Okay, A2P 10 DLC, what does it mean? Why is it important? And how do you integrate it with your high-level accounts, sub-accounts, workflows with onboarding, and not tear your hair out the entire time? We're going to cover all of that in today's video.
So A2P stands for Application to Person and 10 DLC stands for 10-Digit Long Code. So this is compliance around businesses sending text messages with phone numbers, which are 10-Digit Long Codes. Basically, these are rules being enacted both by the US government and carriers such as AT&T, T-Mobile, etc. to reduce the number of spam messages that are actually being sent by businesses or others, increase the deliverability from businesses that are actually taking marketing through text seriously. And really there's two considerations here. How do I manage this for my own business to make sure that my texts are getting delivered?
And how do I manage this for my clients'businesses so that they can market through text effectively? We're going to cover both in this video. Now, a quick note, in the past I have recommended cold texting as a strategy. super illegal, but in a B2B sense, you getting nailed for this and fined is rare, especially based on the volume that most of the people watching this video would be sending.
I'll talk a little bit later in this video about how you still may be able to pull off cold texting, a little bit of a workaround, but the majority of this video is going to be completely white hat. Let's just get this thing done and make sure that it's efficient every single time we onboard someone. So when it comes to sending texts through high level, there are really four options.
The first one is a low volume mixed use campaign. I would say 90% of the people watching this video should go with this option. Secondly, we have a standard campaigns, which allow you to send way, way more messages.
These are designed for massive companies. The fees are also way higher, so I probably wouldn't recommend signing up for it for most of you. But again, you can also send way more messages.
On the screen is the difference between low volume and standard. It's worth noting that in each of these campaigns, you can do a mixed use or you can do a specific use like customer care, marketing, or two-factor authentication, for example. I would always recommend doing mixed because what's the point of having...
registration for only one of those things when you're probably going to be doing all of them. The third option is a toll-free number. These are recently requiring registration that used to not require them. And the process here is just like buying a local area code phone number inside of high level, except you put some kind of 800 number at the beginning, like 811, 833, something like that. And as of recently, these are requiring registration to send any significant amount of volume.
So in my opinion, it doesn't really make sense to sign up for these toll-free numbers. Local area codes are going to have better deliverability. higher send volume and you still have to register them anyway. So may as well just go ahead and do that.
And then lastly, you can do a third party integration. So some high level users have figured out how to plug in something like click send to their high level account to save money on SMS fees because the fees are egregious from Twilio outside of the US. Now, from what I understand, these aren't perfect integrations and no one's really built a system that's better than the native high-level lead connector phone system. So unless you're super techie and you want to figure that out, I recommend you stick with lead connector phone system. All right.
So now with all of that out of the way, let's actually go and do this live for a real client. I'm going to show you how I set it up, some hacks I have for making this quick and easy on you and some troubleshooting steps if things aren't working for you. So I actually have a live client we're going to go through. That's a real business we're setting this up for. So you know, this works.
And what I did was just assigned to my client, Hey, please go fill out everything inside of settings and business profile here, which they have done. So they've set up their business type, business industry, type of registration, business registration number, authorized representative, and they've saved all of that. Now, a quick note here, something that's changed recently in this process. If I click on this business type, these are the only options, cooperative, corporation, LLC, or sole proprietorship, which used to be separate, nonprofit, corporation, and partnership. Most people watching this video, you and your clients are likely a limited liability company or a sole prop.
So most of you will be selecting this. This client happens to be a corporation. So we'll see how it goes with that classification.
Beautiful. So now that all of that is filled out, we're going to go to phone numbers and then trust center. If you don't see this trust center thing showing up, it's probably because you're not on lead connector phone system or this sub account isn't.
So go switch to that by going to the agency level phone settings. Perfect. The next thing to do is hit start registering now. Now it's going to ask me if I'm registered in the US or Canada, and it's going to ask this basic question about whether or not we have a tax ID.
This client does. If you don't, for some reason, maybe you're working with like independent contractors that don't have this, you'd hit no. and then that will give you a few different steps after this but it's not going to be too different than what we go over in this video now it's going to automatically pull everything from the business settings and put it in here now it's going to ask me do i want to do low volume standard or high volume standard for most people watching this video you're never going to need more than 6 000 segments per day and you're just going to end up paying a lot of extra fees if you select high volume standards so i wouldn't recommend doing that now you can see it's telling us to acknowledge that a one-time fee of 21 is going to be charged And then this fee can be charged multiple times if we fail. That's something really important to pay attention to.
You want to get this right the first time. And then this additional campaign fee of up to $12 per month will apply in accordance with TCR rules. Now, if we actually go check the high level help doc on this, you can see there's a brand registration fee, which apparently is $4 one time for the sole prop and the low volume and $50 one time for the standard brand registration fee, which would be this. high volume. However, on top of all of that, it's going to be a 1654 one-time registration if you had the time of vetting.
