Polish Your 10DLC Text Messaging Campaigns Before Submitting to The Campaign Registry

If your communications depend on messaging, don’t miss this update for registering your brands and campaigns with The Campaign Registry in Q4 2024 and beyond.
 
On the up side: Long code (10DLC) messaging campaigns are growing in popularity! On the down side: The DCAs are watching. 😳

With great power comes great responsibility, they say, and nowhere is this more clear than with text messaging campaigns. While they’re a great way to communicate short messages, growing popularity means growing scrutiny: from consumers, from fraudsters, and from the DCAs who approve the campaigns.

While the rules haven’t changed much in awhile, they have become increasingly granular as the DCAs hope to plug every gap a sender might hope to wiggle through. Fortunately, Commio’s Director of Customer Success Katie Reddick is here to help you fill in the blanks and keep your messages sending:

• Privacy pages, Terms & Conditions, and other website faux pas
• What you can and can’t say on your opt-in forms—and how you need to document it
• Yes, there are ways to gather opt-ins without your website, but they will be scrutinized
• Brand | Help | Stop | Data Rates, and other components you can’t mention often enough
• Is it really you? Even if you’ve registered your brand, there may be more to do

Learn more about Commio at commio.com.

Transcript

Building amazing experiences that engage and delight your customers is easy with Commio, our smart, reliable voice and messaging solutions are easy to implement and scale with you, so you can deliver more calls and texts be more competitive and save money. With Commio, you get peace of mind and happier customers. Find out why 1000s of software platforms and enterprises trust Commio with their communications. Get a demo today. 
Well,

Good afternoon, everybody, and welcome to Commio's latest cloud communications industry briefing. Katie, it's great to have you back. How you doing? Thank you. I'm good. It's glad to be back. You know, lots of not a lot. I mean, you know, some things stayed the same, but we've got some new stuff. For sure. We have to talk about it, because, you know, you and your team are working with our customers all day long on their text messaging campaigns. And you know, we toss around terms like 10 DLC long code. It just means, if you're sending a text campaign to a regular phone number, a local phone number or set of phone numbers, there's a lot of compliance and registration steps that you have to go through. Now. I've said it 1000 times. It's not like it was six years ago when I started. You could just send any traffic you wanted, almost any way you wanted, and now it's completely the opposite. So let's just leave the past in the past and realize that, you know, we have to update our materials almost on a bi weekly basis, because things change. So I'm super glad we had a great registration number for this event today, and it's and I think it's on purpose, because I think most people realize that there's a lot going on that we need to update them. So with that in mind, Katie, I want to jump into it right away, like we just we and I love cherry, by the way, on the call. Thank you. My fantastic content person. The title of this webinar couldn't be better. Polish your messaging campaign before you submit it to the campaign registry. So we know that the campaign registry is an ongoing concern. They're the ones who you know are the vetting authority before you're allowed to send messages, and they keep changing what you need. And to be honest, Katie, I think you'd agree. I feel like it's overwhelmingly positive, but it just adds a bunch of steps, right? Exactly? Yep, that's a perfect way to put it. Yeah. So with that in mind, let's get let's go ahead and dive right in. By the way, happy pre Thanksgiving, everybody. I hope you're drinking your water, getting ready. It's coming up quick. It'll be here before you know it. But I wanted to start with this Katie, because we were, we were preparing for this webinar, and I'm like, You know what? I'm just going to put it too long. Didn't Read didn't read slide at the beginning. We have a fantastic document, again, that Sherry keeps up to date for us. Thank you, Sherry, with all these latest updates that come out of the TCR and other places. So if you want to get the list, this is going to give you everything we're going to present today, and then some just type in commio.com/10dlc-checklist - and that'll get you the PDF. You don't have to fill in another form. You've already registered for the webinar. You're good. We already we know who you are, and this will just this is a great document for you to hold on to give to your team review at your leisure. But this is, this has all the information in it. So let's, let's go ahead and start. Let's go ahead and dive in. So the first thing is, is a lot of things that you need to think about for a campaign, right? Katie, before you do the registration. Here's just a few of the things, right?

Right? Exactly. So you know, you more or less have to have your ducks in a row before you even think about submitting a campaign. And what that means is you have to be organized when it comes to your website, making sure that you're listing all of the terms and conditions privacy policy you're very clear opt in. You know the customers, when they come to you and sign up to be contacted, they know exactly who they're signing up with, what they're signing up for. And if I come in as you know a third party and look at this, I can easily see on your website, hey, you've got this check, check, check, you're good to go. That's right, because then we know this. Katie, you know, a lot of people who are new to this process, they'll skip one or more of these steps, and then they're like, Well, wait a minute, I paid you. It costs a little bit of money to go through that vetting process. But now there's a, you know, a deeper vetting process you can get, and they sort of get surprised that they've missed the step. So

I think there's nothing else that, if you should take away from this is you need to look at these. You need to look at this as a checklist, and you need to check them off before you submit so and we're, by the way, we're going to show you some fantastic examples of what the privacy policy should say the terms and conditions coming up in a little bit. We're also going to refresh sort of, the use case and special restrictions that are.

