To be invited into someone’s personal space is an immense privilege. This is why SMS holds so much power—but only if it’s done well. If done poorly, you run the risk of encountering the four-letter word no brand ever wants to read: STOP—the text equivalent of an email unsubscribe.

That’s why it’s absolutely critical to understand why and how you plan to use SMS. Like with other marketing channels, the answer should never be because you have bright, shiny object syndrome. Your foray into SMS must be intentional, focused, and well-planned. We’ve come up with seven questions to ask to determine your brand’s readiness to use SMS in its marketing:

1. What are your use cases?
2. What types of campaigns do you plan on sending?
3. What’s your budget?
4. What’s your timeline?
5. How are you gathering customer phone numbers?
6. Are you separating marketing and transactional traffic?
7. What are your KPIs? Let’s dive into each of them.

A Quick SMS Glossary

• A2P: Application-to-person messaging is when a person receives messages from an application rather than an individual, with no replies expected.
• 10DLC: Ten-digit long code phone numbers (also referred to as long codes)
• Daily limits: Daily limits are the number of messages you are allowed to send each day per registered phone number.
• Error code: A series of numbers sent to the enterprise to signal a problem with the message-sending process.
• MMS: Multimedia messaging service is a text sent with rich media like an image, a video, an emoji or a website link.
• MPS: Message segments per second is how throughput is counted when sending SMS messages.
• Short codes: These are five or six-digit numbers created for enterprise (A2P), two-way SMS and MMS messages.
• Throughput: This term is used to describe how fast and how many messages can be sent from a single telephone number.
• Trust Score: When a business registers for a 10DLC registration, they receive a Trust Score based on specific criteria related to the company that carriers then use to calculate messaging throughput.
• Verification: The process of enabling higher throughput on toll-free phone numbers by providing information pertaining to the content sender.

1. What are your use cases?

There’s no “I” in SMS but there should be in how you use the channel in your marketing. In fact, there are four “I’s” to think about. Here is what each means and the different examples of marketing and transactional messages they can include.

1. Intimate: The ability to interact with the customer in a meaningful way to cultivate an established relationship on your timeline Examples:

• • Happy birthday offer: Send a special offer the user can redeem on their birthday.
  • Milestone recognition: Acknowledge customer achievements as they relate to interaction with your brand or products.

2. Immediate: Messages with a sense of urgency that carry instant customer opportunity Examples:

• • Flash sales, coupons, and keyword promotions: Sales or discount codes announced exclusively via text message are a great way to build excitement around your SMS programs.
  • Confirmation: Keep the user updated about a recent purchase or subscription renewal. 

3. Informative: Valuable, wanted information that is not necessarily urgent Examples:

• • Alerts: Send up-to-the-minute messages about news, weather, traffic, sports, and more.
  • Delivery/pick-up notifications: Let a user know their order is out for delivery or ready for pick-up at your store.

4. Individual: Personalized and customized engagements that grow loyalty Examples:

• • Requests for feedback on purchase: Ask customers to rate their recent purchases. SMS surveys have the highest response rate (40%) of online survey channels.
  • Appointment reminders: Let a user know about an upcoming appointment, safety protocols such as masks and any related forms they need to fill out, or identification/insurance they need to bring.

2. What types of campaigns do you plan on sending?

You’re likely going to use SMS for campaigns that fall into two main buckets: transactional and marketing. It’s important to know beforehand which types of use cases and campaigns you will pursue when registering your SMS phone numbers.

Similar to other message types, transactional SMS messages are often used for:

• Shipping confirmations and updates
• Appointment reminders
• Password resets
• Out-of-stock and restock notices
• Monthly subscription confirmations

…while marketing messages sent via SMS often include:

• Weekly deals
• Product launches
• Shopping cart abandonment
• Newsletter communication
• Product recommendations

Whether marketing or transactional, you will want to consider SMS within the context of your other marketing channels. We’ll explore that in more detail in the Incorporating SMS Into Your Cross-Channel Strategy section.

