The 5-Touch Follow-Up Cadence That Wins Back 35% of Cold Leads

Multi-touch follow-up sequences convert contractor leads at 89.86% versus 8.56% for single-touch outreach, according to Hatch's 2024-2025 Home Improvement Industry Report. That is a 10x lift, and most contractors still send one text and call it a day.

The shop that wins the lead is rarely the shop that quoted first. It is the shop that touched the lead five times across three channels in the first 14 days. Cold leads close when you stop treating them like cold leads and start treating them like a sequence.

This is the 5-touch cadence that recovers 30-40% of cold leads. Each touch has a script, a timing rule, and the exact prompt you can text Clint to send it for you.

Touch 1: Text Inside 5 Minutes (Day 0)

The InsideSales / Harvard Business Review study on response time found leads contacted within 5 minutes are 100x more likely to connect and 21x more likely to qualify than leads contacted after 30 minutes. Most contractors take 47 hours to respond to a web lead. By the time you call, they have hired your competitor.

Touch 1 is a text, sent inside 5 minutes of the lead landing. SMS gets a 95%+ open rate within 3 minutes per multiple Invoca and Twilio benchmark studies. Voicemail gets 5%. Email gets 20% over 24 hours. Text wins on speed.

The script is short, identifies you, and asks one question.

"Hey [name], this is Mike at [company]. Got your request for a [service] estimate at [address]. When works for a quick 5 min call to scope it out, today or tomorrow?"

That is it. No links, no marketing, no signature block. The goal is a yes/no response inside 30 minutes. If they reply with a time, you call. If they reply with a question, you answer in plain English. If they go silent, Touch 2 is already scheduled.

A garage door owner who runs this exact script reports a 47% same-day reply rate on form submits, up from 12% when his team was sending email-first.

Text Clint: "draft touch 1 to every web lead from the last 24 hours that has not been texted yet, schedule for 5 minutes after submission"

Touch 2: Email Day 3 With the Quote or Scope Recap

If Touch 1 did not get a response, Touch 2 lands on Day 3. The channel switches to email because email is where customers go when they want to actually read something. Text is for "yes/no". Email is for "here's what we'd do, here's roughly what it costs, here's the next step".

The Day 3 email does three things. It restates what they asked for so they remember why they reached out. It gives a scope recap with a price range or a flat number. It ends with a single CTA, usually a calendar link or a one-line ask.

Subject: Your [service] at [address]

Hey [name],

Wanted to follow up on the [service] estimate you asked about Monday. Based on what you described, we'd be looking at roughly $X-$Y for the [scope]. Most jobs like this take us about [duration].

Easiest next step is a 15 min on-site to confirm scope. Tuesday or Thursday afternoon work?

Mike

No emoji. No HTML template. Plain text from a real Gmail address, because plain text from a real Gmail address lands in the inbox and HTML-templated emails from Mailchimp land in promotions. Hatch's email-vs-SMS benchmark shows plain-text contractor emails reply at 4-7%. Templated marketing emails reply at 0.5-1%.

If you want the email to feel personal at scale, the trick is to send it from your real Gmail account, not a marketing tool. That is what Clint does by default.

Text Clint: "send touch 2 email from my Gmail to every lead at touch 1 reply timeout, day 3 morning"

Touch 3: Call Day 7 Mid-Morning

Day 7 is the call. By now the lead has been texted and emailed. They know your name. The call is no longer a cold call, it is a follow-up call.

Time it for 10am to 11am local on a Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday. LocaliQ's 2024 home services call data shows mid-morning weekday connect rates 2.3x higher than late afternoon and 4x higher than weekends. Tuesday at 10:30am is the highest-connect window in the dataset.

The script for Touch 3 is short and references the prior touches.

"Hey [name], it's Mike from [company]. I texted you Monday and emailed Wednesday about your [service] at [address]. Wanted to catch you live for 2 minutes. You got a sec?"

If they pick up, you book the on-site. If they go to voicemail, you leave a 15 second message that names the service and your callback number. Then you immediately send a follow-up text:

"Just left you a vm. If easier, text me back here. Mike, [company]."

The dual touch (call + text) lifts response on Day 7 by 60-80% versus call alone, per Owned and Operated podcast episodes with John Wilson and Jack Carr covering follow-up cadence economics.

