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regulations Tag

News, tips & advice from FastSMS

As with any other form of marketing communication, SMS marketing is subject to national and international regulations controlling how, when and where it can be used. It is not permissible to use SMS marketing to disseminate offensive material of any kind nor is it permitted to pretend to be someone you are not.

The most important issue, in many respects, relates to who you can send messages to and these regulations are much the same as those applying to email marketing. You can only send SMS messages to those who you are already have a business relationship with or those who have specifically opted in to your communications. In all instances you must provide a means of opting out or receiving further messages and enforce those choices.

It is not as bad as it sounds since “cold calling” and “spamming” don’t work well anyway so the regulations simply force you adopt best practice.

Yet another company (Quigley and Carter Limited) have been fined by the ICO for not having permission to send SMS messages. In this case, they had outsourced their marketing to a third party who then sent messages on their behalf. So is staying compliant with the regulations regarding SMS messaging so difficult? It doesn’t have to be.

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If you are looking to get going with SMS marketing it's worth learning a bit about the "tricks of the trade" so you avoid the common pitfalls and get off on the right foot. Read about three important marketing concepts that will maximise your success in this venture.

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Starting an SMS marketing campaign can be a daunting task. Gathering explicit opt ins can take time, as you need to make an investment in advertising. So why not just get a jumpstart and buy a list of mobile numbers from an organisation that already has the opt ins? You could do that, but it’s probably harder than just getting people to opt in on their own. Here’s why.

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In last week’s blog I covered how the Trump campaign sent unsolicited SMS messages to voters. This week I’m stuck on the same topic, but from a totally different angle: what we can learn from that failure. Because honestly, their biggest issue might not be violating the law. It might be the people they have writing their SMS messages. It’s time to dissect the message that spawned the law suit, and learn what we can from it.

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