Four contacts over about two weeks, by phone rather than email, each one carrying a piece of information instead of a nudge. That is the method, and the count is the least important part of it. Frequency is rarely what makes a contractor annoying. The Owens Corning homeowner survey published by Roofing Contractor in 2026 found 56% of homeowners wanted a contractor to reach them by phone, against 90% of contractors who were following up by email — so a good share of the people apparently ignoring you never saw the message on a channel they check. Every one of them is a job you already drove to, measured and priced. Change the channel and the wording and you can make twice the contacts you make now without anyone minding.
What actually makes a follow-up annoying?
Not the number of times you get in touch. It is a message that hands the homeowner a job.
"Just checking in" asks him to restart a conversation, remember what the job was, work out what he thinks and then compose a reply — all so you can find out something you want to know. That is unpaid work, requested by a stranger. Nobody answers it, and the fourth one of those genuinely is irritating.
The second half of it is when you call. Contractors ring at ten to seven because they are in the truck and it is dead time before the first stop. The customer is getting kids into a car. Federal rule puts the window at 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. in the customer's local time under 16 CFR 310.4(c), and that is the floor rather than the target — before eight and after nine is where a follow-up stops being service and starts being an intrusion, no matter how useful the content is.
Say something he did not know, at an hour he can hear it. That is nearly the whole trick.
Should you follow up by phone or email?
Phone, and it is not close. The survey numbers are blunt about the mismatch.
| Homeowners | Contractors | |
|---|---|---|
| Prefer / use the phone | 56% preferred | 79% used |
| Use email | — | 90% used |
| Expect a reply in 1-2 days | 56% | |
| Expect a reply the same day | 39% |
Email wins with contractors because email is the thing you can do at nine at night when the paperwork finally comes out. It costs nothing, it feels like progress, and it is the least likely message to be read. Meanwhile 39% of homeowners expect to hear something back the same day.
Text is the useful middle. It reaches people in the two minutes they have, it does not demand a decision, and it leaves the price where they can find it later. Use the phone for the calls that matter and text for the ones that only need to deliver a fact.
How many times should you follow up before it is too much?
Four, spread across two weeks, with the channel and the content chosen deliberately.
| Touch | When | Channel | What it carries |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Same day you send the price | Call | The one line in the estimate worth reading first |
| 2 | Day 3 | Text | The choice that moves the number - allowance, material, finish |
| 3 | Day 7 | Call | A real deadline: lead time or the end of your price validity |
| 4 | Day 12-14 | Text | The release - book it or free the slot |
Touch one is worth the other three put together, because it is the only moment when the job is still the thing he was thinking about. By day ten your estimate is behind a car service and a school form.
The rule underneath the table: no contact goes out unless you can name what new thing it tells him. If you cannot, skip it and wait for the day you can. A contractor who calls three times with something to say is a professional. One who calls twice with nothing is a pest. This is also why the diagnosis matters — if people are reading the estimate and then going quiet, that is a follow-up problem, and the reasons clients stop responding sorts out which one you have.
Are you allowed to keep calling someone who asked you for a price?
Mostly yes, for 90 days, with two hard limits.
The FTC's Telemarketing Sales Rule treats an inquiry as an established business relationship for 90 days from the date he asked, and a purchase as one for 540 days from the transaction (16 CFR 310.2(q)). Inside that window his number being on the National Do Not Call Registry does not block you. So the homeowner who rang you for a deck price in March is fair game through June, and the customer whose bathroom you finished last year is reachable for a year and a half.
The limits:
- A direct request beats the exemption. Once someone tells your business not to call, the relationship stops protecting you (16 CFR 310.4(b)(1)(iii)(A)). Write it down the day it happens — the rule expects a seller relying on a business relationship to keep a record of the name, the number and the date of the inquiry, and "I forgot" is not a record.
- 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. local time, per 16 CFR 310.4(c). Local to him, which matters if you work across a time zone line.
Texting has its own rules and they turn on how the text is sent. A message you type on your own phone is generally outside the autodialer restrictions — the Supreme Court in Facebook v. Duguid held that an automatic telephone dialing system has to use a random or sequential number generator, which your thumbs do not. Run your follow-ups out of a CRM that sends them for you and the FCC rules apply: a customer can revoke consent by any reasonable means, "stop", "quit", "end", "revoke", "opt out", "cancel" and "unsubscribe" all count, you have to honor it within ten business days, and you get exactly one confirmation message, sent inside five minutes, with nothing promotional in it (47 CFR 64.1200(a)(10) and (a)(12)).
None of this is legal advice, and several states run telemarketing statutes tighter than the federal one. But the shape of it is worth knowing, because the honest version is reassuring: the law is not the thing stopping you from following up on a job you were invited to quote.
What do you say so it does not read as a nudge?
Put the fact first and take the obligation off him. Most of these land in voicemail, so write for voicemail.
Dave, it's Mike about the deck. One thing before you decide — the composite I quoted is running six weeks out from the yard right now, the pressure-treated is on the shelf. If you're leaning composite I'd want that ordered in the next couple of weeks to hold the May start. No need to call back today, I will try you Thursday.
Look at what that does. It names the job, it hands over something he could not have known, it explains why the timing is real rather than manufactured, and it tells him when the next call is coming so it is not a surprise. It never asks him a question he has to answer.
The text version of touch two is shorter and does the same job: Quick one on the bathroom - I put a $900 allowance on the vanity. If you already have one picked out, send me the model now rather than after demo. A message carrying a number gets answered. A message carrying a feeling does not.
When do you stop?
Day fourteen, and you mean it. The release is the message that gets the most replies of any of them:
Happy to hold the slot or let it go, whichever suits — just let me know either way and I'll stop chasing you.
Giving someone permission to say no is what finally produces an answer, and a clean no is worth more than a maybe you carry around for a month. Then stop. The long cadences you read about - eight touches, twelve touches - were written for people selling software to strangers in other states. You are going to run into this man at the hardware store.
Not forever, though. The estimate is still live in his drawer, and your business relationship runs 90 days from the day he asked. A single call in week ten, when the price has moved or the season has turned, is a different call from the fifth one in two weeks — and it is the reason a validity window on the document earns its place.
What this misses
The survey is roofing. Owens Corning polled homeowners about a roof, which is usually urgent and comparatively simple. A kitchen decision runs on a slower clock and involves two people who disagree, so read the channel preference as solid and the two-day response expectation as generous.
Follow-up cannot fix an estimate nobody understood. If people come back confused about what is included, no sequence of calls helps and the repair is upstream, in what the document says and excludes.
Some of them were never yours. A share of homeowners collect three quotes to learn whether the project is affordable at all. The answer is no, and four polite calls do not change it.
The real fix sits earlier than any of this. Nobody has to be chased about a price they were handed while you were both still standing in the room, before the comparing started. That is what BidWalk does — the estimate goes out from the driveway, and the first follow-up is a conversation instead of a rescue.