That are out there and then, because we've seen this too, back in the early days, Katie people used to sort of submit, well, we think we're we might want to send this kind of a message, yeah. And it's like you need to have your content nailed, because that will set sort of the flag for what your whole campaign needs to read like, not exactly like it, but it needs to be the same type of message with basically the same idea behind it, or you can get in trouble. So some people, you know, they sort of rush it. They may give this task to a technical person, not their content person. They don't have a team working on this together, and that's when they get in trouble, right? Yeah. And, you know it, they really are checking kind of each of those things. Now, each of the website places the message content within the submission. So, you know, it does seem like a lot, but as long as you kind of walk yourself through it and that document Tim referenced on the previous site, I mean, you could pull that up. I know it's kind of long, but you could read through it and just check it off as you go to submit it. And that covers everything that they're going to look at. That's right. And I think, and again, we're going to get into each of these steps, but you'll notice that, okay, now that you got your content, you got everything else ready to go, then you have to register the brand, make sure that that's approved, all set, and then you do the campaign registration. And then you can actually sort of get started. So there's, there's a stair step to all of this. So what's new? Nothing and everything. I love this. And we've already said this, you know, the direct carrier aggregators, those are the people above us, right? Are being a lot more vigilant, a lot more granular, and I get to see all the back and forth of you know, what's going on from from a from a registration standpoint, and it's always a constant flow of almost the same things. You know, Hey, your privacy policy is missing that what you where is this? Where's that? And it slows the process down. So if you can do all this in advance and follow it as a checklist, you're going to be way ahead of most customers, and you can get started faster, right, exactly. And, you know, I'm kind of seeing working with customers in the past few weeks, you may have had it down pat with what they were looking at, say, a month ago. It's slightly different. Now. There's a little bit more to it. So you just kind of have to retrain yourself to look for these additional things when you're going to submit. That's right. So let's go ahead and get into it. So the first thing is, and we have documentation around this, and I think most people, I think, natively understand, yeah, what use cases are acceptable and which ones aren't. So

and if there are restrictions, you need to understand it. You can see here on the right, here's Jack Daniels, right, right away,

age gates are a thing depending on your product, depending on your use case, so you need to follow through, like people can't, literally, like she says here, we can't. You can't just check, oh yeah, I'm over 21 you know. So in some cases, depending on the use case, you might need to have an up, an ID upload, or a third party verification, or something as easy as a birth date, but it all depends. So and we can counsel you on these things based on your use cases, but,

yeah, that's important. You know, those restrictions are part of the deal depending on the use case that you're bringing to the table. And lastly, and I think this is another big change, was political messaging got a little bit more organized for this cycle where, you know, in order to get the campaign, the campaign verified token for the campaigns, you had to, you know, provide at least, you know, organization name and a website and, and I think there were some other steps, but again, they're just unique to political messaging, right, right? Yeah, that, that external verification token, if you guys dealt with political at all, you know, that was a kind of a new step, or different from other use cases, yeah? And I think correct me, if I'm wrong, wasn't that new to this cycle, or did start with the midterms?

It is on the newer side, yeah, yeah, yeah, but that's a whole separate step, right? You start with a campaign verified token. You can't really start using 10 DLC campaigns until you have that token. It's part of our process.

So let's go, if we go down that list, you know, and again, we'll have the website stuff coming up in a minute, registering your brand if the number one thing is happened is that, I don't think that they were as stringent about this at the beginning, but you got to make sure that your EIN and your related data have to match exactly. You know, we're even even down to exactly how you say, what's your company, what's your brand, slash company name. It has to match how you registered for your EIN tax information, right? It has to be exact. And this is a, you know, this is checking a database, essentially. So, you know, you you have to be exact. I've seen people do things like they forgot to add the LLC at the end of their name. You know, you could have everything else, right, but that's still going to cause it to fail when it goes to verify it, yeah. Is it comma? Inc? Is it llc?

So, yeah, it has to be exactly how you registered. And I think the other newest change as well is, you know, for public companies,

when you go through this process, you're registering a publicly traded brand for a campaign that you have to supply an email address that is with the domain of the brand and, you know, and the brand's website, obviously, and they're going to send an email to that account to somebody who works at that company to do the two FA authentication. So that's new, yep. And that right now, you know, it's just for publicly traded companies, but it sounds like they're moving towards that for all brands. So just get in the habit of adding your company domain email address, and that way you don't have to retrain yourself to do it, you know, if these, these kind of requirements change to include all brands, yeah, and you see here at the bottom, you know, publicly traded companies, you can keep sending existing campaigns, but as soon as you go to create a new one, you're going to have to go through this 2f a process, which, you know, it's not that, not that complicated. And by the way, guys just a little, you know, a little inside baseball here. But this is actually one of the verification steps. We use a Commio for new customers, like when I get a lead coming in, somebody wants to talk to us about getting onto our network. It has to come from somebody's business account, and we have to be able to verify it. So no surprise that it finally caught up with this process. Yep, exactly. So good to know. Well, so let's go back to the website, by the way, and

