Since your contact list is old, many of the phone numbers will be bad, meaning the original person changed numbers and the number in your list belongs to a different person now. That new person was not in your opt-in contact list most likely. Here are a few tips to follow when you want to send a text to an old contact list.

send a text

Our suggestion is that you set up an amazing voicemail and make sure your opt-out mechanism is stated in that voice-mail.

Maybe something like:

“Thank you for calling XYZ Company. Your call is important to us and it will be processed in the order it was received. All available agents are attending to other clients right now due to higher than expected call volumes today. You can text in your questions or concerns for faster response times. You can also opt-out at any time by texting in with the words REMOVE ME and you will be deleted from our contact lists.”

Of course, you can change the script however you like. This is just an example for information purposes.

Because your list is old, you could get complaints from people who changed their number and are now accidentally on your list. To reduce complaints and to massively increase trust and conversion rates, we recommend that you utilize our Automatic Replies (also called Responders) to answer the inevitable questions such as “Who is this?”, “How did you get my number?”, and things like “Why are you texting me?”

If you don’t answer these questions, they won’t trust you and may report your number to their carrier for sending unwanted texts. The carriers won’t care if you can prove that that number opted-in. When you send a text to a unknown contact you can get your numbers blocked which cost you money.

Also, use our text to landline scrubbing function. Cleaning up your list will reduce the amount of failed sends that happen. You pay for failures with credits so it is a waste. Additionally, carriers use it as a blocking signal similar to how ISP’s use bounced emails as a signal and start blocking you.

We recommend you watch our latest videos on using our text message platform. You will save yourself a lot of trial and error wasted time by understanding the features before you launch your campaigns.