3. What’s your budget?

SMS is not sold on a CPM basis like traditional advertising. Rather, there are a few factors that go into calculating your budget range for launching your SMS strategy:

• U.S. vs. International: Factor in whether or not you are sending texts within your native country or to an international location, as other countries will have variations in pricing.
• SMS vs. MMS: Because MMS includes media, message costs might run higher, depending on which service you use.
• Short code vs. long code: Short codes can cost up to $10,000/ year on average while a long code can cost a few dollars and between two to five cents to send messages. We’ll do a more detailed breakdown of short and long codes further down.

Pro Tip: You can multiply the per-message cost by the number of opted-in users to whom you plan to send communications for a specific campaign to finalize your budget.

4. What’s your timeline?

Your timeline for getting SMS up and running largely depends upon the type of number you plan to use. Short codes can take between six and ten weeks to get approved and go live on major carriers—in some cases, it’s even longer. Working with a trusted partner can help you expedite this process.

You’ll also need to estimate how long it will take to gather customer phone numbers to use for SMS marketing. This will likely happen on a rolling cadence. Most SMS marketing platforms require at least 1,000 opted-in phone numbers to get started.

5. How are you gathering customer phone numbers?

Just like with any first-party data you gather from users in other marketing channels, you must incentivize your customers to give you their phone number and opt into SMS due to the perceived value of engaging with your brand. You’ll also want to use other channels in your marketing mix to drive to SMS. Some ways you can entice users to sign up for SMS messages include:

• An exclusive discount, such as an extra 20% off their order
• Freebies, like a cup of coffee
• Contests and giveaways
• Free resources, such as guides or eBooks

Using established digital marketing channels can help you cross-promote SMS sign-ups. Your website is a prime place to incorporate SMS promotion because of the real estate and functions available—banners and pop-ups, landing pages, chat and point-of-sale checkboxes, and more. You could send an email that encourages SMS sign-ups through the copy or in the signature. On social media, you can use a URL, QR code, or keyword to capture opt-ins.

From here, you need to figure out whether you want to pursue single vs. double opt-in to get consent to message users who provided their numbers. Single opt-in, in which a user agrees to receive text messages from your brand with a single “Yes,” is the strategy to choose if you want to grow your SMS list faster, as there is no secondary confirmation to complete the opt-in.

However, this may yield more opt-outs down the road. Double opt-in requires a user to say “Yes” to the channel twice. So while you may grow your list slower, you’ll have a more loyal base and fewer optouts downstream. It all depends on your strategy and business model.

Your user opt-out subscription policy is just as important as your opt-in policy. That’s because if you message a user who has opted out of SMS, you are out of compliance, which can result in fines of $1,000 or more.

A best practice is to send opt-out instructions with every campaign, as some carriers do filter SMS messages that don’t have these details. At minimum, you need to have opt-out instructions with the very first campaign that you send to a user. One thing to note is that opt-out instructions are included within the overall character limit for SMS, so aim to be as short and concise as possible.

Pro Tip: When you message users, the value must be E.164-formatted, in which you put the country code, area code, and subscriber number so the number reads as: 12345678901.

6. Are you separating marketing and transactional traffic?

Carriers must be able to identify and then separate SMS for compliance reasons and to guarantee message delivery. Certain messages need to be sent immediately or within a specific timeframe, such as those containing an OTP or order pickup details. In certain countries, promotional marketing SMS messages can only be sent within certain times during weekday hours.

For these reasons, it might make sense to separate out your marketing and transactional traffic to ensure your more urgent messages get to the intended user quickly. You should also pursue separate keywords for both types of campaigns. These are words that trigger actions within your SMS communications, such as when someone inbound texts the word “Personal” to get more information about a personal loan.

Keywords are good for identifying the markets and content in which a user has shown interest so you don’t send every text message on every topic to every person.

Separating marketing and transactional messaging also gives your customers more options on the types of messaging they want to receive vs. only one option to receive all or nothing. For example, many end users do want to know when their order is shipping, but do not care about the latest sale information. So separating the two types of communication can be beneficial for these purposes.