I feel like this is table stakes. Katie is the person who's in charge of a website. But let's, let's be clear, if you need to work with your marketing slash web team, and look, is your website live? Does the domain line up with your with your company, brand? Does it have a valid, secure, secure socket layer or an SSL certificate and and by the way, Google, maybe it's been six or seven years ago required anybody who wanted to be part of the Google index anymore as a company had to put an SSL security certificate on their website. So again, it's basic, but especially if you're a newish company, make sure that you have an SSL certificate live on your site, by the way. What does that mean? You've seen it everywhere, you know, https colon, slash, slash. You see that on the domain. That means there's a SSL certificate, you know, that's applied to that domain, so it's secure,

but they look for that now. So you have to have an SSL certificate on your site. It has to be up to date. It can't be invalid. Because I don't know about you, Katie, but I hit websites, you know, probably three or four a week where, oh, the SSL SSL certificate mismatch. Yeah. What does that usually mean? Guess what? They didn't pay for the SSL certificate this year. They missed their deadline.

Make sure that you pay for it and that you keep it up to date. So again, the website domain has to match the brand name, and we're going to show you a few examples in a minute, right Katie, but privacy policy terms and conditions labeled easy to find. By the way, we recommend that you put those links in the footer, super easy to find. Maybe you can put them in the header too, but make sure that the person who's going to be doing the review can scroll down see privacy policy, terms and conditions, and it just has to be easy to find from the home page, accurate, up to date. You know, again, this doesn't even matter how you capture opt ins. It's got to be on your brand website. And by the way, include all URLs with campaign submission. So that means that whatever you're linking to as part of your campaign, you want to use your primary brand domain name in the link that appears on your messages. You can't use URL shorteners. It's been that way for quite a while. Yeah, right. And you know, they, they have a we'll get to this, I'm sure, on the slide. But in the past, you could just say, Yeah, I have a privacy policy. Go find it. Now they want you to actually supply that actual link directly to it as well, just so it's easier for that review or the person reviewing it to go click it. Yes, and by the way, just to reiterate, they're going to check so make sure that it's up to date. Because I feel like it was a little wishy washy there at the beginning. It's not anymore, but you gotta make sure that it's right. So let's talk more about the privacy policy. So you can see here, and I love on the right is a fantastic example. Is what you want to basically tell people is that you are that you are not going to be sharing, renting, selling personal information, including phone number with any third party or affiliate, right? So you can see here again, the actual copy. I won't read it out loud, but we're not going to share your OPT in with any third party. We may share it for like, consent status. You know consent status, third parties that support our messaging services. You know,

anybody who's basically helping with the delivery of the messages, that's it, but we are not going to resell your information. So what's interesting about this? And I don't know if we, if we called it out specifically, I think we did, coming up Katie, but like January, I think, is it the 25th of next year is the consent debt?

Line that if you're involved in anything related to leads or reselling leads, it's got to be one to one consent. You can't sell, you know, people's opt ins for more than one campaign. It's got, it's a one to one thing,

which is a huge challenge, slash opportunity, for anybody who's in lead gen, but it adds a whole nother layer of

of complexity,

so you can see, or must include, a mobile sharing section that explicitly states you do not share data with third party services period. It's not allowed, and that's what a lot of people tend to be missing from their privacy policy. You know, they may have one that they did, you know, months back or a couple years back and that, and that just wasn't necessary at the time. So definitely, kind of polishing up your websites to make sure that they're compliant and have that language in there. And by the way, I apologize we jumped in so fast, but I forgot to reiterate to everybody on the call that, you know, obviously we're recording it, we're going to send out the recording after the call, and also go ahead and use that chat button if you have questions or comments along the way. I love to thread them in, because David just said, Well, wait a minute, what if my company doesn't have a website? Like, what does that mean in terms of registration? Yeah, great question, and that is okay, obviously, you know, there are companies out there that don't have a website in the document that we referenced that we have for you guys, we have that kind of called out in the section, so it'll walk you through it. But just to kind of give you what they're going to look for, what they're going to need, is in the call to action, you're going to explain exactly how the customers are opting in. So, you know, maybe that's in person. Maybe I have a coffee shop customers come in. They, you know, sign up on even, like a kiosk type thing. You can explain that thoroughly. And then there's a multimedia section where you can upload things, like, if it's a physical form, you could scan it and upload it. You can do screenshots. Some people, they just do like their LinkedIn or their Facebook, and that's fine. You'll just either screenshot like where you have the privacy policy within the Facebook. Other ways to do it,

let's say they opt in over the phone. You can explain it and kind of give a snapshot of the script that that person says, As long as you have that there, you know, they'll they'll be able to review that, and that'll get approved. You just kind of have to, again, just go through and kind of check everything off that they're requiring for those use cases. That's great. Katie, I'm curious. I've never asked you this, like, how many of our customers do you say have a website versus don't have a website? You know, majority,

majority do have a website, but we have, we have a good handful of customers specifically that are using either Facebook or LinkedIn.

