The right time to message a customer is a time when somebody at your end can answer the reply. That is the whole of it, and it is not what the best-send-time tables tell you.
Those tables were built from consumer brands mailing hundreds of thousands of people who were never going to write back. A contractor’s message frequently gets a reply, sometimes an urgent one, and if it arrives at eight in the evening on a phone nobody is watching, the perfect send time has cost you the job.
Before the timing question, the permission question
Text messaging in the United States is regulated considerably more tightly than email, and the rules are worth understanding before anything else, because they decide whether you may send at all.
Marketing texts generally require prior express written consent. A phone number a customer gave you so the engineer could ring ahead is not consent to send them promotions later. Service messages about a job they actually booked: the technician is on the way, the part has arrived, sit differently from marketing ones, and the distinction is not always intuitive.
Collect consent in writing at the point of booking, record when and how you got it, and keep that record. This is not legal advice and it is worth twenty minutes with somebody who does this properly, because exposure is calculated per message and a list of four thousand adds up quickly.
Some of the hours are set for you
Federal telemarketing rules restrict calls and texts to between 8 a.m. and 9 p.m. in the recipient’s local time, and several states impose narrower windows than that.
The words that catch contractors out are “the recipient’s local time”. If your service area crosses a state line or a time zone, or your customer list has picked up people who moved away, your nine in the morning is not everybody’s. Check what your platform does about time zones before you schedule anything, because a good many of them send on yours.
If your texts are not arriving, this is usually why
Carriers in the US require businesses sending automated messages from ordinary ten-digit numbers to register the brand and the campaign. Unregistered traffic gets filtered, quietly, without an error you would notice.
So when a contractor tells us their texts stopped working, the answer is almost never the send time. It is registration, or a message that tripped a filter, or a number that has been reported.
Opting out has to work everywhere
A reply of STOP must take effect immediately, and it must take effect in your systems as well as your messaging provider’s. Somebody who opts out and then receives a promotion from your scheduling software has a complaint with real weight behind it.
Make leaving easy for email too. An unsubscribe is a person telling you something useful for free, and chasing them is how a list becomes a liability.
Now the timing itself, which is simpler than it looks
- Send inside the hours you answer the phone. Preferably at the start of them, so the replies land while somebody is there.
- Avoid Monday first thing. You are competing with the weekend’s backlog for attention.
- Avoid Friday afternoon. Anything needing a decision will sit until Monday, by which time it has aged.
- Send seasonal reminders before the weather turns, not during. When the first cold night arrives, everybody is already ringing everybody. The same logic applies to where seasonal budget should go.
- Do not chase the published optimum. If a time genuinely were best, the inbox at that hour would be the most crowded place on the internet.
Email and text are not the same instrument
A text is an interruption. It goes off in someone’s pocket, and they look. An email is a queue; it waits until they are ready.
Reserve text for things that are genuinely time-bound to that person: the engineer is thirty minutes away, your appointment is tomorrow, the quote you asked for is attached. Use email for everything that can wait an afternoon. Contractors who send promotions by text burn through goodwill they will want later, when they need a message about an actual appointment to be read.
Frequency is a timing decision too
Nobody unsubscribes because a message came at 10 a.m. rather than 2 p.m. They unsubscribe because it was the fourth one that month.
For a trade, the natural rhythm is a handful of messages a year plus whatever the customer’s own history calls for, and that second kind, driven by what is in the job record, does far more work than anything you schedule on a calendar.
Frequently asked questions
Can I text a customer who gave me their number for a job?
About that job, generally yes. To market to them later, generally not without express written consent. The safe approach is to ask for permission at booking and keep the record of it.
What hours am I allowed to send texts?
Federal rules set 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. in the recipient’s local time for telemarketing, and some states are stricter. Check the rules for every state you serve, and check that your platform sends on the recipient’s clock rather than yours.
How often should I message customers?
Less often than the software makes it easy to. A few scheduled messages a year, plus messages triggered by that customer’s own equipment and history, is a rhythm people tolerate for decades.
Why are my texts not being delivered?
Most often because the sending number is not registered for business messaging with the carriers, or the content tripped a filter. Send times and phrasing are the last things to look at, not the first.
Where to start
Find the time your last campaign went out and ask who was covering the phone for the two hours afterwards. If the answer is nobody, move the next send rather than rewriting it, that one change will do more than any subject line.
Real Time Marketing has worked with home service contractors since 2016: plumbing, HVAC, roofing, electrical and other trades, nationwide, from our office in Bradenton, Florida. Agreements are month-to-month. See our email and text message marketing or book a strategy call.