Now, in practice, I have actually seen these come out lower and of course high level is sort of contradicting itself here saying it's going to be 20.95 when the numbers here are completely different anyway just know it's going to be around this much it's the cost of doing business and these are changing all the time anyways so don't stress out too much about these fees sweet i'm going to hit continue and now it's asking me to switch my campaign use case so this is what i was talking about earlier where there's like 12 different options of what we can sign the client up for and if you're only planning on using it for one thing go ahead but my assumption is most of you are going to be using this for something like customer care and marketing so you may as well do the low volume mix easy to see a process and fees are less so that's great all right now for the worst part what do we actually put in these dang boxes here well the nice thing about high level here is they're providing an example that we can just copy and paste into each one of them and we just replace you know the company name here i have something that i use each time i do this so i'm just going to pop it in here and it says this campaign sends appointment information confirmation reminder messages as well as promotional material for special offers to our customers once they have booked an appointment with us on our website and opted in to receive promotional and notification sms from us something like this is all you need as far as i know you don't have to mention the company name in here it probably doesn't hurt but i'm not sure it helps either next up sample message one now let's go ahead and see what we can put on here okay boom now we have put both of our sample messages in here and i really need you to pay attention because this is super important at the bottom here you can see the message will include an embedded link And secondly, the messages will include phone numbers. So if you check these, you need to actually put those into your sample messages. Also in your description, if you're saying I'm doing confirmation reminder messages or I'm doing marketing promotions, your sample message should be an example of a confirmation and reminders text and an example of a promotion. So that's exactly what I've done here.
The example is, hi, this is Amy from blank. Your appointment for blank for appointment date slash time. These aren't real merge fields.
You can just put whatever you want in there is confirmed. Please give us a call at number to reschedule. So I've included that phone number there. And then this is super important at the bottom, dash, name of the business, reply, stop, done, subscribe. Sample message two.
Hi, this is Amy from Business Name. We have a special for Braces slash Invisalign going on during January. More information at, here's the link to our website.
Let me know if you'd like me to get you scheduled, dash, name of the business, reply, stop, done, subscribe. Now, a question I got once on this, what do I do if the actual name of the business isn't the name that they go by colloquially? For example, let's say the name of my business was Marketing Professional Services, Inc., which doesn't sound very good in a text, but most people just know me as Keaton. They talk to me as Keaton. What do we do here is put the actual legal name of the business here in sample message one and sample message two.
But in practice, I don't have to put that every single time I send that out to people. It's just for the purposes of getting approved. All right, next up is consent. And this is where things can get really tricky. So hang with me because this is where most people get denied.
For this to get approved, you need two things. You need to send them a form that shows you have a consent checkbox. And that form has to link to a terms of service that actually has real terms of service for this business.
So if your client already happens to have both of those things on their website. They have a form that has a check box at the end that says, I consent to receive messages from this business. And I agree to these terms and conditions and the terms and conditions are linked.
Then you can skip the next one to two minutes of this video. If your client doesn't have that set up already, and you're just like, I need to get this going. I'm going to show you how we do a quick setup for this inside of high level just to get this person approved. And then later down the line, you can actually link those terms and conditions to their site and do it all properly. But this has worked for me to get approved fast.
which is what i'm trying to help you with in this video so the first thing you're going to do is come to this page agency sas.io free dash a2p dash assistant and this is powered by a company called formwise friends of mine very cool company check it out link below in the description it allows you to make your own forms like this with custom prompts for your customers and basically what this does is shortcuts you having to create the really good prompt for chat gpt and all you do is submit the name of the business in here and it fills it in all right so i filled this out one note here is that it only lets you click one of these don't worry about it just select one it's not a big deal and i put my own email here because i don't want them sending any emails to my clients so i'm going to hit generate a2p copy it'll gather those answers for us and as you can see it's generating everything that we need but the main one i'm interested in here is this terms of service thing so it's given us the entire terms of service outlined here i'm going to go ahead and copy this and all i'm going to do now is go back to this sub account in another tab go to sites click new funnel and name this terms and conditions create i will add a new step and call it tnc and create from blank Now you don't even need a domain connected to this. I'm just going to use the main domain that I use for my software. So I'm going to go small, add row, one column, add element, headline. And I'm going to call this business name, terms and conditions, SMS.
Then underneath that, I'm going to add a paragraph and I'm going to paste all of this. I'll make the font a little bit bigger and go through and format this a little bit better. All right.
So I finished printing up that terms and conditions here. You can pause and read the entire thing if you want, but basically what this has done is just covered all our bases. I've formatted it correctly and And the person that's checking if this campaign is compliant is going to come to this page and make sure that we have this.
So now it's set up. This is an example of another terms of service that that same form spit out to me. So I don't know if they recently changed what was in there, but I think this one looks a little bit better.
