Businesses looking to send SMS/MMS messages in the US and Canada must adhere to specific regulations and guidelines.

Once you are ready to begin setting up your SMS/MMS marketing, you're given a brand and campaign verification form. This form is intended to register both your company and your SMS traffic with the mobile network operators. Fines for unlawful messaging in the US can be as high as $2,000 per text message, so it is important that this form is completed accurately.

Our form has been created to make it as easy as possible for you. We take care of completing all of the STOP/HELP/OPT-IN messaging that is required for compliance, so that you can focus on creating your marketing campaigns.

You're also provided with the language required for your CTA, so that you are 100 per cent sure you are collecting opt ins in a legal and compliant way. Based on the type of messaging you plan to send (marketing and/or transactional) you are required to present either one or two separate CTA opt ins. We help you identify what your use case(s) require and get you the appropriate wording.

We also provide you with a completed terms and conditions paragraph that must be added to your current wording in order to be compliant in the US/CAN. This copy is automatically generated for you once you have completed the brand and campaign verification form.

One thing that must remain your responsibility is the required language that must be added to your privacy policy. To offer some guidance, we’ve added templates for you below:

If you ARE NOT using abandoned cart messaging:

“{Brand} will not sell or share any information collected via their SMS/MMS campaigns to any third parties for marketing purposes. Additionally, while {brand} does use cookies on their website, these are not used for anything other than to match you up with your information and provide the best experience while using {website}”

If you ARE using abandoned cart messaging:

“{Brand} will not sell or share any information collected via their SMS/MMS campaigns to any third parties for marketing purposes. Additionally, {Brand} automatically collects information when visiting our website, which may include cookies, third-party tracking technologies, and server logs. A cookie is a string of information that a website stores on a visitor's computer, and that the visitor's browser provides to the website each time the visitor returns. {Brand} uses cookies to determine when a visitor's cart has been abandoned and to keep track of the items placed in the cart, as well as to perform other crucial ecommerce capabilities.

SMS and MMS traffic in the US and Canada is regulated and run through filters that are intended to catch bad actors and stop the flow of spam, as well as inappropriate and non-compliant traffic.

Filtering is done using AI and is constantly evolving, but we try hard to stay on top of it to help ensure your traffic will be compliant and avoid these filters. Below you will find a list of prohibited traffic. This is not a complete list of all types of traffic that is filtered out, but will give you a great idea of what the large majority of prohibited content includes:

Always make sure to use a brand shortened URL or a Dotdigital shortened URL, such as https://dd2.io/, order to ensure delivery. Anonymous URLs, bit.ly, ow.ly, is.gd, etc. get caught in carrier filtering and result in undelivered messages.

For compliant industries/messaging involving age-sensitive content, registration for SMS campaigns must be placed behind an age gate that requires users to enter their full date of birth.

In order to be compliant you must have the following things in place:

The quiet hours for SMS marketing are between 9pm and 8am.

If you don't know the location of your customers, marketing should be complete by 6pm EST and not start before 11am EST.

A number of campaign types have particular extra requirements. Our application form guides you through what is needed for these: