With the Converse platform, compliance is simplified and automated to ensure that you’ve properly received and recorded consent from your prospects and customers for your SMS text messaging programs—whether for marketing, sales, or service.

A Review of the Basics of Compliance for SMS Messages

Compliance refers to the rules that guide SMS messages, what you can do, how you can do it, and things you want to avoid.

This post focuses on the US regulations. Text messaging is governed by The Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The FCC is the primary body in the US for regulating communication by satellite, wire, radio, television, and cable, so text marketing also falls under its domain.

Text messaging compliance follows the specific rules of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA.) The TCPA is the main anti-telemarketing law in the U.S. It also applies to text messaging, since texting is viewed as a transaction like a phone call.

The fines for violating regulations can be steep – up to $1,500 for each text message if a court thinks you’ve knowingly violated the rules for compliance. So, let’s not let this happen.

4 Tips to Follow for Compliance

First: Get Consent

The FCC is concerned about controlling spam, so you need to gain permission from people before you can text them. The first thing you need to do to use business text messaging is to build a compliant opt-in list.

Here’s what you need to know:

• All contact consent should be in writing and records kept for 4 years to comply with TCPA. You must also make them aware that you will be sending them text messages in the future—before they consent.
• Consent is easily achieved digitally and recorded automatically in the Converse Intelligent Messaging Platform and captured/stored in Salesforce. This includes via website form, email, text message, a check box on a form or application, or digital document.
• Make sure that consent is optional.

Second: Decide if You Need Single or Double Opt-in

The main thing that determines this choice depends on how you receive consent. The objective is to prove that you have consent from the device owner.

Here’s what you need to know:

• Single Opt-In: If you receive consent via an SMS message from a mobile device, you have the written consent of the device owner. An example is if they text a keyword to sign up for your text messaging program.
• Double Opt-In: If you receive opt-in via other means, such as a web form, check box or paper (via a trade show, for example) then you should send a single message to the device owner to verify they’ve opted in by texting YES in reply. This is a requirement of the US wireless association (CTIA) and the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA).

Third: Disclose the Details

When you’re inviting prospects and customers to opt-in to your text messaging programs, you need to disclose information about the program they’re signing up for.

Here’s what you need to know:

• Provide an overview of the types of messages they should expect to receive and the message frequency (e.g. 4 messages per month). The overview can be a broad description, such as marketing and promotional messages related to your products and services. Or it could be specific and targeted to appeal to a role or to expand about a topic the person is interested in learning more about. Just remember that what you promise is what you need to deliver to stay in compliance.
• Provide links to your terms and conditions and privacy policy.
• Inform them of how they can opt out of the program.
• Inform them about possible carrier costs and fees they may incur.
• It’s wise to send a confirmation text upon opt-in that restates the program details.

Fourth, Respect Opt-Outs

One of the most important aspects of compliance for business text messaging is handling opt-outs correctly. If you don’t, your business will be at risk for penalties for spamming.

Here’s what you need to know:

• Offer an easy way to opt-out in your messages. An example is “Text STOP to end text messages.”
• Make sure you include the opt-out wording in a message at least once per month.
• When you receive an opt-out, make sure to acknowledge it with a message so the person knows you’ve received their request and acted upon it.
• Converse will automatically record and timestamp the opt-out, providing you with an audit trail, and remove the contact from messaging programs.

The Bottom Line

Compliance for SMS messages is no different than getting permission for email marketing. The Converse App for Compliant Opt-In/Opt-out comes preconfigured to allow you to comply with regulations and automates what would otherwise be a complex manual process to keep track of consent status.

You can learn more about compliance best practices in our course for text messaging.

Here’s how to get started building a compliant opt-in list for business text messaging.

Defining Scheduling via SMS Messages

Scheduling via SMS messages is when a series of messages are sent to schedule, confirm, and then remind people of their commitments. Messages are scheduled via an automation system to deliver at the frequency you desire. Each message that’s sent can result in other messages, depending on how your recipient responds.

SMS messages can be used for a variety of business use cases around scheduling. Anytime you need to schedule an event, appointment, series of meetings or personal appointments, intelligent messaging is your answer.

Your options are many, but include:

• Appointments: The most basic type of scheduling is used for scheduling appointments for services, including healthcare, wellness, beauty, and maintenance.
• Meetings. Is your CEO or other executive visiting a city to meet with prospects and customers? You can reach out to offer them a personal meeting, confirm it and then remind them. Or you can schedule the meetings individually and then use messaging to confirm and remind them.
• Interviews. The Converse Scheduling App can be used to schedule interviews for jobs, education, enrollment and more.
• Webinars and online events. You can promote your event, enroll your attendees, confirm their enrollment and remind them of the upcoming event through an automated conversation flow.
• Live events. Promote your live events with customers, prospects, students, and more through messaging. Compel people to register with Calls to Action (CTA) and discounts, confirm their registration and remind them of the event, automatically. You can also send additional promotional offers around the event through messaging after someone registers. Or offer different CTAs for those who don’t register.

