Text Scripts for Reaching Past Clients
Builds guide sites for a livingPublished July 22, 2026Last updated July 26, 202632 min read
- 16 CFR 238.2(b) states that even where the true facts are later made known, the violation occurs if the first contact was secured by deception, which is the case against every curiosity-gap opener.
- Open with your first name and the water or the boat, because a text from an unrecognised number is judged on its first fragment.
- Name one specific date rather than asking an open question, which hands the work back to the client.
- 16 CFR 238.3(c) treats claimed availability as requiring either real supply or a clear disclosure that supply is limited: two October Saturdays left beats October is open.
- Send one message, one follow-up, then stop until there is a genuine new fact, because a third message with nothing in it exists only to extract a reply.
- Do not attach a discount; add time on the water instead, which costs little and does not reposition your published rate.
The Federal Trade Commission's guides against bait advertising open with a definition worth reading before you write a single message to a past client: an alluring but insincere offer to sell a product or service which the advertiser in truth does not intend or want to sell.
Guides are not rules and they do not reach a fishing guide texting last year's clients. What they do is describe, with unusual precision, the exact failure mode of every bad reactivation text ever sent: an opening line engineered to get a reply rather than to state a true offer. The scripts below are built the other way round, and the reasoning for each is set out beside it. Nothing here is legal advice. The related pieces are indexed on the running the business hub.
| Engineered for a reply | Stating a true offer |
|---|---|
| Hey! Quick question for you | Evan here from the drift boat, Sept 12 came free |
| You're not going to believe the river right now | Water came back up Thursday, fishing is good again |
| Filling up fast, don't sleep on this | Two Saturdays left in October, the 11th and the 25th |
What does the bait guide actually say?
That the first contact is judged on its own, regardless of what happens next.
Section 238.0 of Title 16 defines bait advertising as an alluring but insincere offer to sell a product or service which the advertiser in truth does not intend or want to sell, and states that its primary aim is to obtain leads as to persons interested in buying merchandise of the type advertised.
Section 238.1 says no advertisement containing an offer to sell should be published when the offer is not a bona fide effort to sell the advertised product.
Then 238.2(b) supplies the line that matters most here: even though the true facts are subsequently made known to the buyer, the law is violated if the first contact or interview is secured by deception.
Which is the whole argument against the opening line that exists to trigger a reply, because the correction that arrives in your second message does not undo the first one.
Part 238 is carried on the eCFR.
The same test applied to the price itself is worked through in the pricing piece.
What goes in the first seven words?
Your name and the boat, because they do not know the number.
A text from an unrecognised number is read on a lock screen in about a second, and everything that happens afterwards depends on whether the first fragment identified you.
So the opening is your first name, then the thing that places you, which is the water or the boat rather than the business name.
Evan here from the drift boat on the Madison places you instantly for somebody who spent a day with you and cannot picture a company name they never used.
Whereas an opener that withholds identity to create curiosity is the structure Part 238 describes, and it also reads as a scam to anybody under forty.
The rule of thumb: if the message would work equally well sent by a stranger, the opening is wrong.
The full sequence this fits into is set out in the win-back piece.
What a reactivation list is worth, arithmetically. Sixty past clients, texted once in late winter. If eight reply and five book at $650, that is $3,250 from about forty minutes of typing, and the marginal cost is zero because the days were already there. The same forty minutes spent on paid acquisition at a $90 booked-client cost would produce roughly nothing. That gap, not the wording, is why the list gets texted. Every figure here is a stated assumption, not survey data.
Which message goes to somebody who fished last season?
A dated opening, not an open question.
The message reads: your name and the water, the specific thing that has changed, and one date.
Evan here from the drift boat. Water came back up Thursday and the browns are moving. I have the 12th and the 26th open if you want one.
Which does three things at once, being identification, a real reason to be texting, and something concrete to say yes to.
The open question version, meaning any variant of thinking about getting out this year, puts the work of proposing a date on the client and it is the reason most reactivation texts die politely.
One date is better than three, because three reads as a calendar negotiation and one reads as an offer.
If the date is wrong they will say so, and that reply is the conversation you wanted.
Timing the send is dealt with in the fall wrap-up piece.
Which message goes to somebody two years gone?
Shorter, and with an explicit way out.
A client who has not fished with you in two seasons may have moved, had a child, taken up something else, or had a bad day they never mentioned.
So the message acknowledges the gap rather than pretending it away: Evan here, we fished the Madison in 2024. No idea if you are still getting out, but I have room in October if you are.
The phrase no idea if you are still getting out does real work, because it gives them a costless exit and removes the social pressure that makes people ignore a message rather than decline it.
Which raises the reply rate rather than lowering it, since a no you receive is worth more than a silence you have to interpret.
