When you purchase a new number to send SMS or MMS messages in the United States or Canada, you must complete a number registration form in Dotdigital, which provides us with all the information we need to submit and process the registration of the new number for you.

Complete the number registration form

To access the registration form, contact your Customer Success representative who can enable this on your account.

To locate the form in Dotdigital, expand the User menu and go to Settings > SMS settings > US and Canada SMS/MMS applications.

Register your brand

Brand registration is the first step in setting up to send SMS and MMS campaigns. This step helps mobile network operators to verify that your business is a legitimate one that’s registered with the federal government.

Information collected under the Company and contact information section of the form helps us in registering your brand. You must ensure that all of the requested information matches what is registered with your organisation’s Federal Employer ID Number (FEIN). If this information isn’t correct, brand verification fails and we can’t set up your campaigns.

Register your campaigns

In marketing, a campaign generally refers to a particular message, or set of messages, for a specific purpose, for example, for Black Friday.

In Dotdigital, we also refer to an individual email or SMS marketing message as a campaign.

In mobile messaging specifically, a campaign refers to the specific type of messaging as well as the content of the messaging you plan to send.

Campaign registration is a longer process than brand registration and usually requires you to make changes to your website and marketing material in order to ensure compliant sending. Once a mobile messaging campaign is registered with the networks, you can use it for your ongoing Dotdigital campaigns.

Our number application form guides you through all the required information.

Brand details

This section of the form is specific to the brand sending the messaging to the end user. If you’re a third-party sender, this needs to be your clients information. The brand name must be displayed in all of your messaging, so you should make sure that it’s not too long and is easily identified by your recipients.

Opt-in experience

This section of the form collects the information needed for the carriers to confirm how you are opting end users into your messaging campaigns.

Use the tooltips next to each section to guide you through how to complete them.

You can also generate the call-to-action (CTA)/Opt-in and the opt-in confirmation message here, so you can be sure that the wording around your campaigns is 100% network compliant.

Campaign details

In this section, you must provide additional information including an example message for expected traffic.

Based on the campaign types you select, you’re provided with additional boxes to populate with more examples.

If there's any required language or standard responses for your use case(s), we populate the required wording for you.

Inbound message responses

In this section, we populate your START/STOP/HELP messages for you. The provided messaging has been pre-approved by the networks. We put this messaging in place for you.

If you want to make any changes, you must contact your Customer Success representative before doing so, to ensure your messaging remains compliant.

Once you have completed the form, you can use the wording provided for you to create your opt-in page and update your Privacy policy and Terms and conditions.

We confirm with you once the number registration process is complete and your number is live and ready for sending, so that you can make the opt-in page available to users.

Next steps

Once you have finished your application, there are just a few steps remaining before you can start sending.

Reviews

Once you’ve submitted your form, it’s time for your campaigns to be reviewed.

This is a multistep process that can take anywhere from one to six weeks depending on the type of number you’re using to send.

Your Customer Success representative can give you more information on the likely timeframe for your particular application.

The steps for review:

Dotdigital review: 2—3 business days
We review your campaign and let your Customer Success representative know if any changes need to be made. Most commonly, the changes required relate to sample messages, terms and conditions, privacy policy and CTA opt-in language.

You can avoid most delays at this stage by using the suggested language provided in our form and adding it where needed as soon as you submit your campaign.

Aggregator review: 5—7 business days
Aggregators are partners to the carriers who provide additional review of all campaigns prior to approval.

If you have all of the suggested wording we provided to you in place, changes requested from the aggregator are generally around content, or any new requirements that have been put in place. You must be responsive to any requested changes in order to maintain the approval timeline.

For short code applications only - Carrier review: 10—20 business days
Once our aggregator partners are satisfied with the submitted campaign, they submit it to the carriers for approval. Carriers test to ensure that all of the content matches what was submitted in the campaign.

We put all of this messaging in place for you based on the information provided in your application.

Approval

Once your campaign has been approved, your Customer Success representative reaches out to you to confirm.

You should then:

Perform some test sends to make sure that everything is working as expected.
Learn more in Create an SMS campaign.

You can contact us with any questions or concerns that come up during testing.

Make sure that your campaigns match what was submitted to the aggregators and carriers.
To avoid any issues with your sends, consult your Customer Success representative before making any changes.

Consider how to opt-in your existing contacts.
Any existing phone numbers in your CRM are not eligible to receive your messaging because they have not yet opted in. To begin sending to these contacts, contact your Customer Success representative for best practices around opting these customers in.

Send SMS and MMS in the US and Canada 4: Register your number