Consent and contact permissions

What consent means for outreach, how Landing Zone records consent statuses, and why batch SMS requires verified consent.

Updated 3 min readMaintained by Landing Zone

Consent means a contact has agreed to be contacted. Keeping a clear record of how and when each contact opted in — and making it easy to opt out — is the foundation of responsible outreach.

Permission is specific, not general. A contact who agreed to hear from you by email has not necessarily agreed to receive your texts, and agreement for one purpose does not cover every purpose. Telephone consumer-protection rules and carrier policies generally distinguish between channels, and SMS generally carries stricter consent, carrier, and registration considerations than ordinary commercial email — see SMS consent.

Consent also has to be provable. A status in a database means little without a record of where the permission came from and when.

Landing Zone tracks SMS and call consent per contact with three statuses:

  • UNVERIFIED — no opt-in has been recorded for the contact.
  • VERIFIED — an opt-in has been recorded, with proof.
  • REVOKED — the contact withdrew permission, for example by replying STOP.

Each status carries recorded proof: the source of the consent, the date, and supporting details. Skip-traced contacts and imported contacts default to UNVERIFIED until you record an opt-in — finding a phone number is not the same as having permission to text it.

Batch and campaign SMS require VERIFIED consent: contacts without it are excluded by the SMS eligibility checks. For how the records themselves are kept, see Consent records.

You can record consent when you bring contacts in. CSV import includes an opt-in consent capture step, and requires an opt-in acknowledgment — including confirming A2P 10DLC compliance and that you have a lawful basis to contact the recipients — before the import proceeds.

Record consent honestly. The acknowledgment documents what you attest about your list; it does not create permission that was never given.

Revocation

Consent can be withdrawn at any time. When a contact replies STOP — or with another opt-out keyword or free-form revocation wording — Landing Zone sets their consent to REVOKED, adds them to the suppression list, sends a confirmation reply, and records an audit entry. See Opt-outs and STOP keywords.

What Landing Zone does not do

Recording a consent status does not establish that the consent was validly obtained. Landing Zone stores what you tell it — the source, date, and details you provide — and enforces the VERIFIED requirement for batch and campaign SMS, but it cannot verify that a contact actually agreed, or that the agreement covers your use case. A VERIFIED status is a record, not a legal conclusion.

Your responsibilities

  • Obtain consent that fits the channel and the purpose before you reach out.
  • Record the real source, date, and details of each opt-in, and keep them accurate.
  • Treat revocation as final: once a contact opts out, do not message them again or re-import them into new lists.