Why Become a Textpert at Scheduling?

Reduce Costs: In our example above, a missed healthcare appointment costs $200, on average. Even if you only had one no show per day, at the end of the week, that’s 5 missed appointments at a cost of $1,000. Over the period of one year, the cost spirals to $52,000.00. Text messaging puts reminders—literally—in the palm of your customers’ hands. It’s simple and intuitive for people to either confirm or reschedule within seconds of receiving the reminder message.

Lower Effort: Today’s consumers want control over their options. They want to use whatever channel is most convenient and lowest effort to take care of their scheduling needs at their leisure. Text messaging for scheduling provides them with the autonomy and immediacy they desire. Automating the process also reduces effort and time for your staff in relation to scheduling—time they can spend focused on your customers and running your business.

Increase Revenues: See the reduction in costs for missed appointments above. By using text messaging to confirm or know you can reschedule a newly released time, you’ll see that money you thought lost now flow into your business. Time, once lost, cannot be resold.

The Converse App for Scheduling Puts Automation to Work

Using conversational text messaging to schedule events and meetings is simple. It also results in far fewer missed meetings or last-minute cancellations.

Scheduling message campaigns generally follow these steps. We’ll use an event as the example, but the process for a meeting is very similar.

Offer your meeting via text message. Simply send a message to an individual or a list that includes the link to your online scheduling application.

Capture their appointment. Be sure to have your calendar integrate with your CRM to add the appointment to the individual’s record. When an individual schedules a time in your calendar, their record updates and will trigger your message campaign for confirmation and reminders.

Create your message content, using best practice templates included in your Converse App to create your confirmation and reminder messages, as well as your offer to reschedule online.

Define the timing for your messages. How often do you want to remind your attendees of the meeting? What offers do you want to send along with the reminders?

Define your response flow. Do you want to offer the option to reschedule their meeting time? If so, you’ll want to define the Keywords for them to respond, and the conversation flow for cancellation or rescheduling.

It’s really that simple. People will love the ease of scheduling a meeting or registering for an event online, with immediate confirmation on their mobile device. Since more than 90% of messages are read, your appointment reminder has a much better chance of being seen, thereby reducing no shows. The ease of replying with a keyword to reschedule, should the need arise means you’ll have less empty slots in your schedule, increasing your revenue and the people you can serve.

Find out more about Converse Apps and transform your campaigns and communications—into relevant experiences that your potential and existing customers will thank you for sharing. It’s easier than ever to reach and engage your audiences with relevant content that drives business growth.

Defining a Single Message Campaign

Single message campaigns sent to a list of contacts in your CRM, or database, can be used for a variety of business use cases. Responsiveness to text messages means your audience will quickly learn about your new products, job opportunity, property listing, event, class schedule, or the amazing discount you want to give them when you notify them with a single message.

Here’s the basic simple principle.  Anytime you want to communicate with your audience and be sure they pay attention to your information, use a single message.  You can send a single message today, then send another in two weeks, or four. You can use them in so many ways to inform and serve your audience, you’ll simply love the versatility in how you communicate—and so will your prospects and customers.

Why Become a Textpert at Single Messaging Campaigns?

• Match Audience Preferences: According to a recent survey by Ellie Mae, 97% of consumers asked want texting to be part of the sales conversation. In fact, Gartner’s 2017 Channel Survey found that there’s a place for messaging at every stage of the customer journey.
• Get Their Attention: People check their phones every 15 minutes or so, even without the ping of a notification. More than 80% of Americans text regularly. And, because nearly all text messages are read within a few minutes, this channel has the highest opportunity to get your prospects’ or customers’ attention.
• Deliver on Your Promises: The ability to automate replies to inbound keywords used in a single message means you’ll always deliver instantly when your audience responds to your campaign—sending a coupon triggered by the keyword reply of “PROMO,” for example.

Converse Apps Kickstart Relevant Conversations

The Converse App for Single SMS Messages contains everything you need to define and launch your campaign. Once you’ve installed the App, you’ll find:

• Content templates that come with suggested messaging you can tune to your specific needs to meet campaign goals.
• Pre-built automated responses triggered by a keyword or to confirm an opt-in, and other scenarios, where applicable.
• End-to-end data, analytics and reporting to capture key insights, define performance and that you can use to optimize your future campaigns.
• Click-and-go user interface that’s intuitive and designed to simplify your effort to manage the volume of conversations you’ll create.