What it must not do is manufacture a reason, and the manufactured reason is the commonest form the bait structure takes at this distance.
Saying I was just thinking about that fish you caught, when you were not, is an insincere opening in the sense the guide means.
What to do with the ones who never reply is covered by the spreadsheet CRM piece.
These guides do not bind you. The FTC's guides against bait advertising are interpretive guidance addressed to advertising practices generally; nothing in them creates an obligation for a guiding business, and nothing on this page is legal advice. Text messaging to consumers is separately regulated under federal and state law, including consent, identification and time-of-day requirements, and those rules do carry real consequences. Confirm the current requirements with a lawyer in your state before running any messaging at volume.
What about the cancellation gap?
Name the actual gap, and do not dress it as a favour.
A cancellation two days out is the single best reason to text a past client, because the offer is genuinely time-limited and genuinely real.
The message is: Evan here, had a cancellation for Saturday the 14th, half day open at nine. Yours if you want it.
What ruins it is the addition that makes it sound like a favour, meaning any version of thought of you first or wanted to give you the chance before I post it.
Because if that is not true, it is the alluring but insincere opening exactly, and if it is true it does not need saying.
The urgency in this message is real, which is precisely why it should not be decorated: a genuine two-day window is more persuasive stated flatly than any manufactured one is dressed up.
Sending it to five people at once is fine provided the message says so, and the honest version is: texting a few people, first yes gets it.
How to fill the rest of the gap is handled in the no-show piece.
What does 238.3 suggest about promising availability?
That claimed supply has to be real, or disclosed as limited.
Section 238.3 lists the practices weighed in deciding whether an offer was bona fide, and among them is the failure to have available a sufficient quantity of the advertised product to meet reasonably anticipated demands, unless the advertisement clearly and adequately discloses that supply is limited.
Translated to a guide's messaging, that is the difference between I have October open and I have two October Saturdays left.
The second is a limited-supply disclosure and it is both more honest and more effective, because a specific scarcity is credible in a way that an unspecified one is not.
The same section names the refusal to show or sell the product in accordance with the terms of the offer, which in this trade is texting a rate and then adding fees when they reply.
Whatever number goes in the text is the number, and if the number depends on party size then the text says so.
What the quoted number has to include is set out in the day rate piece.
How long should these messages be?
Under three lines, and the third line is optional.
A reactivation text is read on a phone in a queue, and length is read as sales pressure before a single word is processed.
Two lines is the working shape: identification and reason in the first, the offer in the second.
Which forces the discipline that makes these messages work, being that everything not load-bearing has to come out.
The photograph is the exception worth making, because a picture of the fish they caught attached to a two-line message outperforms anything you can write.
What never belongs is a link, unless they asked for one, since a link from an unrecognised number is the single strongest scam signal there is.
If a booking page is needed, it goes in the second message after they have replied, not the first.
What that booking page should do is the subject of the booking page piece.
What about the group organiser?
A different message, because their decision is a different one.
The person who booked four rods last year is not deciding whether to go fishing; they are deciding whether to do the organising again.
So the message removes organising work rather than adding excitement: Evan here. Same weekend as last year, the 18th and 19th, both boats. Want me to hold them while you ask the others?
Which is an offer to carry the difficult part, and holding two days for a week costs you almost nothing against the value of a repeat group.
The follow-up matters more here than anywhere else, because the organiser is waiting on other people and a silence at day five is usually not a no.
One check-in at a week, phrased as a release rather than a chase, is the correct number: still holding those, say the word if it is not happening.
Why the group is worth this handling is set out in the repeat rate piece.
How many times can you text somebody?
Once, then once more, then stop until something changes.
The working pattern is one message, one follow-up about a week later if there was no reply at all, and nothing further until there is a real event to report.
A real event means water conditions changing, a cancellation, or a season opening, and it does not mean the passage of time.
Which is the practical form of the bona fide test: a third message with no new fact in it exists to produce a reply rather than to convey anything, and that is the structure the guide describes.
The follow-up itself should be shorter than the original and should not reference the original, because reminding somebody they ignored you is the surest way to make sure they keep doing it.
A no, once given, ends the sequence permanently for that season, and the name goes in a column so next year's send skips them.
Where that column lives is dealt with by the spreadsheet CRM piece.
Should these be sent one at a time?
Yes, and the reason is not sincerity theatre.
A message sent through a bulk tool arrives looking like one, because the formatting differs, the sender identity differs, and the client has seen ten thousand of them.
Sending from your own phone, one at a time, takes about forty seconds each and sixty of them is forty minutes once a year.
That is not a large enough cost to justify the loss, and the loss is real: a personal text and a broadcast are read as different categories of thing before the content registers.
The one-at-a-time constraint also caps the list at a size you can actually handle, which is a feature, since a hundred-and-eighty-name blast produces replies you cannot service.
