Glossary
Lead reactivation, defined in plain English
Every term we use on this site, written the way I would explain it to you on a call. For each one you get the plain definition, what it actually looks like in a real business, and why it matters to your money. No jargon for the sake of it. If a word here shows up in a proposal from anyone, you will know exactly what it means.
Jump to a term
- Lead reactivation
- Reaching back out to leads who once inquired but never bought, restarting the conversation, and finding the ones who are still interested. Instead of buying new leads, you recover sales from people who already raised their hand.
- Database reactivation
- Lead reactivation run across your whole list at once. You work through every old inquiry and past buyer sitting in your CRM rather than a single segment, so no warm contact goes unchecked.
- Reactivation campaign
- The actual sequence of messages that does the reactivating. A planned run of texts sent to your old leads over a few days, written to restart a real conversation rather than blast an offer, with every reply routed to a person or a booking link.
- The Hand-Raise Test
- A short, low-risk test on a sample of your own list. We text your old leads in your voice, hold real conversations, and hand back the people who reply and are ready to talk, so you see genuine replies before you spend anything.
- Dead lead
- A lead your team marked cold because follow-up stopped getting replies. Most are not actually dead. The timing was off, they got busy, or they needed to talk to a spouse, and nobody checked back.
- Hand-raiser
- A reactivated lead who replies and signals they are still interested. They confirm they have the problem you fix, can afford your offer, and are ready to move forward, so your team only talks to people worth talking to.
- Opt-in
- Permission a person gave to be contacted, usually by filling in one of your own forms or buying from you. We only message opted-in leads from your own funnels and past buyers, never purchased or scraped lists.
- A2P 10DLC
- The carrier registration required in North America to send application-to-person text messages to standard phone numbers. Registering keeps delivery clean and spam-safe. We handle the registration on your behalf.
- Win-back campaign
- A campaign aimed at past customers who stopped buying, usually with an offer to bring them back. It is one slice of database reactivation, which also covers old inquiries and quotes that never closed, not just lapsed buyers.
- Closed-lost lead
- A lead your CRM marked lost because the deal never happened. Most were a timing mismatch, not a hard no. They got busy, the budget moved, or they picked someone else and it fell through, which is why closed-lost and dormant leads are the first place we look for recoverable sales.
- Stale quote or estimate
- A price you quoted that never turned into a job. The prospect asked, you sent the number, and the deal went quiet. Stale quotes are among the warmest names on any contractor’s list, because the person had a real project and a real budget in hand.
- CASL
- Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation, the law that governs commercial texts and emails sent to Canadians. It requires consent, sender identification, and a working opt-out. Reactivating leads who inquired or bought from you falls under its implied-consent rules, which is exactly who we message.
- Implied consent
- Permission to contact someone based on an existing business relationship under CASL, valid for six months after an inquiry and two years after a purchase. It is the legal basis for texting your own old leads in Canada, and the reason we only work lists you earned.
- Conversational AI
- Software that holds a real back-and-forth text conversation instead of sending one-way blasts. It answers common questions, handles objections, and books a call, trained on your FAQs and sales copy so it sounds like you.
- Warm transfer
- Passing an interested lead straight to your team while they are still engaged, either onto a call, a calendar booking, or a dialler, rather than leaving them to go cold in a queue.
- Appointment setting
- Turning interest into a booked call on your team’s calendar. In reactivation it is the last step: once an old lead replies and qualifies, the conversation books them straight onto your calendar instead of leaving them to drift back to cold.
- Performance-based pricing
- A pricing model where you pay for results, such as booked calls or sales, rather than a monthly retainer. It lines up our incentives with yours and keeps the risk on us until the system proves it works.
- Cost per lead
- What you spend to earn one new inquiry through ads, landing pages, and your team’s time. Reactivating a lead you already earned is far cheaper because you already paid to get their attention once.
- Speed to lead
- How fast someone follows up after a lead comes in. Reply rates fall quickly as minutes turn into hours, which is why after-hours inquiries so often die before anyone gets to them.
- Missed call text-back
- An automatic text sent to a caller the moment their call to your business goes unanswered. It acknowledges the missed call and keeps the conversation open by text, so the caller does not just move on to the next name in their search.
- No-show recovery
- Following up with people who booked a call or appointment and did not show, to rebook them rather than write them off. A no-show is usually a scheduling miss, not a lost customer.
- Nine-word email
- A short, plain re-engagement message, popularized by Dean Jackson, that asks a single easy question to restart a dormant conversation. The same idea drives the hand-raiser text: brief, human, and easy to answer.
In practice
Picture two years of ad spend. Thousands of people asked for a quote, booked a call, or filled in a form. A handful bought and the rest went quiet. Reactivation goes back to that quiet majority and starts the conversation again, one text at a time, in your voice, until the people who are still interested reply.
