Why timing matters more than wording
Most contractors get the wording right and the timing wrong. They send the review ask the next morning, or three days later in a batch, or worse, in the same invoice email nobody opens twice. By then the customer has moved on. The driveway is dry, the new outlet is just an outlet, and the emotional peak (the moment the problem got solved) has passed.
Text within the first two hours after the crew leaves and you are asking while the relief is still fresh. The gutter isn't overflowing anymore. The AC is blowing cold again. The customer just told a spouse or a neighbor about it, unprompted. That is the window. A review request text sent inside that window converts at a meaningfully higher rate than one sent the next day, because you are riding an emotion that is already active instead of trying to manufacture one from a cold invoice.
There is a second reason texting beats email here: open rates. A review-request email sits in an inbox next to receipts and newsletters and gets a fraction of the attention a text gets. SMS open rates run far higher and happen fast, usually inside minutes. If the goal is a review while the memory is sharp, the channel has to match the urgency. That is the whole argument for SMS over email on this specific ask, even though your list should carry both channels for different jobs (see our breakdown of when to use SMS and when to use email for the trade nouns and use cases where the two split).
The exception: emergency and storm jobs. If a crew tarps a roof at 11pm or clears a flooded basement at 2am, do not text at 2am asking for a review. Queue it to send the next morning between 9 and 11am instead. Same rule for jobs finished after 8pm on any weekday. Respect the hour even when you don't want to wait.
What the text should actually say
The winning formula is short: name, job, one link, one ask. Nothing about "if you have a moment" or "we'd really appreciate it if." Those are filler words that make the text longer without making it more persuasive. Contractors read as busy people talking to other busy people. Write it that way.
Template that works across trades:
- "Hi [Name], this is [Company]. Mike finished up the [job type] today. If you've got 30 seconds, a Google review helps other homeowners find us: [link]. Thanks for the work."
- "[Name] - thanks for having us out for the [job type] today. Would you drop us a quick review here? [link] - [Company]"
Notice what is missing: no emoji, no all-caps, no "URGENT," no threats disguised as reminders. This is a business text to an adult who just paid you money for a job you did well. Talk to them like that.
Name the specific job ("the water heater install," "the panel upgrade," "the spring tune-up") instead of a generic "our service." Specificity does two things: it proves a human sent the text instead of a bot, and it jogs the customer's memory of exactly what got fixed, which shows up in the review itself. Reviews that mention the specific job ("replaced our water heater same day") rank better in local search and read more credibly to the next homeowner than "great service, would recommend."
If the crew lead has a name customers know, use it. "Mike finished up" beats "our technician completed" every time. It personalizes a message that could otherwise read like it came from a call center.
One link, not five choices
Send exactly one review link, and make it the Google Business Profile review link, not a landing page with buttons for Google, Facebook, Yelp, and a survey all at once. Every extra choice is a chance for the customer to close the text and never come back. Google is where your service-area map pack visibility lives (that's Local SEO's lane, not this one), and it is where the next homeowner searching "[your trade] near me" will actually see the review. One link, one destination, no decision fatigue.
Shorten the link if your texting platform supports it. A long Google review URL looks suspicious in a text message and can trip spam filters on some carriers. A clean short link (through your ESP/texting platform, not a random third-party shortener that looks sketchy) reads as more legitimate and clicks through more often.
Test the link yourself, on your own phone, before it goes out to a list. Review links that route through the wrong Business Profile listing, or a duplicate listing you meant to merge months ago, waste every review you generate by attaching it to a profile customers can't find.
Some contractors run Facebook or Yelp asks as a separate, occasional campaign, not mixed into the Google request. That's fine as a second channel later, but it should never dilute the primary ask. Google reviews carry the most weight for local search visibility and for the map pack, which is where most residential and commercial searches for a trade actually start. If you only have the bandwidth to build one review channel well, build the Google one first and build it right before adding a second platform to the mix.
TCPA rules: what you can and can't text
Review-request texts are marketing messages under TCPA, which means the customer needs to have given consent to be texted, not just handed you a phone number to schedule a job. The good news: if a customer texted you first, replied to a confirmation text, or checked a box on your intake form agreeing to text communication, you generally have what's called express consent for transactional and related follow-up messages. The distinction that gets contractors in trouble is treating every phone number in the CRM as fair game because it exists.
Three things keep a review-request campaign clean:
- Consent on file. Your intake form, work order, or booking confirmation should include a line the customer agrees to (text opt-in), not a number you scraped from a check.
- Opt-out honored immediately. Every message needs a working "Reply STOP to opt out" path, and STOP has to actually remove the number from future sends the same day, not the same week.
- Business hours only. Most state and carrier guidance treats 8am to 9pm local time as the safe window. Outside that window, even a well-meaning review ask can trigger a complaint.