You know, they don't have a website, but customers will go to their LinkedIn page or go to their Facebook page, and they will opt in to be contacted for, you know, whatever they might be selling or or referring. Yeah, I'm gonna say all those Facebook sellers out there, you're welcome. I opt in way too often to their to their offers. So sorry, right? I do it alright. So let's talk about terms and conditions. And again, we've got a good example on the left, I'm sorry, make your screen as big as possible. You can take a look at this. Look. Look at this list down here. I love this. You know, this is their terms of service. They sort of cover everything. This is Papa John's, right? So they're really clear here, guys, you know, what's the brand name? How often are they going to get messages like people. I think forget this one a lot. Are they going to get one a month? Are they going to get one a week? Are they going to get one every other week? You know, you got to call it out. And by the way, yes, you have to follow it, because you can get into trouble if you suddenly start to ramp up sending versus what you promised. You know, here it is. Describe the product. How can they get in touch with you? What's the opt out information, which is not required, I guess, if it's a single message program, right, that's fine. Make sure you say that messaging data rates may apply, and also make sure that you're linking to the privacy policy. So yeah, I think again, Papa John's does a great job.

And I also love this too. I've often thought about calling them Katie. But okay, so if the help command doesn't work, if I call that 800 number, who's going to pick up the phone, but it's, it's in there, it's in there. So, you know, I think these are the guys, you know, the bigger brands, that really do it, right? I mean, all the basic information is here. By the way, we have examples and links inside of that document as well, if you want to look at this. But I think they do a great job, by the way. I literally think this, this section of their site, was probably about probably about this big, like two years ago, and now it's right page. That's just kind of the way it goes. And, oh, by the way, and I'm sorry, just just to state the obvious, Katie, make sure when somebody says stop, that you are honoring them and as fast as possible, sending a reply message.

Search that says we received it and we've unsubscribed you, even if you may wait till the end of the day, it may take an hour. It may take a couple hours before you actually refresh your database, reply stop to a stop as fast as possible, right? And you know what this kind of reminds me? You can always go to, you know, whether it be a Papa John's or, you know, a Coca Cola, but one of those, you know, big companies that you know are doing things right. Go look at their website. You know, take a look at how they worded things, or what their terms and conditions look like. It's a great way just to make sure that, you know, you're thinking about everything and, you know, just get some ideas of how to present it clearly to the customers, yeah, and I just say again, just to avoid any potential issues, you know, we're, we're not lawyers, we're not telecom lawyers. We we're practitioners of the messaging campaigns, right, and the technology, but the whole legal side is best to make sure that you're getting this stuff reviewed by your own legal team. So there, there. I said it so good job.

And by the way, this is a reminder about that, that January deadline, and I think it's good for everybody. Is

you. Every recipient must opt in. You can't just buy a list and start spamming messages. You have to be able to prove opt in.

And that's, that's a key. That's a key thing to understand. You got to build your list the right way, and it has to be one to one. Opt in. It's not, you know, it's not third party. You didn't buy a list that, you know, you get the idea. So if, for some reason, somebody, maybe they forgot that they this happens, right? Katie people forget that. They sign up for something and they get, they get a message, and maybe you didn't reply quite fast enough when they said stop, or that stopped working for some reason, and they report you you

know, give people an idea. Katie, how many of those people, if they, if they say, you know, if they reported a spam, how many of those does it take to get somebody in

trouble? You know it's, it's basically a percent, yeah, um, you know different DC A's may tell you different numbers, but you know that needs to be kept to a minimum. I would say under 2% of your, your your signups, um, so, yeah, definitely. You want to make sure you're scrubbing those lists, keeping those up to date, just so that that opt out percent stays really low on your campaigns. Yeah, in fact, yeah, I was gonna say, I thought I heard too that, you know, some of them are even half a percent. Yeah, I'm looking at you. T Mobile, I'm looking at you,

right. They are the most stringent. And by the way, congrats to them. I don't blame them. I mean, to be honest, if you're looking for the cleanest mobile carrier that does a great job of filtering bad traffic, it's, it's it's T Mobile, hands down. But it also means that you as a business owner need to be very careful with with this, because what you have to be able to do, and I think, you know, it's not overstating it, but you got to think about everybody who's in the communication chain. So you got the person at the other end with their handset. You've got the brand over here who wants to send a message, but there are multiple steps in the middle where, like Commio, we have to make sure that we know our customers, that that we work with our customers to properly get their campaigns registered, and all those great things they're gonna, they're gonna actually, you know, buy numbers from us to run these campaigns. And if one of you know,

you know one of our customers, customers, you know, there's this huge chain of custody of this traffic and these phone numbers that we all have to be ready to prove Okay, I did my KYC, my No, your customer, that I had the right information on my site, and then who's next in the chain, and that's really all that a lot of this registration is for, is chain of custody to make sure that when bad act, bad actors or actions happen, that it's traceable, trackable, and that it can be stopped. So again, good thing it, but it just it adds these layers of complexity to registering. So just remember, everybody has to opt in. Don't buy a list. Be careful,

and

yeah, implicit consent. So yeah, you can see here, workflow needs to clearly state that the customer indicated contact with your business via text message.