Where volume is genuinely needed, that is email's job and it should look like email rather than pretending to be a text.
The email version of the same sequence is in the winter email piece.
What does the note at the end of Part 238 mean here?
That a message working is not evidence that it was honest.
The note closing the part observes that sales of the advertised merchandise do not preclude the existence of a bait and switch scheme, and that occasionally such sales are a mere incidental byproduct intended to provide an aura of legitimacy.
Which is the most useful sentence in the whole part for anybody writing marketing copy, because it separates the two questions people habitually collapse.
Did it get replies is one question, and was the opening true is a different one, and the first has never been evidence about the second.
A curiosity-gap opener will out-reply a plain one in almost every test anybody runs, and the test is not measuring what it appears to.
What it costs is invisible in the numbers: the clients who replied, felt handled, and did not book, and who now read your name differently.
In a trade where the same sixty people are the entire list, that is an expensive way to win a reply-rate comparison.
The same trap in review requests is examined in the review request piece.
Where do these messages usually go wrong?
Six ways, and the opener accounts for most of them.
Withholding your identity to create curiosity, so the message reads as a scam and fails the bona fide test at the first contact.
Asking an open question instead of naming a date, which hands the work to the client and produces a polite nothing.
Manufacturing a reason for the message, which is the insincere-offer structure in its purest form.
Quoting a number that later grows, which 238.3 names directly as a refusal to sell in accordance with the terms of the offer.
Including a link in the first message, which trips every scam heuristic a phone user has.
And sending a third message with no new fact in it, which exists only to extract a reply.
How the annual version of this becomes something else entirely is covered by the tradition piece.
What should the message never contain?
A discount, in almost every case.
The reflex when a text goes unanswered is to add money to it, and it is the most expensive habit available in this trade.
A past client who did not book because the date was wrong is not converted by fifty dollars off, and a past client who was going to book anyway has just cost you fifty dollars.
Worse, the discount teaches the list that your published rate is an opening position, which changes every future conversation with every person who received it.
What works in its place is adding something that costs you little and reads as substantial, which in this trade is time rather than money.
An extra hour on the water, a dawn start, or lunch handled are all real value with almost no marginal cost, and none of them repositions your rate.
Where a genuine price move is warranted, it belongs in a published shoulder-season rate rather than in a private text, because a rate everybody can see is a policy and a rate one person got is a negotiation.
How do you keep track of what was sent?
Two columns, filled in the same minute you send.
The date of the last message and the outcome, recorded as one of booked, declined, no reply, or asked to be left alone.
Without those, next winter's send goes out to people who told you no in March, and that is the failure that actually damages a list rather than any wording choice.
The asked-to-be-left-alone value is the one that matters most and the one nobody records, because it feels like admitting something.
It is also the cheapest possible protection, since one unwanted repeat message to somebody who already declined does more harm than twenty unanswered ones.
Recording it takes four seconds and it has to happen at the moment of the reply, because it will not happen later.
What is the working set?
Four messages, two lines each, sent by hand.
Last season's client gets identification, the changed condition, and one date.
The two-years-gone client gets identification, an acknowledgement of the gap, and an explicit way out.
The cancellation gap gets the real window stated flatly, with no favour language attached to it.
The group organiser gets an offer to hold the dates while they ask the others, and one release-framed check-in a week later.
All four identify you in the first seven words, name a real fact, carry no link, and stop after the second attempt.
The Commission's authority over unfair or deceptive acts sits at 15 U.S.C. 45, with the Title 16 volume mirrored on govinfo.
The list these are sent to is built in the client database piece.
How this was checked. The definition of bait advertising as an alluring but insincere offer to sell a product or service which the advertiser in truth does not intend or want to sell, with the observation that its primary aim is to obtain leads as to persons interested in buying merchandise of the type so advertised, comes from 16 CFR 238.0. The principle that no advertisement containing an offer to sell a product should be published when the offer is not a bona fide effort to sell the advertised product comes from 238.1. The statement that even though the true facts are subsequently made known to the buyer, the law is violated if the first contact or interview is secured by deception comes from 238.2(b). The enumerated practices weighed in determining whether an offer was bona fide, including the refusal to show, demonstrate or sell the product offered in accordance with the terms of the offer, and the failure to have available a sufficient quantity of the advertised product to meet reasonably anticipated demands unless the advertisement clearly and adequately discloses that supply is limited, come from 238.3(a) and 238.3(c). The closing note that sales of the advertised merchandise do not preclude the existence of a bait and switch scheme, and that such sales are on occasions a mere incidental byproduct intended to provide an aura of legitimacy to the overall operation, appears at the end of the part. Part 238 was read on the Electronic Code of Federal Regulations on 26 July 2026. Part 238 consists of guides, which are administrative interpretations rather than substantive rules, and it imposes no obligation on a guiding business; it is used here as a description of a failure mode, not as a compliance standard. Federal and state law separately regulates commercial text messaging, including consent and time-of-day restrictions, and none of that body of law is analysed on this page. No reply rate, conversion rate or response benchmark for guide text messaging is asserted, because no consulted source publishes one; the figures in the arithmetic panel are stated illustrative assumptions.
