Run text message marketing campaigns

In the United States, you need a person's prior express written consent before you send them marketing texts, and you have to stop texting them as soon as they opt out. The main federal law is the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA). The phone carriers add their own rules through the wireless industry group CTIA, and they can block your number if you break them. In practice, the rules come down to five things:

• Get clear, written permission. The signup has to say that the person is agreeing to receive marketing texts from your business. A checkbox can't be pre-ticked, and agreeing can't be a condition of buying.
• Say what they're signing up for. The signup should name your business, say roughly how often you text, note that message and data rates may apply, and explain how to get help and how to stop.
• Honor opt-outs right away. Replies like STOP, END, or UNSUBSCRIBE mean the person is out. Federal rules now require you to honor an opt-out within ten business days, and carriers expect it to be immediate.
• Respect quiet hours. Federal rules bar marketing texts before 8 a.m. and after 9 p.m. in the recipient's local time, and some states set narrower windows.
• Keep proof. Hold on to when and how each person opted in, because that record is your defense if someone complains.

Kite writes these rules down for your business and follows them on every campaign. You tell it your quiet hours, your frequency limit, and anything specific to your situation, such as "never text the wholesale list" or "no texts on Sundays," and Kite remembers them as standing rules for your team. It also writes the opt-in wording for your signup form or checkout, including the disclosure about frequency, rates, help, and opting out. When people sign up through a Brevo form or an import, Kite can create the Brevo list they land in so text subscribers stay separate from everyone else.

Rules differ outside the United States. Canada, the United Kingdom, and the European Union each have their own consent requirements, and Kite records whichever ones apply to the people you text.

Kite decides who gets a text by reading your Brevo lists and segments and matching them to the message. It sees each list's name and size, and it can pull contacts by list, by segment, by an attribute you track such as city or plan, or by when they signed up. A text about a new store opening goes to the segment near that store. A text about a reorder discount goes to past buyers.

Kite also decides who should not get the text. Brevo campaigns can skip whole lists, so customers who bought last week don't get the discount and your staff list doesn't get the promotion. Before it proposes a send, Kite reads your recent SMS campaigns with their send times and recipients. If the segment it wants to text already heard from you twice this week and your limit is two, Kite tells you and suggests holding the text, sending to a different segment, or folding the news into the next scheduled text.

A good marketing text says who it's from, gives one reason to act, and makes acting easy. Kite writes each text in your brand voice using what it knows about your products, your offers, and the people on the list. Every message it writes has these parts:

• Your business name comes first. The reader knows who's texting before they read anything else.
• The text carries one offer or piece of news. It's stated plainly, with a deadline when there is one.
• A link takes the reader to the page where they can act.
• An opt-out line tells people how to stop. Kite ends the text with a line such as "Reply STOP to opt out."

Here's an example of a text Kite might write for a coffee roaster with a seasonal sale:

Harbor Coffee: Our fall blend is back. 20% off beans through Sunday with code FALL20. harborcoffee.com/fall Reply STOP to opt out

That message fits in a single text. A standard text holds 160 characters, and a longer message gets split into several parts, each one billed separately. One emoji or curly quotation mark switches the whole message to a different character set that fits only 70 characters in a single text, so Kite counts characters and checks the encoding before it proposes a message.

Kite creates the SMS campaign in Brevo with the campaign name, the sender, the message, and the recipients, and it proposes a send time that falls inside your quiet hours. If your list spans time zones, Kite picks a time that's inside the window everywhere. For example, 1 p.m. Eastern reaches California at 10 a.m., which is fine for both coasts.

You see the campaign before it goes anywhere: who it's going to, how many people that is, the message, and the send time. Approve it in the conversation in the Kite web app or in Slack, then send or schedule it from Brevo. If you decide against it, Kite deletes the draft campaign so your Brevo account stays tidy.

Kite measures clicks by giving each text its own page. Visits from a text message arrive without a referring site, so on an ordinary page they blend in with every other direct visit. When the text links to a page that exists only for that campaign, every visit to the page came from someone tapping the link in the text.

Kite builds that page on a website it hosts for you, such as a short page for the fall sale with the code and a buy button. Kite's built-in analytics then report the page's visitors, sessions, and conversions, including form submissions and button clicks. If your website runs somewhere else, Kite reads the same numbers from your connected analytics product.

After a send, Kite reads the campaign's results from Brevo, including how many texts were delivered, how many bounced, how many people replied, and how many opted out. It puts those next to the visits and conversions from the campaign page, so you see the whole path from text to sale.

Kite compares each campaign with the ones before it. If the restock text drove twice the visits of the discount text, Kite points that out and suggests leaning into restocks. If one segment's opt-outs jump after a third text in a week, Kite suggests lowering that segment's frequency and records the change in your rules. Each result goes into your team's knowledge base, so the next campaign starts from what your customers actually responded to.