Why it matters
You already paid to earn every one of those names. Getting even a small slice of them talking again is the cheapest revenue in your business, and almost nobody works the list properly because doing it by hand takes forever and feels like nagging.
In practice
Instead of picking one tidy segment, we export the entire list. Every old inquiry, every quote that never closed, every past buyer who drifted off. Then we message all of them in a sequence, so the names you forgot you had get the same shot as the ones you remember.
Why it matters
The money is usually hiding in the contacts you would never think to look at by hand. Working the full database in one pass surfaces recoverable sales across the whole list, not just the few you already had a good feeling about.
In practice
A typical campaign is a short run of messages spaced across several days and sent in small daily batches so carriers keep delivering them. The first text is a plain human question, not a pitch. The moment someone replies, they drop out of the sequence and go straight to a booking or to your team.
Why it matters
Most owners picture a reactivation campaign as one giant mass text, which is exactly the thing carriers flag as spam and that burns a list for good. Running it as small conversational batches instead is the difference between a booked calendar and a database you can never message again.
In practice
We take a slice of your list, message them in your tone, and handle the back-and-forth. You watch the replies come in live. The people who write back and are genuinely interested get handed straight to your team, and you decide whether to run the rest of the list based on what you saw.
Why it matters
It moves the risk off you and onto us. You are not paying for a promise or a slide deck, you are watching your own leads raise their hands first. If the test does not produce real conversations, you have lost nothing and you walk away.
In practice
A homeowner asks for a roofing quote in spring, then a storm of life hits and they go silent. Your team calls twice, hears nothing, and files them under lost. Nine months later the roof still leaks and nobody ever circled back. That is a dead lead, and it is rarely as dead as the label suggests.
Why it matters
Every dead lead was once a real buyer with a real problem. When you treat the whole pile as gone, you write off people who would still say yes if you simply showed up again at a better moment.
In practice
A hand-raiser is not just anyone who texts back. It is the person who says yes, I still need this, I can spend what it costs, and I am ready to talk this week. The conversation sorts the tire-kickers out before they ever reach your calendar.
Why it matters
Your team’s time is the expensive part. When every call is with someone who has the problem, can afford the fix, and is ready to move, your close rate climbs and nobody burns an afternoon chasing people who were never going to buy.
In practice
Someone downloads your guide, requests a quote, or buys from you. In doing that, they hand you permission to follow up. That permission is what separates a list we can legally and comfortably work from one we will not touch.
Why it matters
This is the honest limit on the whole model. If your leads never opted in, we cannot text them, full stop. It is also your protection, because it means every message goes to someone who already chose to hear from you.
In practice
Carriers like Rogers, Bell, and the US networks want to know who is sending business texts and why. Registering your brand and campaign tells them you are legitimate, so your messages actually land in inboxes instead of getting silently filtered.
Why it matters
Skip this and your carefully written messages never arrive, which looks like a dead list when it is really a delivery problem. We take care of the paperwork so your reply rate reflects real interest, not a technical block.
In practice
A med spa messages clients who have not booked in a year with a reason to come back. That is a classic win-back. Database reactivation is the bigger job, because it also chases the people who inquired and never became customers in the first place.
Why it matters
Past buyers already trust you, so a win-back is often the fastest cash in the whole list. But if you stop there you leave the larger pile of never-bought inquiries untouched, and that is usually where the bigger number is.
In practice
Your salesperson quotes a job, the prospect goes with a cheaper bid, and the deal gets stamped closed-lost. Six months later the cheaper crew did shoddy work or vanished, and that prospect is back in the market with nobody following up. The label said lost. The buyer did not disappear.
Why it matters
Closed-lost is a snapshot of one moment, not a permanent verdict. Circling back later, when the timing or the other guy has changed, turns a chunk of those write-offs back into live deals your team already did the work to earn once.
In practice
A solar installer sends a proposal, a roofer emails an estimate, a home services company quotes a bathroom. Plenty of them never reply. Six months later the problem still exists and the quote is sitting forgotten in a CRM or an email folder, with nobody circling back to it.
Why it matters
Someone who asked for a quote already told you they have the problem and wanted it solved. Reopening old quotes and estimates is often the single fastest slice of a reactivation to turn into cash, because the buying intent was already there and only the timing slipped.
In practice
CASL is why we ask how you earned your list before we touch it. Messaging people who filled in your form or bought from you sits inside the rules. Blasting a bought or scraped list does not, and we will not do it, because that is exactly the behaviour the law exists to stop.
