What is SMS marketing consent?

SMS marketing consent means the person actively agreed to receive marketing texts from your store, knew that is what they were agreeing to, and you can show when and how they agreed. Three parts, and each one causes problems when it is missing.

Active means the person did something. A box they ticked, a form they submitted with a clear label, a keyword they texted to your number. Consent that was assumed because they were on a page, or collected through a box that was already ticked, is not the same thing.

Specific means they knew what they were agreeing to. Marketing text messages from your store, at a frequency you have described. Agreeing to receive delivery updates is not agreeing to receive promotions.

Recorded means your platform holds the timestamp, the source and the wording that was shown at the time. This is the part stores skip, and it is the part that matters if anyone ever asks. Any serious SMS platform stores it automatically as long as you collect through the platform's own forms rather than a custom one that writes numbers into a list.

This page describes the general shape. Requirements vary between countries and states and they change, so check what applies to the places you sell into, and take proper advice if you are unsure.

Someone agreeing to your emails has not agreed to your texts, and the reverse is also true. They are two separate permissions and most regimes treat text messaging more strictly than email.

The reason is straightforward. A text arrives on a device the person carries, often with a notification and sometimes with a cost to them, and there is no folder for it to sit quietly in. That intrusiveness is why the rules are tighter and why the penalties for getting it wrong tend to be heavier.

In practice this means your sign-up units need to make the distinction visible. A form that collects an email address and a phone number in one step should be clear about what each one will be used for, with separate agreement for the text messages. A checkout that offers order notifications by text should not quietly enrol the customer in marketing texts as well.

It also means you cannot take a list of phone numbers from your order data and start marketing to it. Those numbers were given for delivery. Uploading them into an SMS platform and sending a promotion is the single most common way stores get this wrong, and the fact that they are your own customers does not change it.

Collect SMS consent at the moments where the person has a reason to want texts, and keep it out of the way of the checkout itself.

The places that work: a sign-up unit on the site that offers something texts are genuinely good at, such as a restock alert or early access to a drop. A clearly labelled option at checkout, presented as a choice rather than a default, which catches buyers at the point they are already giving you a number. A post-purchase page or email, where you can ask separately once the order is done. And a keyword campaign, where someone texts a word to your number, which is the cleanest form of consent there is because the person initiated it.

What to avoid is anything that makes the checkout longer or more confusing. Extra fields and extra decisions at the payment step cost orders, and an SMS subscriber is not worth a lost sale.

On the offer itself, be honest about frequency. If your unit says occasional updates and you send three times a week, you will get opt-outs and complaints, and both are worse in SMS than in email because the volumes involved are so much smaller.

There is a set of disclosures that show up in most regimes, and including them is good practice regardless of where you sell.

At the point of sign-up: who is sending, what kind of messages, roughly how often, that message and data rates may apply, how to stop, and a link to your terms and privacy policy. In the messages themselves: your store name, so the recipient knows who is texting, and a clear way to opt out.

Then honour the opt-out immediately and completely. Standard stop words are recognised by SMS platforms automatically, but check that an opt-out in your SMS tool also flags the customer everywhere else you might text them from. Someone who has said stop and then receives a message from a different tool you use is the situation that turns an annoyance into a complaint.

Keep quiet hours. Most regimes restrict the times of day marketing texts can be sent, based on the recipient's local time rather than yours, and platforms have a setting for it. Turn it on before your first send, not after your first complaint.

Again, this is the general shape rather than a legal answer. Check your own markets.

An SMS list behaves nothing like an email list, and the way you treat it should reflect that. It will be a fraction of the size, each message costs real money to send, and the tolerance for irrelevance is far lower.

That argues for using it narrowly. The messages that suit SMS are time-sensitive and specific: your order has shipped, the thing you wanted is back, the sale ends tonight, your subscription ships tomorrow. The messages that do not suit it are the ones you would send by email anyway.

Because every send has a cost per message, frequency has a direct effect on margin as well as on opt-outs. A store sending weekly promotional texts to a large list can spend more on messaging than it makes from it.

Segment as you would with email, and hold back the people who have not engaged. And measure opt-out rate per send closely. In email an opt-out is a slow leak. In SMS, where the list is small and hard to rebuild, a single badly judged send can remove a meaningful part of an audience that took a year to collect.