Additionally, outlining expectations of what consumers should expect to receive from these two different message types (both in terms of messaging and timing) can help align expectations so consumers know what content they will receive from your brand and how often they should expect this communication. A preference center can also accomplish this.

Pro Tip: Your SMS marketing partner can help you set up your backend strategy, workflow, and keywords so that you send the most important messages compliantly and at the correct time.

7. What are your KPIs?

SMS performance can be measured similarly to other advertising channels, specific to use cases and campaign types. Campaign metrics that help keep a pulse on campaign performance and optimization include things like: SMS sends, delivered, bounce, and send skips.

Additional KPIs can be unlocked with a link shortener (and UTM parameters directly attributing website traffic from SMS), including business outcome metrics around total purchases, average order value, revenue, conversions, and more.

This allows you to get even closer to attributing SMS campaigns to pipeline influenced (revenue, long-term value, and return on investment).

Looking at SMS performance across audience cohorts also can be an effective way to understand engagement and performance across any user profile fields you currently have on your customer. In Iterable, for example, you can look at SMS revenue based on country or state, SMS performance metrics against brand affinity, or engagement cohorts like a loyalist vs. a neutral audience segment, and more.

Beyond campaign and business outcome KPIs, it can be helpful to start thinking through a testing strategy with SMS. The following can be helpful tests as you roll-out, build, and refine SMS within your cross-channel strategy:

• Test specific offers: SMS can be a great test channel for testing promotions and/ or specific offers with a smaller subset of your audience.
• Test SMS performance vs. other channels: Try testing SMS against email engagement/performance, keeping the offer and messaging consistent.
• Test segmentation performance: Look at two audience cohorts (e.g. loyalists and new buyers) to determine engagement/performance differences between the two.

With Iterable SMS, you have secure, native short link creation and tracking at your fingertips. Know exactly which SMS messages are generating conversions and revenue, as well as opt-outs. Create custom domains to personalize URLs and reduce your character count.

Depending on your answers to the seven questions, there are a few paths to launching your SMS program. Your end goal is to choose the right SMS codes for your intended use cases, ensure you are compliant, and maximize deliverability, which is determined by your total messages delivered divided by messages intended.

Choosing and Registering Long Codes vs. Short Codes

As described in our glossary, long codes are standard phone numbers, usually ten digits in length, that can send and receive voice calls and SMS messages. Short codes are five-to-six-digit phone numbers created for high-throughput, two-way SMS, and MMS messages. Choosing long-code or short-code numbers will dictate the registration process and determine your potential throughput (measured in MPS).

Send speed and volume are the main differentiators in choosing a long code vs. a short code. Long codes are easy and low-cost to set up, but have limits in send rate and volume. Short codes fire very quickly, but cost a couple thousand dollars and take several weeks to get up and running. Here are the other main pros and cons and proposed use cases for each code:

Another thing to consider is that you must register with the carrier the use cases you anticipate using in your SMS program. For instance, if you’re registering a short code for both transactional and marketing use cases, you’ll need a separate code for each category. You would also need multiple short codes if multiple brands within your company will be sending SMS.

You don’t need to have a separate short code per individual use case if all the use cases are related to, say, marketing and specified on your application with separated opt-ins.

This means that one short code can be used for mixed marketing use cases such as newsletters, promotional messages, alerts, and product updates, but would require separate, specific opt-in options for a short code.

Using a trusted SMS partner can help you both navigate and expedite the registration process for long and short codes.

Iterable SMS comes with built-in support to help you navigate the nuances of number registration, implementation, and delivery.

Pro Tip: If you are registering for a short code and plan to use MMS, you must note that in your application.

The 4 Laws and Components of SMS Compliance

Like any other digital marketing channel, SMS has guidelines, but they are not federally regulated. While there are several U.S. laws that touch SMS, and each international country also has different laws that should be reviewed and considered, carriers also have their own individual guidelines. This can lead to the tricky situation of following legal guidelines but still being out of compliance.