The first message must always be sent by the customer. It must be stated that the customer initiated contact with the business to provide implied consent. So, yeah, implicit consent is a whole separate thing based on how you start the process of getting people to onto your list, right? But that's why we always say it's best to do double opt in. You know, hey, no matter how you capture it the first time, send them another text. You know, by the way, reply, why to to verify that you want to receive messages from Papa Tim's pizza. Yes. Okay, great. I got them on the first time, and I got them on the second one, right, exactly. And be ready, by the way, you got to capture that. You can use something like trusted form, some other solution to to capture that opt in information, so that when somebody like you know the.

Como or a DCA or a carrier comes back to vet something, you need to be able to pull that and show it to them that you got that consent. Yeah, right. And again, all the good actors out there know this, and they've been practicing it for a long time. It's sort of people who are new to it that get caught flat footed. And by the way, another great example, what should your opt in form look like? And I think this is, I think you'd agree, a lot of people get tripped up on this because they've made, they may have made their opt in pages a long time ago. There's one thing you need to update. Look at this right hand side, guys, make sure that your OPT in language is as close to this as possible, because all the right information is here on the right hand side, yeah. And you know, a lot of pages are missing the check box. The check box is a really good thing to have because it calls out that they are opting into specifically what they're checking off, and it gives them a physical action that they have to do. So, you know, that way the DC A's or whoever's reviewing this, they can't come to it and be like, Yeah, you're kind of trying to hide that. Nope, it's clear. They're checking it off. They're opting in to receive those messages. Yeah, and we go back to the beginning. So the forms have to be

on an SSL certificate. They have to be secure right to make sure that the data is not being siphoned off or harvested somehow. It's got to have the right opt in language, and you cannot pop up your privacy policy or your terms and conditions. You got to link to them in in their totality, or they need to be on the page, right? So these sign up pages should be all by themselves, ideally

with this information stipulated. And again, I know we went back and forth a lot on this content, guys, so don't, don't sleep on that little, tiny copy you see on the right hand side. Blow that up. Probably when we send the recording, we're going to send a link to the PDF. You'll be able to easily see all this copy it's in the document that we're linking you to. But there's a lot of little nuances that have been changed in that block on the right hand side, because there's a reason why. You know, there's two check marks here

and the copy that's in there. So we'll make sure you get that you can take a look through that. But the opt in forms on your website, again, if there's one thing you want to look at immediately after this webinar, get this content, go look at your page and make sure that that lines up, because that will get you in trouble.

So, and you can see here again. So here's, sort of, here's sort of a bad example, because it's missing, sort of almost all the best things that we just talked about. This is an older page. We're not going to call out who, who's it was, but it's missing, you know, a bunch of the elements. There's no check box here, there's no language here, there's no link to, you know, there's no link to the privacy policy, no link to the terms and conditions. You used to be able to get away with this. You really can't anymore. So

yeah, so let's see,

yeah, consent to receive messages should be titled as such, and not tied to consent for other types of communication. So you know, you can't just use a catch all, you know. You got to have a separate, you know, form for your opt in for receiving text messages, right? Yeah, it also has to include these other things. I think we've already talked about the frequency the message and data rates apply, help and stop

and again, all pages that collect phone numbers have to have the opt in language, and you have to include the opt in URLs with the campaign submission itself. And

by the way, and I love this here on the right, so you'll notice note that the phone number is not a required field.

Email address in this case, is a required field. But you know, you can't force people to fill in that number. You need to make it optional. So this is probably the best way to do it. I really would love to have their email address, but, man, their mobile phone number is even better. But you just can't force this one to be required,

which was an also recent change as well.

So, and by the way, great, great example here is, there's other ways to collect options. You already mentioned it verbally, you know, maybe at the coffee shop. But usually the verbally thing is, hey, you see the screen down here, fill in your number and we'll text you that kind of a thing. And again, you already mentioned that you can take screen grabs, include evidence with the opt in process in that multimedia section of the registration, where you can actually, you know, send in a screen grab or a photograph that you've taken of how you have, how you do it. And this works too. I just thought of another kind of scenario. Let's say you have a customer facing portal, and when a customer signs into their account. Maybe, you know, it's like your como.io portal. You sign into your own account. There might be behind a login, opt in details. So clearly, you know, if I'm a DC and I'm reviewing it, I'm not going to have a login to your website. Those are other things that you'd want to just screenshot and upload to that multimedia section. Anything that might be.

Behind a login. Oh yeah, great tip. Great tip for sure.

Let's see thoroughly explain the opt in process in the Call to Action section, including the links to privacy policy terms and conditions. This is, this is, we're seeing a lot of rejections this week because the Call to Action section requires all of these bullet points. Now,

in the past, it really, you kind of could just give a sentence or two, and you were actually encouraged to kind of keep it brief. That's changed. So I keep telling customers pull this list up. It's in, you know, that document, of course, like Tim said, we'll send you this as well. Pull that up and make sure you include all of that. Because this is a new change. It that you already have this information. You were already providing this information before, but they just want to see it in that call to action section. So I would just go through and check it off, make sure you've got each of these things within there, gotcha, gotcha. It's almost like they're making you double opt in with your registration information, right, exactly. And I really say all this stuff up here, yes, but now do it again in your own words. Okay, you know, I get it, and

here we go. So let's talk about messages. So you can see here on the right, again, we've got some really good examples.

