SMS or email for waking up old leads?

Ask which channel to use for reactivating a dormant list and you will get dueling statistics about open rates. Skip them. The channels are not competing at the same job, and the right question is not "which gets seen more" but "which starts a conversation."

What each channel is actually for

Text is a conversation channel. A text lands in the same thread as messages from family and the dentist, gets read close to immediately, and invites a one-thumb reply. For reactivation, that reply is the entire game. You are not trying to inform a dormant lead. You are trying to get them to say something, even "who is this?", so a qualification conversation can start.

Email is a content channel. It carries things a text cannot: photos of finished jobs, a breakdown of financing options, proof. People tolerate long-form in email. Nobody reads four paragraphs in a text thread. But replying to a business email feels like work, and reactivation lives on replies.

So the practical split for a dormant list: open with SMS, support with email. The text restarts the relationship and carries the conversation. Email follows for the leads who re-engage and need substance before a call: the estimate recap, the reviews, the how-it-works page.

The part most advice skips: SMS has real rules

Text messaging for business in the US is regulated, and reactivation campaigns sit squarely inside the rules. Three things have to be true before the first message goes out:

1. Consent. The leads you are texting gave you their number and an expectation of contact when they made their original request. That prior relationship is what makes reactivation of your own list a different animal from texting a purchased list, which you should not do at all.
2. Registration. Business texting through US carriers requires A2P 10DLC registration: your brand and your campaign type, registered and approved. Unregistered traffic gets filtered before it ever reaches a phone, which is how a "bad reply rate" often turns out to be a delivery problem.
3. The basics of respect. Identify the business by name. Honor opt-outs instantly. Keep messages inside sane hours in the recipient's time zone. Beyond being legally required, every one of these also raises reply rates, because the message reads like a person instead of a robocall.

This is unglamorous plumbing, and it is half of why do-it-yourself reactivation campaigns disappoint. The list was fine. The messages never arrived, or arrived looking like spam.

How the sequence fits together

For a typical services business working its own dormant list, the pattern that holds up:

• Text first. Short, named, referencing their original request, with a question that is easy to answer and an easy way out.
• Conversation in the thread. Qualification happens by reply, not by form. The goal of the thread is a booked time, not a link drop.
• Email as the supporting act. Once someone re-engages, email carries the heavy content: what the job involves, what it costs, why you.
• Calendar and CRM close the loop. Every booked call lands on the calendar with confirmation and reminders, and every outcome gets written back to the CRM so the list is cleaner than you found it.

The channel debate ends up mattering less than the capacity question underneath it: someone, or something, has to actually hold all those threads. That is the job we built Inflow to do, and the place to start is knowing what your list is worth.