Automatically follow up on unsold estimates

Dispatch Bros attacks unsold estimates from two sides. The Estimates page gives you a live follow-up radar — the Pending / Follow-Up card totals every sent estimate that has gone quiet for 7 or more days, and each quiet row carries a hint telling you whether the customer never opened it or opened it and went silent. On top of that, the built-in Unsold Estimate Follow-up campaign can text those customers automatically, with strict consent and anti-spam guardrails.

Before you start

• Automatic follow-up texts require an SMS-ready phone number (SMS ready status).
• Marketing texts go only to customers with explicit marketing consent — the campaign can never text someone who opted out.

The follow-up radar on the Estimates page

Open Estimates and look at the pipeline cards:

• Open Pipeline — money still winnable: every sent estimate awaiting an answer.
• Pending / Follow-Up — the subset of the open pipeline that has been quiet for 7+ days, with its dollar value. "Quiet" means nothing has happened — no customer open, no send — for that long.

Each quiet row also shows a hint under its status: whether it was sent and never opened, or opened days ago with no answer since. Those are different phone calls — one customer never saw your price, the other saw it and stalled.

The Unsold Estimate Follow-up campaign

The campaign is a marketing automation named Unsold Estimate Follow-up, described in the app as "Follow up with customers who received an estimate but haven't booked yet". It runs on a schedule (labeled "Scheduled — unsold estimates") rather than firing off a single event. Its default message is a short text from your company: a reminder about the recent estimate, an invitation to reply or call to get scheduled, and the required opt-out line.

Who gets it, and when:

• Audience — customers with an unsold estimate older than the configured age (30 days by default).
• Consent — the editor states it plainly under Marketing consent required: only customers with explicit marketing consent receive it; STOP and do-not-market customers are automatically excluded.
• One message per wave — each customer gets at most one text per campaign wave, and waves are separated by a 14-day cooldown.
• Quiet hours — default quiet hours run 8:00 PM to 8:00 AM; "Messages will not send during quiet hours and will be rescheduled."
• Stops on reply — the moment the customer texts back, their follow-up is cancelled and it's a live conversation in your Messages inbox.

Editing the campaign

Campaigns are managed from Automations in the left sidebar. When you open the workflow's editor you can adjust:

• Message Template — the text itself, with placeholder chips like {first_name} and {company_name} that fill in per customer (placeholders). A live preview shows the message with sample data.
• Active — the master switch ("Workflow sends messages automatically").
• Stop on Reply — "Cancel if customer texts back".
• Quiet Hours — start and end times, in your company time zone from Settings → General.
• Source Filter — limit the campaign to estimates from selected job sources (scope to a source).
• Audience Preview — see who currently matches before anything sends.
• Sender Number — which of your numbers the texts come from.

Click Save Changes when done.

Troubleshooting

• Nobody is receiving follow-ups — the most common cause is consent: the audience is filtered to customers with explicit marketing consent, which many customer records don't have. Check the Audience Preview to see the real match count. Also confirm the campaign's Active toggle is on and your number is SMS-ready.
• The Pending / Follow-Up card shows money but no texts went out — the card is a radar, not a trigger. It counts every quiet estimate; the campaign texts only the consented subset on its own schedule.
• A customer got a follow-up after replying — replies cancel pending follow-ups when Stop on Reply is on (the default). If it was switched off, turn it back on.
• You can't find the campaign in Automations — marketing campaigns are managed separately from the everyday transactional automations list. If you don't see it in your account, contact support — the campaign engine may simply not be switched on for you yet.
• Texts arrive at odd hours — check the Quiet Hours window and that your company time zone is set correctly in Settings → General.