situations, and the message that works for one reads as noise to the other two.

People who have already bought from you. The warmest names you will ever hold, and the ones most businesses neglect hardest. They are not deciding whether to trust you; they have simply forgotten you exist because nothing has arrived from you since the invoice.
People who asked for a price and never booked. They had the need and got as far as the number. Something stopped them, and in most cases it was timing rather than the price — which means the same person is a live prospect again on a schedule you cannot see.
People who came in through a form or a text and never got a real answer. This group is uncomfortable to look at and it is where the fastest money is. They wanted to talk to somebody and nobody got back to them.

Sort a year of records into those three piles before you write a single word. The sorting is the work; the writing is easy once you know who you are writing to.

The window that closes fastest

For that third group, the useful lesson is not about what to send but about when. When somebody fills in a form for a local service, they rarely fill in only yours. Whoever replies first is usually the only business that gets a real conversation, and everyone who replies the next morning is answering a question that has already been settled elsewhere.

This is why the channel matters as much as the speed. An emailed reply lands somewhere people check a few times a day; a text lands somewhere people check within minutes, which is most of why SMS carries a 98% open rate while email fights for attention in a crowded inbox. For the first touch after a new enquiry — and for the automatic reply to a call nobody could pick up — a text does the job an email cannot.

What to actually send

None of this needs to be clever. The messages that get replies from an old list are short, specific and obviously written by a business rather than by a marketing department.

To a past customer: a note tied to something real — the service you did for them is due again, the season has turned, the thing you installed needs looking at. A reason beats an offer.
To someone who was quoted and went quiet: acknowledge it directly. "We quoted you in March and never heard back — is this still something you're looking at?" One question, easy to answer in one word.
To the never-answered pile: apologise briefly and get straight to the point. Most of them will not reply, and the handful who do are the cheapest work you will win all quarter.
To everyone, occasionally: something with no ask in it at all. A short piece of useful advice keeps you in the inbox as a business worth hearing from rather than one that only appears when it wants something.
And to nobody: the generic monthly newsletter that goes to all three lists at once. That is the thing that trains people to stop opening you.

A list you contact only when you need work is not a list. It is a group of people learning to ignore you.

The part that makes it repeatable

Doing this once produces a good month and no lasting change. What makes it a system is dull infrastructure: every enquiry landing in one place regardless of whether it arrived by text, chat or form, so the whole team can see it and no message quietly dies in one person's inbox. Then each contact record carrying its own history — what was sent, what was opened, what was ignored — so the next message accounts for the last one instead of starting over.

That is the difference between sending things and running follow-up. It also gives you the only number that matters here, which is how much work came out of names you already had. Almost nobody measures that, which is exactly why almost nobody realises how well it performs next to everything else they are paying for.

If you want the doing of it handled, that is email marketing and SMS marketing, and the shared inbox and contact history live in the Business Portal. On the speed question specifically, we have written about the real cost of a missed call and about why a text outperforms an email. If you would rather see what this looks like against your own list, ask for a proposal.

Frequently asked questions

How old is too old to contact?: For past customers there is no limit worth worrying about — a two-year-old customer with a real reason to hear from you is a better prospect than a stranger. For quotes that never closed, a year is a reasonable place to stop, mostly because contact details go stale rather than because interest does.
Will messaging an old list annoy people or get me marked as spam?: It can, and the cause is almost always relevance rather than frequency. A message that plainly relates to something the person actually did with you is welcome; the same message sent to everybody is not. Sort the list first, keep the unsubscribe honest and easy, and stop messaging anyone who uses it.
How much of this can run on its own?: The timing-sensitive parts should: the instant reply to a new enquiry, the text back after a call nobody answered, the reminder that a recurring service is due. The reactivation messages to old quotes are better written by a person, because the whole reason they work is that they do not read like a mailout.
Is this instead of paid promotion or as well as it?: As well — but do it first. Working an existing list has no cost per name, so it is the cheapest work available to you, and it also tells you something you need to know before spending more on acquisition: whether enquiries are being followed up properly at all. Buying more leads to feed a process that drops them is the most expensive mistake in this whole area.