This is why it pays to work with an expert SMS marketing partner in addition to your in-house legal counsel and/or data privacy team. Together, these resources can help ensure you’re following the law and carriers’ specific requirements.

That said, you should be aware of a few federal laws that touch SMS:

1. Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA): The TCPA federal law requires marketers to get explicit written consent from users before sending them recur – ring automated SMS communications. 
2. Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association (CTIA): CTIA takes things a step further than the TCPA by mandating that SMS program details are clearly stated and visible, have a call to action, and specify how to opt out, among other things.
3. The Americans With Disabilities Act for Accessible Design (ADA): ADA requires that brands make accommodations for anyone who is impaired, including ensuring messages pass the POUR test: Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust.
4. The CAN-SPAM Act: Under the FCC, you can’t send unwanted text messages to mobile numbers, and the user should be able to tell if a message is an ad. This does not apply to messages sent by brands with which the user already has an existing relationship.

When taken in aggregate, these U.S. laws can be boiled down to four main compliance rules that you’ll want to take into account regardless of carrier:

1. Your subscriber must explicitly opt in to SMS marketing in writing. This opt in must be separate from email market – ing. In other words, opting in to one channel doesn’t mean opting in to other channels. As mentioned in the Gathering Customer Phone Numbers section, users can opt in via single or double verification.
2. You must explain to potential subscrib – ers which types of messages they’ll receive from you, with clear instructions on how they can opt out if they so wish. 
3. You must immediately respect opt-out requests.
4. You can’t send SMS communications during “quiet hours”—typically before 8 am and after 9 pm in the recipient’s time zone—as per the TCPA. There are also state-specific rules, so work with your SMS partner to ensure compliance with local laws.

Compliance isn’t just about avoiding a fine. It also ensures your messages actually get delivered by the carrier. Messages judged as spam could be blocked. We’ll get into the error codes associated with this and other delivery issues in our Troubleshooting section below.

Either way, any SMS program should be run by your in-house legal counsel team to ensure compliance.

SMS Delivery Checklist

• Make sure the user phone numbers you collect are accurate and can actually receive texts. Gathering phone numbers using a keyword can better ensure validity.
• Format your number in E164: country code, area code, and subscriber number.
• Ensure you only text users who have opted in to receive your messaging.
• Avoid sending any messages that could in any way be interpreted as spam to prevent mobile carriers from filtering them.
• Ensure your messages are 160 characters or less. If you go beyond this limit, your message will be sent as separate texts.
• Maintain daily limits—if you flood your message queue past the throughput dictated by your trust score, your messages can bounce.
• Spell out opt-out instructions clearly.
• If you need to send bulk text messages, use short codes, which are designed for this level of volume.
• Use a reliable provider that doesn’t have a history of data security problems or use “gray routes” through unauthorized networks to avoid paying third-party network operators to transmit the message.

SMS is a powerful channel, especially when it’s integrated with email, push, social, and any other channel experiences.

Taking time to create a harmonized cross-channel marketing strategy will help consumers “see” your brand in a consistent and seamless manner regardless of the device they are on or what stage of the journey they’re in.

Think about how you feel if you see a brand act out of character on a particular channel or device. You would likely feel misled and turned off from doing business with them. By presenting a consistent image of your brand across channels and devices, users get a coherent view of who you are, what you offer, and what you stand for.

In the following pages, we’ll dive into three core planning areas to consider when integrating SMS into your cross-channel mix.

Iterable brings real-time data and engagement together to deliver the highest level of personalization and channel orchestration. With Iterable SMS, you can leverage all the no-code automation and data activation baked into the broader platform—eventbased triggers, dynamic segmentation, journeys, etc.— to deliver truly harmonized experiences with SMS.

1. Customer journey

In general, it’s important to figure out what a user journey looks like with your brand across channels and touchpoints so you can deliver a harmonized experience for customers.