All that’s required is for you to tune the App parameters and content to match your campaign need.

Here are a few ideas to help you kickstart relevant conversations with the single message App.

Use a single message campaign to:

• Survey new leads about their specific interest or share requested content
• Send various offers, discounts, and coupons
• Alert prospects and customers to special sales events or new products
• Follow-up from an event to continue that conversation
• Build an opt-in list for a new texting program

How the Converse App for Single SMS Messages Campaigns Works

Take the following 6 steps to design, launch, run and respond to your single message campaign.

Step 1: Select your list from your CRM or database.

Step 2: Tune your message in the content template provided with the App to meet your specific needs, select the number to send your messages from, tune name fields to match your CRM and add your company’s name and any URL specific to the message or offer.

Step 3: Set the goals for your campaign and track them on the Insights dashboard. Goals can include metrics such as the response rates, number of supplies, conversions from responses, and more.

Step 4: Assign users to your campaign by choosing which members of your team should be alerted and can view and respond personally to replies to your message.

Step 5: Run your campaign by selecting the start and stop dates, time and time zone.

Step 6: Respond to leads that take action by personal message or automated message, as appropriate for your campaign.

As your campaign is running, you can monitor your results via statistics reported through the Insights dashboard in real-time.

Mastering the basics of single text message campaigns will help you become a Textpert in short order.

Find out more about Converse Apps and transform your campaigns and communications—into relevant experiences that your potential and existing customers will thank you for sharing. It’s easier than ever to reach and engage your audiences with relevant content that drives business growth.

Defining Compliant Opt-Ins

Business text messaging is a form of permission-based communication, regulated in the U.S. by the TCPA, the U.S. Wireless Association (CTIA) and the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA). If you communicate with EMEA data subjects, GDPR also regulates consent.

Just as with email marketing, anytime you begin to use messaging to talk with your prospects, customers, candidates, home buyers, investors, patients, or others, you need to get their consent.

Consent—also known as “opting-in”—must be tracked, time-stamped and managed within your intelligent text messaging platform as a means of evidence that you have the consumer’s permission to message them.

Why Become a Textpert at Building Lists for SMS Messages?

Gain Access: The Kahuna Mobile Marketing Index found that native SMS messages have a high opt-in rate: 86% in US, 82% in Europe and 77% in Asia. Just as impressive, 77% choose to turn on notifications, so you can be sure they’ll see your message quickly.

Increase Intent: Recent research by Twilio found that messaging is ranked as the #1 channel consumers want to use to engage with businesses. And half of them prefer native SMS to message with businesses over messaging apps, like Facebook and WhatsApp. When your business communicates in the way consumers prefer, you’re showing them that you care about what they want. And, rather than just pushing messages at them, consumers can easily respond and have a conversation with your business. Responsiveness builds trust and the confidence that drives intent to buy…and buy again.

Grow Loyalty and Satisfaction: The Global Mobile Messaging Consumer Report found that consumers agree messaging is a great channel to learn about new products and services, provide feedback, or get support. These conversations serve to increase loyalty and satisfaction as they strengthen relationships.

The Converse App for Compliant Opt-In Comes Ready to Roll

The Compliant Opt-In App provides everything you need to run a conversational text messaging campaign to build your lists. Simple tuning of the preconfigured campaign will get you started quickly and simply.

You’ll find:

• Message content templates that make it easy for you to quickly tune your messages based on best practices used by more than 1800 customers to accomplish the same goal.
• Message flows for your opt-in process, including any appropriate automated workflows, auto-responses, and triggers for opt-in compliance requirements.
• Data and analytics that you need with key insights to help you understand why people opt-in, which offers lead to the best opt-in results, and how to drive higher opt-ins to build your list.
• An intelligent and intuitive interface designed to accelerate and simplify managing the volume of opt-in requests and the messaging campaigns you’ll deliver next…

How the Converse App for Compliant Opt-In Works

Let’s say you’re running a promotion that includes an option for a prospect to text a keyword to a short code to “opt-in” to receive something relevant to them. Depending on your type of business, the offers could be new product information, discounts or coupons, contests, how-to videos, insights or research findings—and those only scratch the surface of possibilities.

When an unknown lead sends the keyword to the short code, the following opt-in occurs:

• The keyword and mobile number used to send it are captured as the Converse App creates a new lead record in your database.
• The Opt-In App then automatically triggers a legally compliant message back to the prospect that includes your company name, value proposition, frequency of messages to expect monthly, and the option to ask for help or opt-out of future texts.
• The App will then trigger the first content message to deliver the information or offer the prospect responded to by texting the keyword.

This sequence allows you to manage compliance requirements automatically and convey the information the sender requested.

