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SMS & Voicemail

SMS and voicemail follow-up: compliance basics

Texting prospects works because people read texts. It carries rules that carriers enforce, and breaking them gets your sending blocked. The basics are simple: get permission, register your sending, make opt-outs easy, and send only things worth receiving. This is a walk-through, not legal advice.

Permission is your responsibility

Before you text anyone, they need to have said yes to hearing from you, and you need to be able to show it if anyone asks. Collect that permission where the contact signs up: a form, a reply to a message, a sign-up sheet at an event. Say plainly what they will receive and how often.

Then keep your own record, because tooling does not replace your responsibility. A prospect who never agreed to a text is not a lead; they are a complaint waiting to happen. Ask for permission in your own words, and keep it simple.

Register your sending brand

Carriers require business texting to be registered. Registration links your brand and your sending number to the messages you send, so they pass as business traffic rather than look like spam. Do it before your first campaign, not after delivery drops. The details take a little effort to gather, so set aside an afternoon.

Registered sending is the price of texting at all, so it is worth doing properly. If you send through a provider, expect the same registration requirement to apply to your account, and expect your messages to be billed by that provider.

Make it easy to stop

Every text needs a way out. Give an obvious instruction to reply with a stop keyword, and honour it straight away. Once someone opts out, they are gone: no more campaigns, no exceptions, no second-chance messages. Clean lists also keep your own delivery reporting honest.

Keep the list tidy by removing opt-outs regularly and by never adding numbers you found or bought. Buying lists is the fastest way to look like spam to both carriers and prospects, and small lists of people who said yes outperform large lists of people who did not.

Write texts like texts, and keep them rare

Short, specific and useful: what this is, why you are sending it, and what to do next. One ask per message, sent at sensible hours, at a frequency low enough that people stay subscribed. Templates save you retyping approved wording, and ringless voicemail gives you a second channel for the message you would rather they hear than read.

In QwikSol, SMS runs through Twilio and is billed by Twilio. The product includes A2P brand-registration tooling and unsubscribe keyword handling, while consent responsibility stays with you, the coach.

Key takeaways
  • Collect permission where people sign up, and keep your own record of it.
  • Register your sending before your first campaign, and honour stop requests immediately.
  • Short, useful, infrequent texts beat long ones sent often.
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