IMPORTANT: If you are using our SMS feature to send text messages to your guests, please not the important guidelines blow or your number may be at risk of being flagged as SPAM and messages will not be delivered to your audience.
1. ALWAYS send a way to opt-out… example: To end these messages from us, reply STOP
2. DO NOT use URL Shorteners like Bitly in your messages.
Here is some additional information on the topic:
As of September 30, 2020, the larger U.S. carrier industry will begin to more strictly enforce their policies and guidelines across the entire application-to-person (A2P) messaging ecosystem (over 10-digit Long Codes, Short Codes, and Toll-free), specifically focusing on opt-ins, opt-outs, public domain links, and snowshoe messaging. As an important note, the CTIA defines A2P messaging as messaging originating from a business, organization, or entity to communicate with consumers (not consumer-to-consumer messaging).
While this notification is in no way a change to the policies put forth by carriers, it is a reminder of what is and what is not acceptable within the North American messaging community. Carrier partners have indicated that there will be greater enforcement of messaging policies and we expect to see increased filtering of the following:
- Traffic, as identified by increasing customer complaints, that shows evidence of not gaining appropriate opt-in.
- Informational and promotional traffic failing to have a clear description of how to opt-out, meaning STOP language is not clearly shown to the end user. As a reminder, conversational traffic is consumer-initiated and does not require including STOP language in each response.
- Traffic using URL shorteners with public domains rather than custom domains owned by the company.
- Traffic that appears to be snowshoe messaging – a technique used to spread messages across senders for the purposes of overcoming filtering systems.