Once the opt-in is completed, you’re ready to launch any type of conversational text messaging campaign you’d like. Depending on the additional Converse Apps you’re using for the campaign, you may choose to send a single message to the prospect, begin a drip or nurture campaign, schedule a meeting or start a survey.

Converse Apps simplify what it takes to become a Textpert at building lists for SMS messages.

Find out more about Converse Apps and transform your campaigns and communications—into relevant experiences that your potential and existing customers will thank you for sharing. It’s easier than ever to reach and engage your audiences with relevant content that drives business growth.

Defining Nurturing

A nurturing campaign is a series of messages sent to a targeted list of customers designed to sustain engagement, build trust and ultimately result in a commercial relationship. The purpose of nurturing campaigns is to drive revenue and growth.

Nurturing differs from a promotion, discount, or offer in that it allows your customers to move at their own pace, learning what they need to know along the way to choose to do business with you…repeatedly. With an intelligent text messaging platform, your text messages are sent via an automation system, scheduled to deliver at the frequency you’ve specified.

Why Become a Textpert at Nurturing Campaigns?

• Grow Engagement: One of the biggest challenges in today’s noisy environment is getting customers to give you their attention by engaging with the information you send them. There are so many options to choose from, that your message needs to stand out. It also needs to be reinforced to drive preference and action. Text messages get attention—usually within minutes.
• Increase Responsiveness: With a read rate of 98%, messaging is one of the most responsive channels available for marketing, sales, and service. People read and act on messages quickly. You can send them content, videos, images, links to web pages, and more, and they will reward you with their responsiveness. In fact, 85% of consumers say they want to have conversations with businesses via text message.
• Retain Existing Customers: It’s common knowledge that keeping an existing customer is much more cost efficient than acquiring a new one. As you learn more about your customers your messaging can become hyper-relevant, offering them a variety of useful information. This includes tips for using your products, which additional products complement the products they’ve purchased…the options are endless. Nurturing with messaging is personalized, friendly, and intuitive for them to engage with you. What more can you (or your customers) ask for?

Converse Apps Remove the Risk

Creating a text messaging nurture program from the ground up can seem daunting. Under usual circumstances it requires IT development resources, coding, testing, content creation, and more.

Converse Apps remove the complexity, time and need for additional resources to get your messaging programs out the door. Converse Apps provide a kit of preconfigured, ready-to-go conversations to kickstart your efforts.

This means you get a fully functioning App based on best practices validated by more than 1,800 customers so you can focus on achieving your objectives to grow your business.

Each Converse App delivers a complete conversational text messaging campaign, ready-to-run with simple tuning. Included are industry proven:

• Message content templates that make it easy for you to quickly create your messages in a best practices way.
• Conversation flows for your campaign, including automated workflows, auto-responses (where applicable) and triggers for these actions. The Converse Drip/Nurture App also includes the ability to trigger emails for content delivery, if your prospect prefers email.
• End-to-end data, as well as the analytics and reporting you need to capture the key insights to optimize your results.
• Intuitive user interface designed to accelerate and simplify managing the volume of conversations you’ll create with conversational messaging.

Steps to Nurturing Message Campaigns Using Converse Apps

1. Define a Segmented Target List: Converse integrates seamlessly with popular CRM systems allowing you to pull a list based on any object or field to create the best possible profiles and lists for your campaign—just as you would for an email campaign.
2. Tune Your Messages: Your Converse App comes with templates that reflect best practices. All you need to do is tune and tweak the messages to speak to your specific audience. This may include name fields to match your CRM, keywords and short codes for responses, and links to the content you’re sharing in each touch of the nurture campaign.
3. Select Your Cadence: Choose how often you want your messages to be received by your target audience. You may choose a cadence based on a timed release (once per week) or choose to have your campaign triggered by audience behavior, such as a customer responding with a keyword for more information.
4. Set the Goals for Your Campaign: Goals can include response rates, number of replies by contact, speed of replies, conversions, etc. Converse Apps will track your results against your goals and display the information on the insights dashboard for your nurturing campaign.

Now you’re set to run your campaign. Yes, that’s all you have to do to get it up and running. Your Converse App will route contacts that act to the appropriate response mechanism, either an automated message or set of messages or a personal interaction with a marketing, sales, or service user, depending on what you’ve specified.

You can check your dashboard in real time to see the progress of your messaging sends, responses to individual messages, groups of messages or the entire campaign.

Converse Apps give you a no-risk way to become a Textpert at nurturing campaigns.

Find out more about Converse Apps and transform nurturing programs—and other communications—into relevant experiences that your potential and existing customers will thank you for sharing. It’s easier than ever to reach and engage your audiences with the relevance that drives business growth.