I'll go ahead and put the copy just in the description below this so you can check it out. Make sure you swap out the name or your business's name. But my hunch is that either of these will work. They're just looking for the fact that we actually have it in the first place.
All right. So now that this is set up, I'm going to go ahead and hit preview and we're going to copy this URL, leaving out this no track equals true. And then I'm going to go. back and the next thing we need to do is set up a form because people actually have to opt in via the form right so we'll go here to forms builder go ahead and add a form and look at that it spit out a beautiful form for us right away we don't even have to do anything so in this terms and conditions step here right now it's linked it won't show me what it's linked to but it's definitely not linked to what we want it to be linked to so i'm going to delete that and say terms and conditions and then highlight this and hit link and i'm just linking what i made in that page and as you saw there the url didn't even have the business's url in it it's just the preview url including my white label software's streamline.io beautiful so one more thing is to swap this button text out for submit instead of just saying button and now we'll go ahead and hit preview and i will copy this link and go back to here where we're finishing up so how do leads contacts consent to receive messages what i'm going to say here is and users opt in by visiting, then I'm going to link this form and filling in their details. Users check a box that shows their consent to receive SMS messages.
That is it. Now again, that won't work unless you've actually linked to the terms and conditions. Let's go ahead and check one more time here. Beautiful. It looks like I missed that S.
I'll go ahead and fix that before I hit submit. But other than that, we're looking good. Now lastly, this opt in message, let's go ahead and update that.
This is what mine said. You have successfully opted in to receive notification and promotional SMS from name of the business. Please reply stop if you need to opt out in the future.
These are the opt-in keywords. Nice and easy. And now we're ready to submit. So I will hit submit and now moment of truth.
Our brand is in progress and the campaign will start after the brand gets approved. In my experience, this is taking like 24 to 48 hours and I will show you now how it went. Alrighty. So I know we're all exhausted from that whole process, but let's just talk about a few troubleshooting steps. If something isn't working for you.
Number one. Maybe you're in a certain industry like mortgage lending, for example, where I saw somebody post in the Facebook group, I can't get any of my mortgage lenders approved. What's going wrong? And apparently you need to add something at the very bottom of their landing page where the form is that says name of the person is a licensed mortgage broker for company name. Who knew?
But maybe there's something similar for your industry. Ask around, search in the Facebook group, use the search function there. It's super helpful. I use it almost every single day. Next up is for ongoing compliance.
If you followed everything I showed you to the T in this video, then I don't see any other reason why you should be getting disapproved. However, if you do, the next step besides posting or asking the Facebook group would be to go to speakwith.us forward slash Kate. She's the resident A2P10 DLC guru at high level, and she can help you out.
Link below in the description. Now bear with me because this is actually going to be helpful, what I'm about to share. Ongoing compliance. How do you actually make sure that you stay compliant and is it important to stay compliant after you get approved? Well, from what I can tell, they aren't really cracking down on anything once you get the approval.
If you don't add reply, stop, opt out at the end of every single message, you don't add sender information at the end of every single message. Are you going to go to jail? Probably not. Is there technically a risk there? Probably.
But like this story you see on the screen, sometimes it's just better to ask for forgiveness than permission. And it's important to know that technically you don't need to add reply, stop, opt out after every single message. It's just after the first message. So what I like to do is go into business settings here again and remove this, make SMS compliant by adding an opt out message because it's going to send after every single message you send. and check all of these, click disable opt out, confirm, and instead just add that language after the first text that you send inside of a workflow.
Now, important to note here, if you are sending this, I like to remove the word stop and instead create a custom workflow that responds to this word instead reply out to unsubscribe. And the reason for that is that out isn't going to trigger Twilio and therefore damage that number. Stop will, so every time someone replies stop, you're getting this ding against your number. and they're getting unsubscribed.
However, if you just switch to reply out to unsubscribe, you can automatically turn on DND for SMS without actually getting your phone number dinged with Twilio like we saw in that example earlier. Now, none of this is legal advice whatsoever, just stuff that I like to do because I'm okay with being a little bit greyhound. But if you want to be 100% on the up and up, definitely do stop. Just know that a lot of people will probably stop after the very first message. And that just renders this whole process moot, in my opinion, because you can't even text the people that opted in and said, I want you to text me.
I really don't understand it. Now, lastly, cold SMS. Yes, it's illegal. Yes, you probably shouldn't do it, but if you want to do it, it's kind of juicy. Check out this company called unistack.io.
They specialize in cold texting. They've been doing it for a really long time and they will do this whole H2P 10 DLC process for you if you want to use cold texting for outreach. You're taking your life into your own hands there, but good luck to you if you want to do it.
Now, before we close out, if you want to learn more about the fees associated with this, definitely check out this video about high levels hidden fees. Thanks for tuning in and we'll see you in the next one.