2026-10-30
Texting clients: consent, the rules and what to keep
Text messages book more appointments than email ever will, and they are also where US businesses get themselves into trouble. The rules are short, and the records are the whole defence.
Consent is a sentence, not a checkbox
Before you send marketing texts, the person has to agree to receive them, and the agreement has to be specific: who is texting, what about, that automated messages may be used, that consent is not a condition of buying anything, and how to stop.
That wording belongs next to the button on your form, not buried in terms nobody opens. A pre-ticked box is not consent anywhere in the United States.
Store the proof with the enquiry
Keep the exact wording the person saw, the time, the page address, the device and the network address, attached to that enquiry. Not a note that says consent given.
If the question ever comes up, this record is the answer, and reconstructing it afterwards is not possible. Set it up once and it collects itself.
Honour every stop immediately
Reply STOP, UNSUBSCRIBE, CANCEL, END or QUIT must all work, and they must work across every system you use. A client who opted out of marketing and still receives it is the most common way this goes wrong.
Appointment reminders for an existing booking are a different matter from marketing, but treat a clear stop as final either way and keep the contact by email instead.
What this costs when it is ignored
In the US the exposure for unwanted messages is set per message and is measured in hundreds of dollars each, before anyone counts how many were sent. It is the one marketing mistake that scales faster than the marketing did.
None of this is a reason to avoid texting. It is a reason to collect consent properly, store it, and use a system that stops when somebody says stop.
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