This article guides you through setting up a sign-up form, managing consent, and ensuring subscribers are properly opted-in to receive your SMS or MMS messages.
The overall opt-in experience that we’re setting up in this article, is as follows:
1. Create a sign-up form
In Surveys, pages, and forms, create a sign-up form for your contacts.
Learn how to create a sign-up form in Create a survey or form.
Here are some essential elements you should consider including or using in your form:
Add a Form block: Text box
The form block text box provides a place for the contact to enter their mobile number.
Settings:
Question type: Contact mobile number
Default country: Choose a default country
To prevent international numbers from being entered, select Show on default.
Learn how in Form: Add a question with a text box.
Capture both email and mobile number
We recommend setting up the form to capture both email and mobile numbers to unify contacts in your account.
If you collect these two channels separately, it will create duplicate records for the same contact.
Use consent check boxes for mobile and email
You should add individual check boxes for both email and mobile opt-in. The SMS consent check box must be optional, as well as the mobile number field in the form.
Learn how to Add a consent check box.
Add contacts that sign up to a program
In the form’s submit actions, you can choose to add respondents to a list or enrol them in a program, such as your welcome plan or opt-in flow.
Learn how to Configure submit actions.
2. Create an SMS/MMS double opt-in and confirmation campaign
Create an opt-in campaign
At this step, you should create a triggered campaign that serves as your double opt-in confirmation.
Learn how in Create an SMS campaign.
Important tips for setting up your opt-in campaign:
Name the campaign Double Opt-In.
Make sure you include details about the keyword for double opt-in.
Example:
Dotdigital: Please reply "YES" to receive exclusive news, alerts, promotions, and abandoned cart reminders via SMS.' In this example, the word YES is the double opt-in keyword.
Create a confirmation campaign
You need to create a new SMS campaign that includes confirmation text to welcome the contact and inform them how to opt-out.
Learn how to create an SMS campaign in Create an SMS campaign.
Important tips for your confirmation campaign:
Create a new campaign and enter your confirmation text.
Example confirmation text:
“Dotdigital: Thank you for joining our community. Visit our website to learn more. Reply HELP for help or STOP to opt out."
3. Set up the double opt-in keyword
To create the double opt-in keyword, use an SMS auto-responder that triggers your SMS/MMS confirmation campaign when the word ‘Yes’ is received.
Learn how to create an auto-responder in Create a trigger word auto-responder.
Important tips for your auto-responder:
Name the auto-responder "Double Opt-In"
Choose the virtual mobile number to trigger the SMS/MMS campaign.
Add the trigger word YES
Set the auto-responder to trigger the SMS/MMS confirmation campaign.
For Response frequency, select Keep responding with the relevant campaign.
For Actions, choose to add contacts to a "SMS Double Opted-In Contacts" list. This is should be your master SMS list containing all opted-in contacts.
Set the auto-responder to active before using.
4. Create an opt-in program
At this point, you must create an opt-in program to manage the opt-in process for your contacts. If you’re collecting both email and SMS, your opt-in program can include both channel nodes to send each campaign.
Learn how to build a program in Program builder.
Important tips for your opt-in program:
After the start node, add a decision node to check if the mobile number field is not empty.
Connect the yes route to the SMS/MMS campaign node to send the double opt-in campaign containing the double opt-in keyword.
After the SMS campaign node, include an Add Contact node to add these contacts to a list named "SMS Contacts - Pending Confirmation."
Connect the Add Contact node to the email campaign node and continue the opt-in/welcome flow.
Useful links for creating your opt-in program
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5. Create a program to update the SMS pending confirmation list
It’s best practice to create a program to sort your pending SMS contacts into a separate list. You can do this by creating another program.
Learn how to build a program in Program builder.
Important tips for your sorting program:
Set the start node criteria to run daily and every time a contact meets the start node criteria.
Set up the enrolment rule to trigger from Segment. In your segment add a lists block to the include box and choose the "SMS Double Opted-In" list.
Set the logic to check contacts who are present in this list.
After the start node, set up a Remove contact node to remove these contacts from the "SMS - Pending Confirmation" list.
Useful links for creating your opt-in program
This program keeps the SMS - Pending Confirmation list updated. When setting up automations with SMS campaigns, you can exclude contacts on this list to avoid sending SMS campaigns to contacts who have not completed the double opt-in process.
