SMS Blacklist Overview
The recipient’s mobile carrier sometimes blocks these messages based on spam identification, lack of personalization and suspicious URL links. If you’re experiencing these types of blockages, there are measures you can take to avoid carrier violations.
This includes an optional checkbox on lead forms that customers must actively check, ensuring their consent.
How does Fullpath SMS work to keep you off the blacklist?
Sending SMS: Twilio is the third party sending SMS on behalf of the dealership. Fullpath is acting as an ISV (independent software vendor) and buying and verifying phone numbers on our client's behalf.
- Toll Free numbers are being used to send SMS. Toll free numbers are less scrutinized by carriers than 10DLC numbers to still require verification to be used.
- SMS are only sent to those marked 'opted into sms' in the CRM
Opting into text
When onboarding a dealership to SMS, the dealership is asked to provide the following information to prove that they are both a genuine business and that their shoppers actively opt in to receive SMS.
- legal name of business
- business url
- business address
- contact at the business
- verification of customer opt in to SMS.
This process ensures that we only send SMS to customers who agreed to receive them, keeping unsubscribe rates low and limiting the chance of being flagged by Carriers.
We require that our dealerships have active optional opt in. This means having an checkbox that needs to be actively checked by the shopper on a lead form that is optional (not tied to the ability to submit a lead).
Unsubscribe
Allowing customers to unsubscribe is incredibly important to staying off blocked lists. We not only have an opt out message in every SMS and do not engage with those customers going forward, we also built AI to discern any message that implies the customer not wanting to be contacted and stopping all communication going forward.
For example : If the customer implies that they don't want to receive SMS anymore by saying 'take me off your list', 'please don't contact me etc,' This message is identified by AI. We then send a polite message back to the effect of 'Apologies we will not contact you again'. Then the customer is unsubscribed and will not be contacted by Fullpath.
Content and Frequency of SMS
The Fullpath System has hundreds of SMS templates which use AI to create highly specific and personal sms for a variety of use cases. This ensures that we are never sending the same exact message to the same person more than once. In addition to this, include the following personalized information in each SMS to increase engagement and lower our chances of being blocked.
- Customer's name
- Dealership name
- Vehicle the customer is interested in
- Call to Action - link to the vehicle, "call me back if you're interested", "reply if you are interested"
- Unsubscribe ('Reply Stop to unsubscribe)
Dealerships are allowed to create custom sms templates, and are warned they must contain an opt out message. We also limit the dealership to only send sms to those opted in to SMS.
Frequency
- In order to not overwhelm our customers, and to make sure to keep unsubscribe/blocks low, the default is to send an SMS no more than once every 30 days, though this can be changed by the client.
- In addition, we only send initial SMS between 2PM-5PM eastern time as this is the time which we see the most engagement and also to prevent sending SMS at inappropriate hours.
- If a customer replies that they are not shopping for a vehicle (they recently purchased a vehicle for example) we do not engage with this customer for a year before reaching out again.
- Our system is optimized to send sms based on triggers of urgency. For example, if a customer visits a specific page on the website, we may engage them with a special offer on that vehicle.
Replies
While we have SMS with a CTA to click on a link, we have many SMS were we encourage Replies. An AI bot responds to all customer replies, encouraging the customer to agree to a phone call or to come into the store. The bot has no pricing or inventory information. This ratio of incoming/outgoing helps keep us off blocklists.
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Links
We do not use public link shorteners (bitly etc) which is a red flag for blacklist compilers.
More Resources on Blacklists