Statutory damages of $500 to $1,500 per message, enforced by class action. It does not care whether the message arrived.
No fine, no notice, no appeal. Your messages simply stop arriving and nobody tells you.
Business texting has two rulebooks. The legal one — the TCPA and related consumer-protection law, where statutory damages run $500 to $1,500 per message and class actions are the enforcement mechanism. And the carrier one — the filtering systems that quietly decide whether your messages arrive at all. The good news: the same habits satisfy both. This is the checklist we walk through with every texting customer.
1. Consent: get a real yes, and keep the receipt
- Express consent before you text. A customer who gives you their number while booking an appointment has consented to appointment texts — not to marketing. Marketing needs its own, clearly worded opt-in.
- Write down how consent happens — the intake form checkbox, the web form language, the verbal ask at the counter. Your 10DLC campaign registration asks for this; so does a lawyer, later.
- Keep records. When and how each number opted in. If a dispute arrives years after, the record is the defense.
- Never buy lists. Purchased numbers have consented to nothing from you. This is the fastest route to both a legal problem and a blocked number.
2. Opt-outs: STOP means stop, instantly
- Honor STOP automatically and immediately. On our platform this is handled for you — a STOP reply suppresses the number without anyone touching it.
- Tell people how to leave. Recurring campaigns should periodically include “Reply STOP to opt out.” It’s required language for marketing, and it’s cheap goodwill everywhere else.
- Don’t take it personally, and don’t work around it. Texting someone after STOP is the single most reliably punished violation.
3. Identity: say who you are
- Name your business in the thread — especially the first message and any message after a gap. “Your table is ready — Corner Bakery” beats a bare “Your table is ready” from an unknown number.
- Text from the number customers already know. That’s the entire point of 10DLC: your main line, text-enabled, so identity is never a mystery.
4. Timing and volume: be a person, not a cannon
- Respect quiet hours. Texting outside roughly 8 am–9 pm in the recipient’s time zone invites complaints and, for marketing, legal exposure.
- Match volume to consent. Someone who opted into appointment reminders didn’t opt into daily promotions. Complaint rates feed carrier filtering — annoyed recipients literally degrade your deliverability.
5. Content: some things don’t belong in SMS
Carriers restrict or prohibit entire categories (the industry shorthand is SHAFT: sex, hate, alcohol, firearms, tobacco — plus cannabis, gambling, high-risk financial offers, and anything deceptive). Even legal businesses in restricted categories need special handling. Also:
- No link shorteners from public services — shared shortener domains are spam-flagged wholesale. Use full URLs or a branded domain.
- Plain claims only. “50% off today” is fine if true; anything that smells like a scam pattern (“You’ve won…”, “Verify your account…”) gets filtered on sight.
6. The paperwork that makes it all official
Registration is where these practices get declared: your brand and campaign registration documents your consent flow, your opt-out handling, and your message types. Registration without the practices is fraud; practices without registration still get filtered. You need both.
The honest summary: text like a good neighbor with a paper trail. If every message is something the recipient asked for, identified, timely, and easy to leave — you’re compliant with the spirit of every rule, and the letter follows. And if you’d rather have all of this handled — registration, STOP automation, the lot — that’s what Business SMS includes.