Common Short Code Texting Mistakes Businesses Must Avoid
One quite successful approach for companies to interact with consumers and increase involvement is text code messaging. Timeliness and relevance of SMS messages help businesses increase revenue, customer service, and audience connection, strengthening. To guarantee their text code messaging campaigns are effective, companies must, however, avoid a few typical errors. Using text codes for corporate communication will cause five important mistakes to be discussed in the next article.
1. Failing to Obtain Proper Opt-In Consent
Sending messages to people who have not clearly, freely, and deliberately opted in to receive them is one of the largest and most major blunders a company can make with short code texting. Not only is sending unsolicited, unwelcome, or unexpected texts quite ineffective—the vast majority of recipients will simply ignore or delete them without reading a single word—but it can also seriously harm your brand reputation, erode trust with your audience, and even result in possible legal issues and financial penalties for breaking rigorous anti-spam rules controlling SMS marketing.
Before adding someone to your SMS subscriber list, always receive unambiguous, recorded opt-in consent—ideally with a double opt-in confirmation—to prevent this significant issue. This might be via a well-known web form, checkbox at checkout, SMS keyword campaign, or any unambiguous permission process lacking any possibility for ambiguity. Never assume you have unlimited authority or add users to your communications database without having clearly, affirmatively opted in first.
2. Sending Messages at Inappropriate Times
Blasting out text code texts at odd, inconvenient, or inappropriate times that disturb your subscribers’ lives—like very late at night when they are trying to sleep or extremely early in the morning hours before they are awake and ready to interact with brand messages—is another common and troublesome mistake that can seriously affect your results. Even if someone has voluntarily opted in at some point, they most certainly don’t want to hear from your brand at midnight or during significant life events like a crucial business meeting that might affect their career or valuable family dinner time meant to spend with loved ones.
To establish a good relationship with your brand, be kind, thoughtful, and protective of your subscribers’ personal time, choices, and limits. Sort your SMS list according to time zones, lifestyles, and interaction habits, then let consumers select the message periods that best fit their particular calendar. Unless you get consent to do differently or there is a very urgent consumer requirement like a crucial emergency notice about an issue that cannot wait for work hours, schedule your SMS campaigns to go out during typical daytime hours that fit the majority.
3. Neglecting to Provide Clear Opt-Out Instructions
For every single message you send to a subscriber, regardless of content, topic, or purpose, you must provide clear, conspicuously, and easily understandable instructions for how recipients may quickly and conveniently opt-out from all future texts from your text code if they wish to stop receiving them at any time. Usually, this is something brief, straightforward, and difficult to overlook, like “Reply STOP to unsubscribe” at the conclusion of every single SMS message you consistently send without fail. Because they are worried about individuals unsubscribing and decreasing their SMS list, some businesses wrongly try to hide, minimize, or obfuscate this legally mandatory opt-out text.
But such a narrow-minded attitude will only cause more annoyance, more spam reports compromising your text code and account status, and maybe major legal repercussions and large penalties from authorities. Always make the opt-out procedure clear, simple, and painless; respect such requests right away. It’s far better to let someone go gently if they no longer want your messages for any reason at all than to irritate them and damage your essential sender reputation, deliverability rates, and ability to reach the remainder of your SMS audience.
Conclusion:
Although text code messaging is a great tool for companies to interact with consumers, it should only be utilized sparingly. Avoid typical mistakes like failing to obtain express opt-in consent, messaging at odd times, hiding opt-out information, flooding users with offers, and cutting back on offering actual value. Always honor the decisions and privacy of your members. Through your text code program, focus on providing timely, relevant, valuable material to build strong, lifelong customer connections.