Text Clint: "list every lead at touch 2 reply timeout for a call today between 10 and 11 local time, sorted by quote value descending"

Touch 4: Text Day 14 With a Reason to Reply

Day 14 is the second SMS, and it is the touch most contractors miss because they have given up by then. This is the touch that wins back the leads who were busy, traveling, or comparing quotes for two weeks.

The script changes register. Touches 1-3 were "ready to start work". Touch 4 is "we noticed you went quiet". The framing is light, not pushy.

"Hey [name], Mike from [company]. Did you get the [service] handled, or still looking? Either way, no worries. Just wanted to close the loop."

That single text recovers 12-18% of leads who never replied to Touches 1-3, per Hatch's industry data. The reason it works is it gives the lead a reason to say "no thanks" and end it cleanly, which sounds bad but is actually good. The "no thanks" replies free up your CSR's time. The "actually still looking" replies are the gold.

Tommy Mello of A1 Garage Door has talked publicly about A1's follow-up cadence going to Touch 7 and beyond, and Touch 4 alone closing more revenue than Touches 1-3 combined in some weeks.

Text Clint: "draft touch 4 to all leads silent since day 0, send tomorrow at 11am from my real number"

Touch 5: Email Day 28 With the Soft Close

Day 28 is the soft close. The lead is now a month old. Most contractor CRMs have already moved them to "lost" or "cold". This is the email that proves the CRM wrong.

The Day 28 email has a different goal than the Day 3 email. It is not asking for a meeting. It is keeping the door open. The script:

Subject: Closing your file?

Hey [name],

Going to close your [service] file from earlier this month unless you tell me otherwise. Totally fine if you went a different direction or the timing is off. If you want to pick it back up, even three months from now, just reply and I'll keep it open.

Mike

The "closing your file" frame creates a small sense of finality without being pushy. Reply rates on this exact phrasing run 8-15% across the contractors who use it, and the replies that come back skew high-intent because the lead is consciously deciding to keep the conversation open.

John Wilson's team at Wilson Companies has reported this email alone closing $40K-$80K per quarter in HVAC replacements that would have been written off as dead.

If they reply, you flag them for a quarterly check-in. If they go silent, you move them to your reactivation list (see the customer reactivation playbook) and circle back at the 90-day or 12-month mark.

Text Clint: "send touch 5 closing-file email from my Gmail to every lead silent since day 14, schedule for tomorrow 9am"

What Makes the Cadence Actually Work

The scripts are not the secret. The secret is sending all five touches without dropping any. Most contractors run a great Touch 1, a good Touch 3, and forget the rest. The compound effect is the entire game.

Three rules to keep the cadence intact:

1. Real Gmail and real SMS. Cadences sent from Mailchimp or HubSpot land in promotions and feel like marketing. Cadences sent from your real Gmail and your real number feel like a person.
2. Schedule on the day, not on the lead. Don't try to remember Day 14 for every lead. Schedule the entire cadence at Touch 1 and let the system fire each touch on the date.
3. Reply detection has to pause the cadence. If a lead replies to Touch 2, Touch 3 should not still go out. The cadence has to know when to stop.

Most contractors fail on rule 3 because the SMS tool, the email tool, and the CRM are three different systems that do not talk to each other. A real reply on SMS does not pause the email cadence in Mailchimp. So the customer who replied "yes call me Tuesday" gets a Day 7 cold call from a CSR who did not see the SMS reply, and the lead dies of friction.

Clint runs the cadence from a single brain that sees Gmail, SMS, and CRM in one place. When a reply hits any channel, the rest of the cadence pauses automatically. No double-text, no awkward "did you get my email" call. See the AI customer reactivation guide for contractors for the broader pattern, and the missed-call followup agent breakdown and the missed-call text-back guide for how Touch 1 ties into your phone system.

The conversion line: text Clint, get a 5-touch cadence drafted in seconds and sent from your real Gmail and SMS. No Mailchimp, no Zapier.

Text Clint: "list every quote over $2,000 not signed in 14 days and start a 5-touch cadence on each one"

Sources

• Hatch Home Improvement Industry Report 2024-2025 - 89.86% multi-touch response rate, 8.56% single-touch
• InsideSales / Harvard Business Review on response time - 5-minute rule, 100x connect lift
• LocaliQ Home Services Marketing Stats 2024 - call connect benchmarks
• Invoca Home Services Call Conversion Benchmarks - SMS open rate, response time impact
• Owned and Operated podcast (Wilson, Carr) - cadence depth and contractor case data
• Tommy Mello / A1 Garage Door - multi-touch follow-up at scale