If you noticed your SMS marketing not working lately and text messages not sending, there’s a reason for that. Twilio SMS not working means you haven’t properly complied with SMS and outbound call marketing regulations. Don’t worry, there’s a fix… but it takes 3 – 5 weeks. There’s a workaround, but your agency should know what that is. We’ll keep that secret to ourselves for the moment.
Troubleshooting Guide: Why Your Text Messages Aren't Sending in SMS Marketing
It’s because for years Twilio and other providers have been warning people to submit their business and brand profile and all the necessary information they need to approve a company to utilize their platform. Aren’t you sick of spammy text messages? Yeah, so are the rest of us. So to solve that, Twilio (and others) now mandate that a business provides their:
- Tax EIN number
- Legal entity name
- Type of legal entity
- Address of entity
- Phone number
- Registered agents of the company
Once you have submitted this it will take a bit of time to get approved, but that’s only the first step.
Second Step to Getting Twilio Approval for Sending SMS and Outbound Calling
After your business is approved, you now can submit a mock campaign that you intend to actually use Twilio for. In other words, what will the voice drops sound like? What will the text messages be? How will people opt-in/opt-out? It’s a bit of a lengthy process but not impossible.
The other thing is this:
You need to make sure your privacy policy and terms and conditions state what you will be doing for your marketing. You also need to make sure all the forms on your website explicitly state that you will be sending text messages, and to opt into your mailing list, it must NOT be a required field.
In other words: people must agree and WANT to be on your SMS list.
Third Step? CNAM Approval to Unlock Successful SMS Delivery
After you get your business profile approved and your campaign approved, now you can apply for a CNAM.
CNAM stands for “Caller ID Name.” It refers to the name of the caller that is displayed on the recipient’s phone when a call is received, alongside the phone number. CNAM lookups allow businesses and individuals to identify who is calling them by name, rather than just by a phone number.
Here’s a breakdown of how CNAM works:
- Storage: Telephone companies store a caller’s name in a special database. Each phone number can be associated with a particular name in this database.
2. Lookup: When a call is made, the recipient’s phone carrier can perform a CNAM lookup to retrieve the caller’s name from the database.
3. Display: The recipient’s phone then displays the caller’s name along with the phone number on the screen when the call comes in.
CNAM can be particularly valuable for businesses. For instance, if a business wants its company name to show up when it calls its clients, it would work with its telecommunications provider to set up a specific CNAM record.
It’s worth noting that CNAM differs from caller ID in that caller ID only transmits the phone number of the caller, while CNAM provides the name associated with that number.
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