Why it matters
For an Alberta business, getting this wrong carries real penalties and real reputational damage. Working only opted-in leads inside CASL keeps your reactivation defensible, so if anyone ever asks how you got their number, you have a clean and honest answer.
In practice
Someone requests a quote in March. Under implied consent you can follow up for six months on that inquiry. If they actually buy, the window stretches to two years from the purchase. Those windows are the practical map of who on your list we can message and for how long.
Why it matters
Implied consent is what makes texting your own old leads legal in Canada, and it also sets the clock. The sooner you work a list, the more of it still sits inside a valid window, which is one more reason a database that has been ignored for years should be worked now, not later.
In practice
A lead replies asking about price, timelines, or whether you cover their area. Instead of that message sitting unanswered until someone has a spare minute, the AI responds in seconds, in your tone, and keeps the conversation moving toward a booked call.
Why it matters
The honest part: it is not magic, and it is not pretending to be a person. It does the patient, repetitive follow-up your team never has time for, and it hands a warm human over to a real human the moment the conversation gets serious.
In practice
A lead says yes, I want to talk. Right then, while the interest is hot, they get booked onto your calendar or handed to whoever is ready to pick up. Nobody gets parked in a list to be called back tomorrow, by which point the moment has passed.
Why it matters
Interest has a short shelf life. The gap between a lead saying yes and a human actually talking to them is where most warm leads quietly cool off, so closing that gap is often worth more than getting more replies in the first place.
In practice
Traditional appointment setting means a person dialing lists to book meetings. Here the conversation does the setting. The AI holds the back-and-forth, confirms the person has the problem and can afford the fix, then drops a booking link or hands them to your team while they are still engaged.
Why it matters
A reply is not revenue. The money shows up when a qualified person is actually sitting on your calendar ready to talk. Tying reactivation straight to appointment setting, and paying per booked call rather than a flat retainer, is what keeps the whole thing anchored to a result you can see.
In practice
Rather than invoice you a fixed retainer whether or not anything happens, we tie what we earn to what you get, like booked calls or closed revenue. If the list underperforms, that is our problem to solve, not a bill you still have to pay.
Why it matters
It answers the fair question every owner asks, which is what happens if this does not work. When our pay depends on your result, you know the advice you get is aimed at making the system produce, not at locking you into another monthly line item.
In practice
Add up your ad budget, your landing pages, and the hours your team spends, then divide by the leads you got. That number is your cost per lead, and it has been climbing for years across almost every industry as ads get more crowded.
Why it matters
Every name already in your CRM was bought at that price once. Reactivation lets you cash that spend a second time for a fraction of the cost, which is why working the old list usually beats paying today’s rate for a brand-new stranger.
In practice
Someone fills in your form at 9pm. If the first reply reaches them within minutes, they are still leaning in. If it waits until a rep clocks in the next morning, they have often moved on, called a competitor, or forgotten they asked at all.
Why it matters
Slow follow-up is quietly manufacturing dead leads every single day. Fixing speed to lead on new inquiries stops fresh names from turning into tomorrow’s reactivation problem, and it is the cheapest leak in the whole funnel to plug.
In practice
More than half of calls to small businesses go unanswered, and most of those callers never try again. A missed call text-back fires within seconds, something like sorry we missed you, what can we help with, and turns a lost call into a text thread someone can actually answer.
Why it matters
It is the same idea as reactivation, aimed at your phone instead of your CRM. A missed call is a hand already raised, and letting it fall to voicemail is manufacturing a dead lead in real time. Catching it by text is one of the cheapest leaks in the whole business to plug.
In practice
A med spa client books a consult and forgets. A prospect schedules a sales call and something comes up. Most businesses mark it done and move on. No-show recovery texts them the same day, in a human way, and offers an easy way to grab another slot.
Why it matters
A no-show already wanted what you sell enough to book once. Recovering even a portion of them fills a calendar you have already paid to fill, and it costs nothing close to finding a brand new lead to put in the same slot.
In practice
The classic version is a one-line question like are you still looking to sell your house. No pitch, no paragraph, no link. Just a genuine question a real person would send, which is exactly why it gets answered when a polished marketing blast gets ignored.
Why it matters
It works because it does not feel like marketing. That principle sits under every message we send, because the fastest way to restart a dead conversation is to sound like a human asking one honest question, not a company running a campaign.
Want to see it, not just read about it?
The fastest way to understand lead reactivation is to try the live demo. Reply like one of your own old leads, throw a few curveballs at it, and watch how it handles them.
Try the demo, then try to break itSee it for yourself
Try the demo, then try to break it
This is the same conversation your old leads would get. Reply the way a real customer would, throw curveballs at it, and see how it holds up. It is free and there is nothing to sign up for.
Free Hand-Raise Test on a sample of your own list. You only pay when it works.