SMS Compliance: Working with Carriers

Practicing compliant text messaging ensures carriers actually deliver your texts and customers see your messages. Here are three musts for staying on carriers’ good sides.

1. Think like a Consumer

Text customers as you would like to be texted.

That means no texting people at 3 in the morning. No foul language or threats. No spamming text after text. All the basic, no-brainer things that you would block a phone number for doing to you.

If you do any of the example above, people are going to opt out, and too many opt outs send red flags to carriers. Instead, practice quality messaging habits like:

Only texting customers what they asked for
Spacing your messages out accordingly
Talking like an actual human (no ALL CAPS or robotic speech)

All these things also protect your business’s reputation in general.

2. Get Opt-ins

Carriers want to see that you got consent from contacts.

SMS opt-ins are contacts who have expressed a clear desire to be text messaged by your business.

You can get opt-ins by:

Advertising your number so customers text you first
Providing a place for phone numbers on your web forms
Asking customers directly if you can text them

Carriers don’t want to deliver messages to people who didn’t ask for them, so they will check to see if people actually opted into texts from you.

3. Don’t Go Crazy

Take the time to create quality texts that don’t look like spam.

There are plenty of spam filter triggers that carriers stay on the lookout for. We’ve found it’s much easier for you to accidently use some of these triggers, when you’re rushing to blast out a ton of messages at once:

Free and unbranded link shorteners
Links placed at the end of messages
Naked links
ALL CAPS
Excessive emojis
Repeated messages
Overly long messages
Spelling and grammar errors

So take your time, put thought into your messages, and be sure you’re not haphazardly throwing in things from our list of carrier no-no’s. Texts should feel like one person texting another (rather than a stuffy business or automated platform texting), and slowing down will help you do that.

Want to dive deeper? Check out our guide, 8 Ways to Keep Your Text Messages From Being Marked as Spam.