Think of your brand as a story, with each channel providing a different chapter with its own creative, messaging, and calls to action. Ensure that the theme, tone, and action are similar across channels and unify the brand story. When a person uses their smartphone, they are likely hopping between email, in-app, and SMS. So if a customer is in a welcome email program, for instance, a text sent to them should complement their introduction and education with the brand.

To understand where SMS can fit within a customer journey, think back to the four I’s at the beginning of this guide. Your brand should ask itself if the channel could:

• Save users time (immediate): If you want a user to complete a survey or a product review, would they respond faster if you messaged them via text instead of email?
• Fill communication gaps (informative): Is there a sizable lifecycle gap in how you’re nurturing your customers that SMS could fill?
• Drive revenue (intimate): Could sending an abandoned cart message via SMS be the nudge that gets a user to complete a purchase?
• Increase user engagement (individual): Depending on user preferences, could SMS be the best way to engage in a specific moment?

This basic customer journey map example can be helpful in mapping out channel touchpoints by user lifecycle or journey to understand cross-channel intersections and where SMS could integrate.

2. Channel function

Modern marketers are moving away from single, batch-and-blast communications and towards individualized conversations with each user. They’re replacing campaigns with adaptive journeys.

Curology, an Iterable customer that delivers personalized skincare treatments, has seen a 26% improvement in customer engagement and a 10% increase in revenue since adding dynamic, personalized SMS campaigns to their mix – in addition to email.

SMS is a time-sensitive channel, so it helps to understand the level of urgency in your text message campaigns to best strategize how to use it with other channels. Consider different channels as lead, support, or solo depending on the overall action you are trying to drive for that individual user, which should be based on the data you get back on their behaviors and preferences in each channel.

If we look at SMS and email as an example, the matrix to the right is what the channel flow could look like as it relates to consumer needs and response time.

Lean into new events or promotions via SMS, with supporting information to come from “longer-form” channels like email or social media.

Pro Tip: If your brand has an app, consider deep links to bring recipients from the SMS message directly to the relevant section or page of your app.

3. Optimize and test

Consumers now expect brands to send them timely communications tied to key moments. To do this, brands must approach marketing with a service mentality of “always-on” adaptive journeys. This means you can adapt to customer behaviors and changing preferences in real-time and at scale.

There are a multitude of ways that you can go about optimizing and testing your cross-channel strategy. Here are three methods for doing this with SMS:

1. Test multi-channel messages to optimize and determine impact: Similar to the high-/low-urgency matrix above, you can test a lead vs. a follow-up channel to understand engagement. Your brand can use implicit signals to identify which channels customers are not responding to and then follow up with a similar message in another channel.
2. Capture user preferences and deliver messages accordingly using segmentation: Once you’re able to start capturing preferences, you can send channel-preferred messages to optimize and boost engagement based on which device or channel on which a user most wants to receive a specific message. For example, a user might prefer their newsletter communications sent via email but shipping confirmations via text.
3. Ensure consistency of cross-channel messaging: Message consistency helps in understanding the impact of all touchpoints along the path to attribution. Retargeting is also a factor to test in reinforcing engagement with a particular channel. For instance, you can use SMS to drive users to read an information-heavy email that is too long to send over text.

Looking for hands-on, expert guidance on creating, executing, and testing your SMS program? The Iterable Strategic Services team can work directly with your organization to build a custom playbook – based on your unique use cases – to help you maximize the efficacy of SMS across your broader marketing strategy

Troubleshooting

As highlighted in our Delivery Checklist, there are certain things you can do to increase the chances of your SMS messages being sent successfully. However, errors can still happen that prevent messages from being delivered. Let’s briefly look at some of the most common SMS campaign errors and how you can avoid them.

TESTING YOUR INTEGRATION

We recommend enlisting the help of your SMS partner to test your integration, likely in conjunction with the relevant messaging/engineering team at your organization. You’ll want to test both the inbound and outbound components of your integration. Most platforms will post the error codes for a bounce and reason for a sendskip in the event on the profile so you can troubleshoot with the appropriate SMS provider to help identify the issue.

