Mobile Marketers Still Not TCPA Compliant As Deadline Draws Near

With the new Telephone and Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) guidelines going into effect starting October 16th, 2013, several mobile marketers and SMS marketers are still not TCPA compliant. If you are not TCPA compliant by October 16th, you could be facing fines upwards of $1500 per unsolicited text. This means if you have not implemented an auditable consent for all of your customers in your mobile database, you are at risk of being fined by the TCPA.

A recent review of 50 brands found that hardly any of them are TCPA compliant. They are compliant with the old guidelines, but they will still be exposing themselves to possible fines if they do not compile written consent from everyone in their exisiting opt-in database. To be more specific, if you currently have an existing database, you need to somehow get all of your subscribers to re-opt in to your database with written proof that they have read and agreed to the new TCPA disclaimer terms.

An important thing to note about the new guidelines is that they are applied retroactively. This means that if you do not have written consent from members of your existing database by October 16th, you can no longer continue to message those individuals legally. Excuses aren’t going to fly either since this deadline was announced over a year ago. Get compliant or get sued! It’s as simple as that.

Considering recent TCPA lawsuits have risen by 60% over the past year, we would advise you to immediately set the wheels in motion for compliance or you will be risking not only non-compliance, but exposing yourself and your company to significant legal action. Do the math; if you have thousands of people in your mobile database, and you illegally text all of them, that means you will be fined around $1500 per text. This can only mean a financial and legal disaster that could very well put any mobile marketing agency under. DON’T RISK IT!!!

How To Get Written Proof

If you are not currently compliant, read the following very closely. You can obtain the required written signature from your customers in a number of ways. You can get it through email, through a website form, a text message, a telephone key press, or through a voice recording. You will have to change your calls-to-action on anything related to your mobile marketing program to include the necessary language as required by the TCPA. The customers need to read and agree, in written form, to receive SMS messages from a particular brand on the mobile number they’ve provided. They also need to provide written proof that they understand that they are NOT required to give their consent as a condition of purchasing services or products. This needs to be clearly and concisely communicated through ALL calls-to-action. This includes any media promoting the mobile marketing campaign along with the SMS opt-in flow on your customers’ phones. You will also have to include a prompt to your customers to reply “Yes” to confirm that they understood all of this.

For MMS, only one message will be required, however, with SMS, you may have to use 2 or more text messages to get all the information across. The bottom line is that ALL OF THE INFORMATION NEEDS TO BE IN THE MESSAGE.

Additional Important Information

Note that any non-marketing related messages do not apply to this new rule. One-time transactions, along the lines of texting a keyword to a short code to receive a coupon, with no further messages, are also excluded from the new rule. Of course, if you are a marketer that already gathers express written consent from your subscribers, you should already be in good shape. However, if you are a smaller company that doesn’t pay particular mind to the rules, or even worse, you spam people, we can guarantee you that you are not currently TCPA compliant. If you are not compliant, you have about two weeks to get compliant, so we would advise you to not waste time on this. Yours and your company’s future could depend on it.