Optimizing Text Delivery for Communicate Messages

If you're like most of us, you've probably sent thousands of texts from your personal phone and never    wondered, "Will my text get delivered?" 

 

In the realm of mass business texting, however, delivery is an important question. Cell carriers are constantly monitoring mass texting traffic over their networks for potential spam or phishing, and they have the prerogative to delay or block messages from being delivered to end recipients.

 

Here are a few suggestions from TeamSense to improve your text message delivery when sending Communicate messages.

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The most important thing you can do is to respect your message recipients (your employees 👷‍♀️) and respect the codes and regulations of cell carriers 📱.

 

Here are a few tips:

 

We know many of you LOVE to send Communicate messages - and we love that you love it! However, please respect your employees and hold yourself back from sending too many texts. It's frustrating to be an employee and receive multiple texts a day from your employer, and employees will quickly tune them out or simply unsubscribe from messages. After all, you don't want this to be your employees' reaction when they open their texts:

 

 

 

Please respect your employees and reign in your excitement in sending messages. At TeamSense, we recommend sending no more than 2-4 Communicate messages to a given employee each week. If you find yourself feeling limited by that (we totally get it), talk to your Customer Success Manager about creative ways to use the TeamSense Portal to help employees find information on their own.

 

 

Free, public URL shorteners are frequently used in phishing attempts, and carriers consider them extremely suspicious. According to The Code of Conduct for the AT&T Short Code and 10-Digit A2P SMS Messages and the T-Mobile Code of Conduct: 

 

In our experience at TeamSense, free links from public URL shorteners like Tinyurl or Bitly almost always will cause your message to be blocked by the carrier. If you must use a URL shortener, we recommend setting up a unique, branded shortener (e.g., through a paid plan with a URL shortener service like Bitly) - you stand a much higher chance of having your message delivered.

 

 

An explosion of emojis and poor spelling or grammar can be an indicator of a spam or phishing attempt.

 

 

Text messaging is regulated in the United States and Canada in order to protect individuals from unwanted messaging like spam, fraud, abuse, or illegal activity. As a result, applications (like TeamSense) are forbidden from sending text messages with content that may be illegal or suspect. If you are attempting to send a message via TeamSense Communicate and see an error that the message "violates our terms," it means your message could not be sent due to content that is forbidden by regulators and/or cell carriers.

Examples of content that are forbidden by regulators and/or cell carriers include (but are not limited to):

• Potential scams, such as messages about high-risk financial services like payday loans or cryptocurrency, or "get rich quick" schemes
• Messages regarding debt collection or credit repair
• Messages related to gambling
• Messages discussing activities illegal by federal law, including illegal drug use (*Note this includes references to cannabis, which is federally illegal in the United States)
• Messages related to hate speech, firearms, sex, tobacco, or alcohol