Texting that arrives: registration and consent

Back to school is the week a local business sends more texts than usual. Confirmations for the appointments parents booked in a hurry, reminders for the ones booked in June and forgotten, and the recall list untouched since spring.

It is also the week people find out their texts have not been arriving.

Business texting looks like a solved problem from inside the software. You write the message, you press send, the screen says delivered. Whether a phone lit up somewhere is a separate question, and the answer usually depends on paperwork somebody filled in at speed a year ago and never looked at again.

Here is how we set texting up in the CRM so messages land, and which sequences are worth running.

Registration is where most of the damage happens

Anything sent from software to an ordinary ten digit number travels over what the carriers call A2P 10DLC, application to person messaging on a long code. To use it you register two things: the brand, which is the legal business, and the campaign, which is the use case you are sending for.

The registrations that get rejected, or quietly throttled months later, fail on the same handful of details:

• The legal name and tax ID do not match the filed records exactly. A trading name in the brand field is the most common rejection we see, and it is the easiest to avoid.
• The sample messages are not the messages you send. Samples should be your real templates, business name included, opt-out line included.
• The opt-in description does not match the website. Whoever reviews it will open your form. If there is no consent language on the page, the campaign deserves to be refused.
• One campaign is doing two jobs. Appointment reminders and promotional blasts are different use cases. Registered together, the promotional volume drags down the messages that matter most.
• Nobody registered anything. Unregistered traffic gets filtered hard, and you will not get a bounce notice that says so.

If you use a toll free number instead, the equivalent is toll free verification. Same discipline, different form.

Do it once, properly, and keep a copy of what you submitted.

Consent has to be real, and you have to be able to prove it

The federal picture has not tightened the way the industry expected. The one-to-one consent rule for lead generation was vacated by a court in January last year, the day before it was due to take effect. That removed one specific requirement. It did not remove the underlying obligation, and it did nothing about state laws, several of which are stricter and carry their own quiet hours.

What we hold accounts to, regardless:

1. Express written consent for anything promotional. An unchecked box the person ticks themselves, next to plain language saying what they will receive and from whom. Not a pre-ticked box, not a line buried in the privacy policy.
2. Consent stored with a timestamp, the wording shown and the page it came from. If you cannot reconstruct what somebody agreed to, you do not have consent, you have a phone number.
3. Transactional and promotional kept apart. A confirmation for an appointment the person booked is not the same as a summer offer. Consent for one is not consent for the other.
4. Opt-out honoured everywhere, immediately. STOP has to stop everything, across every sequence, and the contact record has to show it so nobody re-adds them from a spreadsheet next month.
5. HELP answered with a real reply naming the business and giving the email address.
6. Quiet hours respected, and set to the contact’s time zone, not the office’s.

Purchased lists are the line we do not cross. They end in complaints, complaints end in a blocked campaign, and that takes your appointment reminders down with the marketing.

The message itself decides whether it lands

Once registration and consent are right, deliverability comes down to how you write and how you send. The filters are looking at patterns, not at your intentions.

• Use your own domain for links. Public link shorteners are the single fastest way into a filter.
• Identify the business in the first message of any conversation, and put the opt-out line on anything promotional.
• Write like a person texting. No block capitals, no rows of emoji, no dollar signs and exclamation marks stacked together.
• Send in batches with a bit of spacing rather than firing a whole list at once from a new number.
• Warm a new number up over a couple of weeks instead of starting it on a reactivation blast.
• Watch the reply rate and the opt-out rate weekly. A sequence people answer keeps arriving. One nobody answers, and some opt out of, degrades everything sent from that number.

The sequences worth running

Most accounts we inherit have too many sequences and too little of the one that pays.

1. Speed to lead. A text inside a minute of the form or the missed call, from the business number, asking one question. This books more work than the rest of the list combined.
2. Confirmation and reminder. Immediately after booking, then the day before, with a reschedule link rather than a request to call back.
3. No-show and cancellation recovery. Same day, warm, one tap to rebook. The slot is already lost, so the only question is whether the person comes back.
4. Recall and reactivation. The people who are due and have not booked, worked in small batches rather than one send, with a reason that is about them and not about your quiet week.
5. Review request after the visit. Sent while the goodwill is fresh, the same request to everyone, no screening step and nothing offered in exchange.

That is the whole set for most local businesses. If a sequence is not booking work, answering a question or preventing a no-show, it is costing you deliverability for nothing.

What to do this month

• Open your registration and check the brand details against your filed records, then read the sample messages and compare them to what your sequences actually send.
• Open your own booking form as a stranger and look for the consent language. If it is not there, add it this week and stop texting anyone who arrived through it until it is.
• Test STOP on a real handset, then check the contact record shows the opt-out and that every sequence respects it.
• Replace every shortened link in your templates with a link on your own domain.
• Turn off any sequence that has not produced a booking, a reply or a kept appointment this year.
• Put the speed to lead text in place first if you do not have one, and set quiet hours by the contact’s time zone.

Texting is the highest performing channel in almost every CRM buildout we run, and it is also the one people break without noticing, because nothing tells you when a message quietly does not arrive. The two sequences worth getting right before the autumn rush are the speed to lead text and the review request, and for practices filling the last quarter, the recall list is the cheapest source of booked chairs you already own. See the dental side for how we sequence it.