Somewhere in your list of emails, there's a group of people who asked what your service costs and never responded again. Most owners I see either treat that as a no or completely forget that it even came through. And like we talked about last week, you already paid to get those people, whether it was ads or all the hours you put into posting. Letting them sit there wastes money you already spent.
What actually happened was that they had the problem and when they went looking, out of everyone they could've picked they asked you for a price. Then something got in the way and you never heard back. They didn't tell you no. People have busy lives, and you haven't even gotten on a call with them yet.
Those people are the warmest leads your business has and the easiest ones to close.
Why going back beats starting over
Getting a total stranger to trust you takes way longer than most people think. Google's research found people usually need around 7 hours of content and 11 touch points, across 4 different places, before they'll spend money with you.
That's why so many people posting on X or Threads see views but no clients. Talking to the right ICP matters. But most people don't realize how many times somebody has to see you before they trust you. The person who asked you for a price already did all of that on their own, so going back to them costs you nothing.
Have Claude find them for you
As someone who once had to sort through 50,000 emails just to clear my inbox, I can tell you it's just as miserable as it sounds. That's why we let Claude or Codex do it.
Give it as many old message threads as you can find, and ask it for one thing: find the conversations where somebody asked about price and then nothing happened, and nobody ever said no. (specify which platform to scrape. ex: gmail)
Then have it draft a short message for each person that names the actual thing they asked about. The cool thing about this is all the messages will be personalized. Not just with their name, but the actual email body itself.
What a good one looks like
Here's the copy n paste version most people send:
"Hi Mike, just checking in to see if you're still interested in our services. We'd love to work with you, let me know if you have any questions!"
That message could have gone to a hundred different people, and Mike knows it. All you did was change his name.
Now the version that actually gets a reply:
"Hey Mike, back in April you asked what it'd run to redo the two bathrooms before your in-laws visit this fall. Did that ever get done? If not I've got room in a few weeks and the number I gave you still stands."
The second one proves you remember him and not his money, and that's why he writes back instead of deleting it. Except you didn't write it. Claude did.
This is a reactivation campaign
What we just talked about is called a reactivation campaign, and it's one of the cheapest ways to bring in money because you're not paying for a single new lead.
Businesses have run these forever, but somebody used to have to go through the whole list by hand and write every message. So most owners just sent the same email to everybody and called it done.
The awesome thing about Claude is that it can go through years of old conversations and write a different message for each person. And over time, you can train it on frameworks and guidelines to make the responses even better.
The honest part
It doesn't matter if these people already hired someone else or if they don't answer, because each message barely costs you anything.
One thing to try this week
Go back to five people who never said no.
- Find the messages where somebody asked about price and went quiet and hand the whole pile to Claude and let it find them.
- Pick five, and have Claude draft a short message for each one that names the specific thing that person asked about.
- Read them, fix anything that doesn't sound like you, and send the first one today. Then tell Claude to repeat the process for more.