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Get a free website previewWhat goes in the first seven words, how many times you can send, and why the discount is the expensive habit
What do the bait advertising guides say?
16 CFR 238.0 defines bait advertising as an alluring but insincere offer to sell a product or service which the advertiser in truth does not intend or want to sell, whose primary aim is to obtain leads as to persons interested in buying merchandise of that type. Section 238.1 says no advertisement containing an offer to sell should be published when the offer is not a bona fide effort to sell. Section 238.2(b) adds that even where the true facts are later disclosed, the violation lies in securing the first contact by deception. They are guides rather than rules and they impose nothing on a guiding business.
What belongs in the first seven words?
Your first name and the thing that places you, which is the water or the boat rather than a business name they never used. Evan here from the drift boat on the Madison identifies you instantly to somebody who spent a day with you. An opener that withholds identity to create curiosity fails the bona fide test at the first contact and reads as a scam to most people under forty.
What goes to a client who fished last season?
Identification, the specific thing that has changed, and one date. Water came back up Thursday and the browns are moving, I have the 12th and the 26th open. One date beats three, because three reads as a calendar negotiation and one reads as an offer. If the date is wrong they will say so, and that reply is the conversation you were after.
What goes to somebody two years gone?
A shorter message that acknowledges the gap and supplies an explicit way out. No idea if you are still getting out, but I have room in October if you are. The exit removes the social pressure that makes people ignore a message rather than decline it, which raises the reply rate rather than lowering it. What it must not do is manufacture a reason, which is the insincere-offer structure in its purest form.
How many messages can you send?
One, one follow-up about a week later if there was no reply at all, and then nothing until something real changes. A real event means water conditions, a cancellation, or a season opening; it does not mean the passage of time. A third message with no new fact in it exists to produce a reply rather than to convey anything. A no ends the sequence for the season, and the name goes in a column so next year's send skips them.
Should a discount be attached?
Almost never. A client who did not book because the date was wrong is not converted by fifty dollars off, and one who was going to book anyway has just cost you fifty dollars. The lasting damage is that it teaches the list your published rate is an opening position. Add time instead, being an extra hour, a dawn start or lunch handled, all of which read as substantial and cost almost nothing.
Can these be sent through a bulk tool?
They can, and they arrive looking like it. Formatting and sender identity differ, and a personal text and a broadcast are read as different categories of thing before the content registers. Sixty messages at forty seconds each is forty minutes once a year, which is not a large enough saving to justify the loss. Where volume genuinely matters, that is email's job and it should look like email.
Sources & methods
- 16 CFR part 238, the Guides Against Bait Advertising, on the Electronic Code of Federal Regulations, read for the definition of bait advertising as an alluring but insincere offer to sell a product or service which the advertiser in truth does not intend or want to sell whose primary aim is to obtain leads as to persons interested in buying merchandise of the type so advertised; for the principle that no advertisement containing an offer to sell should be published when the offer is not a bona fide effort to sell; for the statement that even though the true facts are subsequently made known to the buyer, the law is violated if the first contact or interview is secured by deception; for the enumerated practices weighed in determining whether an offer was bona fide, including the refusal to show, demonstrate or sell the product in accordance with the terms of the offer and the failure to have available a sufficient quantity of the advertised product to meet reasonably anticipated demands unless the advertisement clearly and adequately discloses that supply is limited; and for the closing note that sales of the advertised merchandise do not preclude the existence of a bait and switch scheme. These are guides, being administrative interpretations rather than substantive rules, and they impose no obligation on a guiding business.
- 15 U.S.C. 45 at the Office of the Law Revision Counsel, cited for the statutory declaration that unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce are unlawful, which is the authority the guides interpret. The section was read only for that authority and no part of it is applied to any practice described on this page.
- The 2024 annual edition of 16 CFR part 238 published on govinfo, used as an independent copy of the guides quoted above. Federal and state law separately regulates commercial text messaging, including consent, identification and time-of-day requirements; no part of that body of law was analysed for this page and none of it is described here.
Every figure here is traced to a named public source and checked against it. Licensing, tax, and fee rules change. Verify your state’s current rules with the agency directly before you count on any number here.
Evan Knox
I build booking websites and run the ads and search for owner-run fishing guides, one operation per stretch of water. My first guide client, Bowman Fly Fishing, grew its revenue 4x in a year from that work. Field Notes is where I put the straight numbers on the business of guiding.
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