So in addition to the main messages, include copies of your OPT in confirmation help and opt out messages. So again, this is something that they didn't ask for before, and now they want to see what it looks like, and I already mentioned, make sure that it works, because certainly the political people were not following the stop will stop anything mantra during the campaign, because I remember hitting stop, and I'd hit Stop, stop, quit, quit. I'd give him about five minutes, and then I Okay. I'm going to do what I'm going to do, but we're not we're not lucky enough to have carved a special exception for ourselves like the politicians did, so we need to follow the steps. So right? You can see here again, it's like your main messages have to have, you know, your brand name, your product description in it. You know, look, people get a lot of text messages. It needs to be instantly understood. Who's sending it. What is this about? Make sure that there's a way to stop it or get help and and again, if you're just doing a single message campaign, you're not required to use help or stop but you still need to support the commands so somebody types them, they should still work. So Exactly, yeah, Bobby. I don't know about you, Katie, but I'm very comfortable in the world right now, with most communications happening through text, I'm very happy, and I feel like most people are following it the proper way. But anyway, every time I see a call, it says spam likely and I ignore it anyway. That's another webinar,

but let's see. So opt in confirmation messages. So this is what has to be on those, right?

Yeah, and that, you know that brand identification slash product description, that's definitely new. You know, you weren't seeing that in the past, where people were calling out the brand or the company right at the beginning. I think it's super beneficial. I don't see why anybody would have hesitation moving to this. It just lets you know the person getting the message know right away. Oh, yeah, this is the company I signed up for. And there's kind of no question there. But that's definitely a change that you may have to make if you weren't already doing that. Yeah. And you can see on the left again, this is a great example. Great example. So here's a double opt in. We're hitting y to subscribe, and then right away, it's saying, Welcome. It's got all the right information there. Help, stop. We've got a link to, you know, a privacy policy, which I don't know about you, that looks like a short URL to me. I know, yeah, that they really shouldn't do that. I'm surprised that made it through. But then here again, free people.attn.tv,

free people, attention. TV, interesting like those are how all their links should look. You got to use the brand domain. Yeah, yeah. So,

and we've got here too. This message must also be sent to a subscriber if the keyword join is sent to the number approved for the campaign. There you go. So if somebody happens and gets them, you know, for whatever reason, sends that message. That's one way to capture it, right? You put it up a billboard, you know, you know, send join to right number, yeah. So it also has to happen. Now, here we go again. So for the help message, which I don't know about you. I've never typed help, so this is right. You still gotta have the brand name, the description, customer support, email and or a phone number, right for help and for opt out.

There should be one final confirmation message that you know sort of reminds them, oh, this is what you're opting out of. Yes, you're unsubscribed. You're not going to receive any more stuff from us and

but it can't also include a solicitation. So it's just got to be, Nope, you're done. This is who we are. This is what you opted out of. You can't sort of double promote yourself there at the end, so just avoid that. I know a lot of people.

Used to do that, but I don't blame them. I would do it as a marketer, of course, but yeah, I get it.

So in summary, wow, that didn't take as long as I thought. Katie, yeah,

you got to have all the related URLs with the campaign submission. Every piece of this, you know, there's multiple links are going to be part of every campaign now,

privacy policy, terms and conditions, all that stuff.

Make sure that brand name, stop, help, data rate statement is on everything and, oh, by the way, also, as we've just seen, a very basic product description, is also important to have part of all of this so that you can identify that.

Make sure that your Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions are linked everywhere. Make sure they're up to date, document,

document, document, every part of what you're doing for your campaign before you before you submit it, and explain all the workflows that you said. There's new sections in there that we're going to have to describe how that stuff works. And, oh, by the way, people like Katie and her team are here to help at Commio. We're the ones who are staying up to date on this, because we have to, but we can also coach you as well, because again, the changes happen a lot, and, oh, by the way, before, before I get to the next slide, Katie, so David has another question. So if I'm a small to medium sized business that has no website, I'm currently receiving opt ins, in person, verbally or implicitly by customers making first contact. Do we have a suggestion for the best way to record and store opt ins?

That's a good question. Let me. Let me take that. I want to go see what other customers are doing.

