Text Messaging Best Practices

When updating your contact list into Votervoice, all contacts MUST be previously opted-in from your previous SMS carrier to be fully accepted into VoterVoice. You are not permitted to upload contacts that have not previously selected to opt-in to SMS messaging. VoterVoice is not responsible for any violations to the SMS policy for broadcasting if contact numbers are uploaded outside this criteria.

How do you get the best response rates on your call to action text messages? How do you ensure they get through to your advocates so they can act quickly?

Employ these best practices to ensure high rates of delivery to your mobile audience:

1. Keep your message short and concise, similar to a subject line.
   Think of how your audience receives your text message. They see a notification come in and quickly skim the first sentence looking for valuable information. Sending longer text messages usually just means more cost to you (segments used) that most advocates will not see.
   
   
2. Communicate regularly with your audience.
   Each organization should find the cadence that works best for them, but if you sign advocates up without communicating for too long, the likelihood increases that they’ll unsubscribe the next time you do. We suggest updating consent (making sure people still want to receive text messages from you) roughly every 30 days as it tends to be unreliable after that period of time.
   
   
3. Always make it unambiguously clear that you (your organization) are the sender of the message.
   As opposed to an email where you employ familiar branding your advocates recognize, in a text message you must always make it clear, in text, who the text message is coming from. This helps remind your advocates who they’re getting the message from and helps your organization keep unsubscribes low.
   
   
4. Similar to email best practices, avoid all caps pressure messaging like: URGENT, FREE, ACT NOW.
   The carriers (AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, etc.) scan the content of messages going out for spam just like email service providers do. Pressure messaging can result in your messages being filtered out by the carriers so they do not reach your audience.
   

If you ever find yourself on the fence about the content you’re about to send out: put yourself in your advocates’ shoes. Consider how you would react if you received the message you are about to send.