The carriers themselves are the other risk. Send too many templated, link-heavy texts too fast from one number and mobile carriers can flag it as spam traffic, tanking deliverability for every message after, including the appointment reminders your business actually depends on. This is exactly why the platform choice matters (covered in depth on the Email & SMS Marketing silo home): a texting platform built for business SMS, with a registered 10DLC number and proper sender reputation, keeps your review asks landing in the inbox instead of getting filtered before the customer ever sees them.
How to handle the negative review risk
Contractors hold back on review-request texts because they're afraid of surfacing a bad one. Reasonable fear, wrong fix. The fix is not to stop asking. The fix is to ask everyone, consistently, so the good reviews outnumber the rare bad one by enough that one 2-star review doesn't sink the average.
A profile with 4 reviews and one bad one looks like a coin flip. A profile with 80 reviews and one bad one looks like a fluke, and most homeowners scroll past it to read the ones near the top. Volume is the actual defense against a bad review, and volume only happens if you ask on every job, not just the ones you're confident went perfectly.
Some shops try to filter this with a two-step "how did we do" text before the review ask, routing unhappy customers to a private form and happy customers to the public review link. That approach works but adds a step, and Google's own guidance discourages review gating that selectively routes only positive sentiment to public platforms. The safer version: ask everyone the same way, and separately, make sure your crews are trained to flag a rough job on the spot so you can call the customer before the text ever goes out, not after a public review lands.
If a bad review does land, respond to it (calmly, no defensiveness, offer to make it right) within a day or two. A visible, professional response to a bad review often does more for a prospect reading it than the bad review does damage.
Watch for a pattern, not just a single review. One rough review out of eighty is noise. Three rough reviews in a month, all mentioning the same thing (late arrivals, a specific crew, cleanup left undone) is a signal that something in the operation needs fixing before the review-request text becomes the thing surfacing it publicly, over and over. Treat the reviews as a feedback channel, not just a marketing output.
Does the timing change by trade?
The 1-2 hour rule holds across trades, but the job type changes what "done" looks like, and that changes how you trigger the text. A one-visit job (a service call, a repair, a small install) has an obvious completion moment: the truck pulls away. Trigger the text off that.
Multi-day jobs are different. A roof replacement, a full kitchen remodel, or a whole-home rewire doesn't have one clean finish line the customer feels the same way. For these, the review text should go out after the final walkthrough and cleanup, not after the crew's last day on-site if there's still debris in the yard or punch-list items open. Asking for a review before the dumpster gets hauled away invites a review that mentions the mess instead of the work.
Recurring-service trades (lawn care, pest control, HVAC maintenance plans) carry a different risk: over-asking. If a customer is on a quarterly plan, don't send a review request after every single visit. Ask once, after the first or second visit once the relationship is established, then let subsequent visits roll into a maintenance reminder sequence instead of a repeat review ask. Nobody wants to leave four reviews for the same lawn service in one year, and asking that often reads as tone-deaf at best and spam at worst.
Storm and emergency response work (tree removal after a storm, emergency water heater swaps, after-hours HVAC failures) earns some of the strongest reviews you'll get, because the relief factor is highest. But respect the clock: never send the ask in the middle of the emergency window itself. Queue it for the next reasonable morning. The review will still be glowing. The customer just needs to sleep first.
Building this into an automated sequence
A review-request text should not be a thing someone remembers to send by hand at the end of a long day, because on the days that matter most (the busy ones, the ones with five jobs closed out back to back), it's the first thing that gets skipped. It belongs in an automated sequence triggered off job completion, whether that trigger comes from your field service software marking a ticket closed or a simple manual toggle a tech hits from their phone before pulling out of the driveway.
A basic review sequence for most trades looks like this:
| Trigger | Send | Timing |
|---|---|---|
| Job marked complete | Review request text | 1-2 hours after |
| No click on review link | Single follow-up text | 3-4 days later |
| Review posted | Thank-you text (optional) | Same day as review |
One follow-up is enough. A second nudge past that reads as nagging and increases opt-outs faster than it increases reviews. If a customer hasn't clicked in four days, they're not going to, and pushing again just risks the STOP reply that costs you every future touch, including maintenance reminders and referral asks.
Set the sequence up once and it runs on every job without anyone remembering to think about it, which is the actual goal. The technicians shouldn't have to remember a script. The office manager shouldn't have to build a spreadsheet of who got asked and who didn't. The trigger fires, the text goes out, and the only manual step left is watching the review count climb and responding to what comes in.
This is one piece of the larger owned-audience system covered on the Email & SMS Marketing for Contractors silo page: quote follow-up, maintenance reminders, reactivation of dead customer lists, and review requests all run through the same sequencing logic, wired to your trade's actual job cycle instead of one generic template blasted at every contact regardless of what they hired you for.