You know, it's really, it's up to you, but I'd love to get you some some actual feedback from customers that are kind of in the similar use case, similar size, but Yeah, as long as you're storing it somewhere where you can access it, there's not a requirement that it has to be, you know, in a certain format, but you just Have to have it documented. And that way, when you, you know, let's say you got an opt out, you have a place where you can go and remove them. And then if someone were ever to ask where they're, you know, like Tim said, it's a DCA or a carrier, and we come to you and say, Hey, we need to prove that you have opt in for this phone number. You have somewhere you can go and find that and reference it. Yeah. I mean, I want to say I remember reading about, you know, people, you know, they have sort of physical sign up lists at local businesses. It'd be better if you were capturing on a tablet or something. But you You know, I've seen sign up lists, which also, to me, doesn't sound totally safe, like I don't want to give somebody, oh, look, there's, there's 16 other people above me on the sign up list, you know, but I mean, you got to have a way to capture it. So, yeah, we could supply more information, because that keeps changing. But that's a good question. David, there's a way to do it. There's a way to do it. But, yeah, that's a good question. So again, back to the beginning, Commio.com/ten,

DLC dash checklist. And you can see right away. On the right, you can already see we're, we're basically walking you through, Hey, these are all the players in the space. This is what each of them required. Here's, here's all. And by the way, we do have actual check boxes of do this, this, this, make sure that these things are up to date. It's all in this document@Commio.com

slash 10 DLC dash checklist, and it's also linked in the eBook section of our website. And we that's where Sherry and our whole team keeps those documents up to date. We're going to include links to some of our other ebooks as well in the follow up email. You know, we have sort of, what are the allowed use cases? What are the new rules around those use cases? We, I think we have four ebooks now,

but this is the one that really gets to the heart of the registering your brand and campaigns section of this process, which, again, has been changing quite often. Let's see, do we get another question? Yeah? Great. Yeah. David said, yeah. Thanks. Katie. Send him that information about perfect I imagine he's running a coffee shop or something. And just verbally people, I don't know something, somehow, they're opting in. And how do we catch that? I get it. Okay, great. With that.

Love to take it. If anybody else has any other questions, feel free to use that, that chat box, and I'll relate it.

But Katie, I guess I'd say, you know, in terms of, sort of the usage of 10 DLC. I felt like maybe a year and a half ago or so, a lot of people were leaving 10 DLC to go to toll free. Like, I don't, maybe you can rehash why that was happening, and now I feel like people are really coming back to 10 DLC. So what did you see on your team? Yeah, it's funny, you know. And it kind of, it came down to Tim DLC, hit the requirements a little faster than toll free. And so they were enforcing some of this stuff, and people were thinking, I don't want to do it. I'm going to go to toll free. It's easier, it's quicker. They don't ask me all these questions. And now they do it too.

And.

In some scenarios, people find that getting a toll free registered might be a little bit more difficult.

It's all different DC A's, even within the DC A's, it's different groups of people looking at these. It's manual, you know, someone like you or I going and reviewing all this information. So there's definitely kind of some back and forth of what people have felt was easier to get registered at this point, though, both are requiring this type of information. Both, both are going to check your websites. They're going to actually make sure that you're sending what you said you were going to send. So you kind of can't get around it anymore. Yeah, yeah, by the way, Crystal was saying thank you for the hands on examples, and it's great content. So thank you, Katie, thank you, Sherry. We see you. Yeah, appreciate it. No, Crystal, you're welcome. You know, I think what you're going to find to everybody who you know was with us today, that you know there are, there's a lot of different, lot of different companies that say that they can help you with your text messaging. But I really I'm very proud to be with Commio, because we do take the time to host webinars like this. We're publishing content and helping our customers adhere to the latest compliance and registration processes. Because they do, they change all the time. And I don't know about you, Katie, I'm a little excited that we got a change in leadership in Washington, because some of these things are probably going to change, and I'm going to bet that they may start to walk some of these things back a little bit. No, no promises, guys, right? I feel like this new administration is not going to be as as focused on this process as the as the current one.

I'm not saying I'm not making a personal right hope, pro or con. Here, I'm just saying that every time a new administration comes in, Democrat or Republican, the the regulatory bodies change and and I wouldn't be surprised, because I think I'm trying to remember the name of the guy who Trump just put forward for the FCC. He's already been on the FCC. He was like a second tier guy for the for a couple terms now, but hard nosed, business friendly guy. So we might actually have a little bit of relief from some of this coming up in the new year, but we'll see. But for now, there's no getting around it right? Exactly. This is the way it is. And we'll we'll continue to keep these documents that things up to date. Let's see. Oh yeah, Timmy, I'm really glad you mentioned this. Thank you. I know I totally forgot about that. Yes. So remember, every time you register, you have to pay a fee, right?

Yeah, fees, correct, yeah. And so you're right. You know that that was a component of whether to go and toll free or 10 DLC as well. But speaking of the fees, that's another reason why it's important just to make sure you kind of get everything right the first time, because if you do have to resubmit, you're going to get charged that fee again, and we'd love to help you avoid that. So like Tim said, reach out if you have any questions. You can always take a screenshot or copy and paste what you have written up, we can take a look at it and at least give you some guidance on if you need to tweak anything. Yeah, yeah. And let me say too Katie, in terms of the amount of time that it's taking. Now, I feel like every time we get together, I ask you this, like, so if somebody was going to do a 10 DLC campaign Registration TODAY, or, like, a toll free, like, how long does it take for these things to usually get through the process. You know what it is with both of those processes, we've honestly had kind of a change within the past week or two weeks. So I well, I shouldn't say we, I should say the DC A's. So I don't have a good answer for that. Now,

