Almost every contractor who turns on missed-call texting sends some version of the same message: 'Thanks for calling [Business]. We got your message and will get back to you as soon as possible.'
It is polite, it is instant, and it does almost nothing. The homeowner reads it as a receipt, files it mentally under 'they will call me eventually', and keeps working down their list. You have proved you exist. You have not started a conversation, and you have not given them any reason to stop calling other people.
The gap between a receipt and a conversation is a few sentences. This is what goes in them.
The five things a first message has to do
A first message that actually earns a reply is doing five jobs at once, and most templates only do one or two:
- Name a human. 'This is Maria at Ace Plumbing' outperforms the business name alone, because people answer people. It costs you nothing and it changes the register of the whole exchange.
- Reference the specific call. 'We missed your call just now' or 'your call at 9:40' proves this is about them and not a blast. Vagueness reads as automated even when a person typed it.
- Ask exactly one question. Not three. One question gets answered, three get ignored, and the answer to a good first question tells you almost everything you need.
- Make replying the easy path. The message should make it obvious they can just type back here. Asking them to call you again moves the work back to the person who already tried once and failed.
- Identify the business and offer an opt-out. This is not decoration, it is what keeps you compliant and out of the spam filter. More on that below.
The single biggest upgrade is replacing 'we will get back to you' with a question. A statement ends a message. A question opens a conversation.
The first message, during business hours
The one question here is about urgency, because urgency decides everything that happens next:
Hi, this is Maria at Ace Plumbing. Sorry we missed your call just now, the crew is out on a job. Is this something happening right now, or something you want scheduled? Just reply here and I will take care of it. Reply STOP to opt out.
Notice what it does not do. It does not apologize twice, it does not explain the company, it does not attach a link, and it does not ask for a name, an address and a description of the problem. Those come after they reply, which is the point: the goal of message one is message two.
The first message, after hours
After hours the question changes, because the honest answer to 'can you come now' is usually no, and pretending otherwise burns trust in the first sentence. The job of this message is to separate the true emergency from the thing that can wait until 8am, without promising a truck:
Hi, this is Maria at Ace Plumbing. We missed your call at 9:40. Our crew is off until 7am, but if this is an emergency I can get someone on it tonight. Is water still running, or is it contained? Reply here either way and I will get you on the schedule. Reply STOP to opt out.
That message can be sent at 9:41pm without lying, and it does the triage that decides whether anyone gets woken up. For most contractors the honest split is that only a small share of after-hours calls are true emergencies, but the ones that are tend to be the largest tickets of the month.
What to send when they do not reply
This is where most setups stop, and it is where a large share of the recoverable revenue lives. A single message is not a follow-up sequence. The next morning:
Morning, Maria from Ace Plumbing again. Still happy to help with the call from last night. Want me to put you on today's schedule?
Short, no guilt, no 'just following up' throat-clearing, and it ends in a question that is easy to answer with one word. A few days later, if there is still nothing, change the angle instead of repeating yourself. Ask something useful rather than nudging:
Hi, Maria at Ace Plumbing. Did you get the leak sorted? If someone else handled it that is totally fine, I just do not want to keep bothering you if it is done.
That message gets a surprising number of replies, because it gives them permission to say no. Some of the people who say 'yes, handled' will still hire you next time, precisely because you were the one who was easy to deal with.
Closing the loop, politely
Every sequence needs an end. A breakup message is not a last-ditch pitch, it is a clean exit that leaves the door open:
Last note from me: if this is handled, no problem at all. If it comes back or you need anything else, we are here. Either way I will stop following up.
This one matters more than it looks. Sequences that never end train people to ignore you, and eventually to report you. Ending well is part of being someone worth calling next year.
When it is time to book
When they do reply, the most common mistake is asking an open question. 'What day works for you?' makes the customer do scheduling work. Offer two options instead:
I can do Thursday between 8 and 11, or Friday afternoon. Which works better?
Two concrete choices convert better than an open calendar, and they give you back control of the route. If neither works, they will tell you, and you have still moved the conversation to scheduling instead of leaving it in limbo.
The compliance part nobody mentions
Business texting in the United States is regulated, and templates that ignore this can get your number filtered before any of the above matters. The short version:
- Identify your business in the first message. Not just a first name, the company.
- Include an opt-out on the first message and honor STOP immediately and permanently.
- Texting someone who just called you is standard practice, but blasting a purchased list is a different activity with different rules, and it is how numbers get blocked.
- Sending business texts from a standard 10-digit number in the US requires registering the number, which carriers verify. Unregistered traffic gets filtered silently, which is worse than being rejected: your messages simply do not arrive and nobody tells you.
That last point catches people out constantly. They set up texting, send messages for a week, and never learn that a share of them were dropped in transit.
Why the templates are the easy part
You can copy every message above and be better off than most of your competitors by tomorrow. But the honest thing to say is that the writing was never the hard part.
The hard part is that message one goes out in under a minute at 9:41pm on the night of the first freeze, and message two goes out the next morning while you are already on a roof, and message three goes out four days later when you have completely forgotten this person exists. A template in a notes app does not do that. It needs something that runs whether or not you remember it.
That is the actual mechanism, and it is the subject of the rest of this hub: