When sending marketing SMS messages, the sender is required to have an opt-in from the customer, and the customer has to have an option to opt-out of the SMS messages.
Opt-in refers to the subscriber allowing you to send texts directly to their mobile phone. You must gain each person's permission before sending the SMS messages to them because it's illegal to text business prospects or customers without their agreement to receive marketing SMS messages from you. For someone to subscribe, they must:
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Be given the choice to subscribe or not
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Explicitly state that they're opting into the SMS marketing list
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Be informed of how often they'll receive text messages
Opt-out is the opposite of an SMS opt-in message - a subscriber chooses to unsubscribe from any future text messages from your company, thus no more marketing SMS messages can be sent to them. An opt-out can be solved in several ways:
- When sending the SMS messages from a numeric sender name, such as shortcode or virtual long number, then the customers are able to answer the SMS message. Simply adding, for example, "unsubscribe: reply STOP" to the end of the SMS message will provide the customer with an option to stop receiving the SMS messages. Once the customer has replied "Stop", they should then be added either to the blacklist within your CRM or to Messente's phonebook's blacklist.
- When sending the SMS messages from an alphanumeric sender name, the customers are unable to reply to the SMS message, which means the opt-out can be solved via URL. Messente has created a tool to help automatically blacklist users who choose to opt-out via an unsubscribe link. The URL links can be shortened by different URL shortening services to reduce characters in your SMS. Shortened URLs are accepted in the majority of countries, but bear in mind that unbranded URLs are more prone to filtering and may not be accepted in all countries.