in the past, you know, it was kind of a couple of days for both of those, sometimes we could see a 24 hour turnaround, but a couple of days was the average. Now that there's kind of more eyes on this stuff, and there's just more stuff that's being submitted, I'm expecting it to slow down. I hope it doesn't slow down a ton, you know, but we'll keep an eye on that. And certainly, if we see that it's taking a long time, we have contacts with the DC A's where we can reach out and say, Hey guys, you know, this is taking a really long time. What can we do to speed this up? We have those relationships, and we will use those but I do, I would expect that it may take, you know, more than a couple of days, unfortunately, at least in the beginning, kind of while everybody's getting used to this, this all eyes on these new, new fields, yeah, yeah, I get it. And by the way, Sunday, great question. So I feel like this is something that was a couple years ago was a concern where, you know, we had customers of customers saying, hey, a lot of this stuff related to registration isn't legally required yet, so I'm not going to do it right. And for a while, a lot of companies got away with it, and we were sort of leading the charge, saying, all right, there's still a lot of companies that are not registering their campaigns or.

Not registering their brands, but their traffic is still flowing through the DC A's, and I think all that stopped, I'm gonna think I feel like it was last January, or maybe, yeah, like 18 months ago, and they put a hard stop, and they literally came to us as Commio and said, This is your deadline, and we actually moved it way back before then to make sure that all of our customers were up to date. So Sunday, your question is, you know, a lot of customers, customers may say, Well, none of this is really legally required. I'm not going to update my terms and conditions. I'm not going to update my privacy policy. And unfortunately, the we gotta, we all have to take a hard line and say, Okay, maybe, I guess, I don't know what legal and not legal means, but in order to get our providers who provide our fast, high speed, high quality pipes to the mobile carriers, we have to follow these rules. And therefore you do as well. And nobody likes to do it. It's not fun.

Maybe again, it isn't a quote, unquote legal requirement. Is it just your campaigns are going to get shut down and and again, you could, you could, you could be lucky, right? Can you go find another provider who will do it for you?

But yeah, it's, it's a best practice in our Yeah, exactly crystal, it's a best practice in our upline, our Upstream providers require it. Yeah, exactly right. That's what you say this period. So I feel you I understand, trust me, because we got the same pushback from our customers and a lot of our customers. You already mentioned it. They left 1010, DLC and went to toll free for, you know, maybe a year or so while, while it took toll free to catch up and well, everybody's now at the same point on the starting line for registration. You got it. You have to do it. There's no more snowshoeing. There's no more any of the old stuff is it's all gone now, which is a positive. And again, it's all about chain of custody, stopping bad traffic, stopping bad actors, preventing bad traffic. And oh, by the way, I'm sorry, and I don't want to scare anybody, but do yourself a favor. If you go to our website, look under Resources, click on messaging, surcharges, whatever surcharges, they're part of it. There's a whole section of the potential fines and penalties that you can incur if you send bad traffic. And there's one company in particular, particularly with the initials TMO, that have some highly egregious, but so far, not ever, as far as I know, not ever applied to a customer's customer if you violate these rules. So we're all working in a highly regulated environment now, and we just have to follow these, follow these steps, right? Yeah, I feel like I'm over talking. I apologize.

You're not good stuff, nothing sugar coated here. Katie, we gotta tell the truth. This is the way it is, and it's important. So, right anyway. Well, Crystal, Edward, David, Sunday, all you guys, thank you so much.

We're gonna, you're gonna keep getting invitations to us when these when this type of information changes, and we'd love for you to attend all of our webinars. We really are out there in front of text texting, as well as voice changes in the industry. We're super excited next year, by the way, to talk to all of you more about RCS, the sort of the future of texting, which is not really texting anymore, guys. It's like, imagine delivering a full app experience as a text message to your messaging app that happens to land in the same place as an SMS or an MMS, and we're super excited to be one of the first companies that's adopted that standard. We're building our APIs and next year is going to be super exciting. It's not available yet. Don't believe anything. A lot of these people tell you it's not available. There's no pricing, right? There's no way to build an RCS campaign today, but it's coming, and we're going to be one of the first ones to do it. And on the voice side, you know, we're really excited. We're going to be launching branded, vetted calling in 2025 where we can sort of get rid of this whole spam. Likely thing, put your logo on your calls, even then, not all the mobile carriers have signed up, or have allowed us to sign up for that yet, but I'm very excited, Katie, as we are looking at q4 here next year is going to be even more crazy and interesting than it was this year. Buckle up guys. Stay along for the ride, and we'll guys ahead of the curve. So Katie, it's good to have you back in the in the in the seat of things. Congrats, yes, thank you, and we will continue. So everybody, have a great day. Have a great Thanksgiving, a great holiday, if we don't see you. And if you, by the way, if you have any questions, you know, reply to the email that you're gonna get with a recording of this webinar. I get every reply. If you have more questions, let me know. I can get them to Katie, get it to the team, and we'll, you know, we'll get you all the answers.