Get consent, and be able to show it
Only text people who gave you their number for this purpose — customers you served, who agreed to reminders. Do not buy lists and do not import numbers scraped from anywhere. Keep a note of how and when each customer opted in.
Say who you are in every message
The first thing in the message should be your business name. Customers get texts from unfamiliar numbers all day; an unidentified message reads as spam and gets reported as spam, which hurts delivery for everyone sending from that number.
Honour opt-outs instantly and permanently
- STOP, UNSUBSCRIBE, CANCEL, END and QUIT should all remove the person immediately.
- Never message an opted-out customer again, even from a different campaign.
- Give an equivalent unsubscribe link in every marketing email.
- Keep opt-out status visible to you so you know who you can no longer reach.
Respect quiet hours and timezones
Sending outside roughly 8am to 9pm in the recipient's local time is both rude and, in many places, restricted. If you serve customers across timezones, your system needs to hold messages until it is morning where they are — not where you are.
Keep marketing separate from service messages
A reminder that a customer's service is due is expected and welcome. A discount blast is marketing and deserves a higher bar for consent and frequency. Blurring the two is what turns a useful reminder channel into something people mute.
Protect deliverability
- Cap how many messages any one person can receive per day.
- Avoid link shorteners that carriers associate with spam; use your own short links.
- Do not send the same message to your entire list at once, repeatedly.
- Clean out numbers that consistently fail — they signal a stale list.
What Averflow handles for you
Opt-out keywords are processed automatically and permanently, every text carries your business name and address, messages are held until a civil hour in the recipient's timezone, booking links run on your own domain, and each customer has a hard daily message cap.