Overall, you’ll want to double check the API key, and any relevant integration keys required for the integration, for typos or additional spaces that could be preventing message delivery. You also need to make sure these elements all line up to the right environment (i.e. not using a message service and API key from different environments).

CREATING DYNAMIC SMS BOUNCE ERROR LISTS

You can capture common error codes and use these to get users to update their numbers (i.e. if you determine you have someone’s landline, you can reach out via email or another channel to obtain that user’s mobile number).

INTERPRETING ERROR CODES

You receive an error code when there is a problem sending your SMS messages. Each code indicates why a message couldn’t be delivered. The most common error codes are used by most providers and are applicable all over the world. Here is a sampling:

• 10003: The URL provided was invalid, malformed, or too long. URLs can be a maximum of 2000 characters.
• 10032: Provided value isn’t on the list of accepted values.
• 10700: The CNAM caller data provided is invalid.
• 20005: The user provided is invalid.
• 40001: The destination number is either a landline or a non-routable wireless number

A more comprehensive list of common error codes can be found here.

SMS is a personal, preferred marketing channel that can drive joyful customer experiences. But it’s also a channel with a lot of nuance, intricacies, and backend workflow components (not to mention a lot of acronyms).

If you’re just getting started with SMS, it doesn’t make sense to go it alone. You’ll likely get frustrated and fed up—the antithesis of joy—if you do. Instead, consider tapping into the deep knowledge of messaging and customer engagement experts who can make sense of SMS’s quirks to set you up for success.

Iterable has proudly partnered with Telnyx, a carrier-direct SMS provider that reaches over 200 countries with unmatched deliverability, reliability, and scale. With this partnership, we’re able to guarantee optimal SMS deliverability, reach, compliance, cross-channel orchestration, and price — all so you can provide the richest possible SMS experience to your customers.

So whether you’re sending an SMS/MMS-specific special offer campaign, or including SMS as part of a larger cross-channel loyalty program, you can leverage all the dynamic functionality and data activation baked into the broader Iterable platform.

Iterable SMS at a glance:

• Competitive SMS/MMS pricing
• Built-in white glove implementation support
• Fully compliant opt-in support
• Native link shortener with deep tracking capabilities
• Full support for short codes and long codes
• Campaign and experiment-level SMS revenue attribution and opt-out tracking
• Build SMS campaigns with event-based triggers and dynamic segmentation
• Send via journeys, API calls, or as one-time or recurring blast campaigns 
• 2-Way Automation Chat to track users or send them down different journeys 
• Trigger SMS campaigns based on inbound messages and keywords

Still think SMS is too much to add to your plate? Our Strategic Services team can provide best-in-class marketing strategy and support for your SMS channel needs. We’ll deliver custom recommendations and playbooks by working with your team to understand your audience, messaging and communication, data and insights, and how SMS best fits into your cross-channel marketing strategy.

Already an Iterable customer? Reach out to your customer success manager to learn more about Iterable SMS and Iterable’s Strategic Services offerings.

Not a customer yet but curious about how Iterable can activate your brand’s SMS marketing?

About Iterable

Iterable is the powerful communication platform that helps brands like Zillow, DoorDash, Calm, and Glassdoor activate customers with joyful interactions at scale. Transforming real-time data into individualized, harmonized, and dynamic communications, Iterable empowers more than 1,000 brands to build long-lasting relationships with their customers and meet their goals.

About Telnyx

Telnyx is a global connectivity platform and partner that provides carrier-grade services on a private, cloud-agnostic IP network. Its Voice, Messaging, Numbering, Video, Wireless, Fax, and Security solutions are accessible through RESTful APIs and its award-winning Mission Control Portal. From in-app messaging and calling to feature-rich contact centers, Telnyx solves communications needs at every complexity level, with 24/7 inhouse engineering support on hand. As an internationally licensed carrier, Telnyx powers secure, high-fidelity connectivity while democratizing worldwide access to real-time communications over the internet.