SMS consent and registration

Why texting has the strictest requirements of any Landing Zone channel: consent expectations, sender registration, and how the app enforces its part.

Updated 2 min readMaintained by Landing Zone

SMS is the most tightly controlled channel Landing Zone offers. Text messaging generally carries stricter consent, carrier, and registration considerations than ordinary commercial email — treat the two channels as different worlds, not variations of one.

Telephone consumer-protection rules at the federal and state level generally require consent for marketing text messages, and what counts as valid consent depends on the message type, how the number was obtained, and the state involved. Some states apply stricter standards than the federal baseline.

What Landing Zone does:

  • Every contact carries an SMS consent status: unverified, verified, or revoked, with recorded proof (source, date, details). See Consent records.
  • Batch and campaign SMS only send to contacts with verified consent. Skip-traced and imported contacts start as unverified until you record an opt-in basis for them.
  • At import, you must complete an opt-in acknowledgment describing the source and basis of the audience before the list can be texted.

What Landing Zone cannot do: know whether the consent you recorded was actually valid. Marking a contact verified is your attestation, not the platform's finding.

Sender registration

Carriers require business texting from standard local numbers to be registered (A2P 10DLC). In Landing Zone, Settings → Trust Center tracks your registration status, and SMS sending is gated until registration is approved. Registration itself happens with the carrier registry — see the A2P 10DLC setup guide. Toll-free numbers use a separate verification process — see Toll-free verification.

Registration is about carrier identity and deliverability. An approved registration does not create consent and does not make any particular message lawful.

Enforced sending controls

For every SMS batch, Landing Zone applies its eligibility pipeline before anything sends: verified consent required, suppression and screening hits excluded, the 30-day cooldown applied, landline/VoIP handling, and quiet hours enforced in the contact's local time. The batch preview shows every exclusion and the reason. The first outbound message to a contact automatically appends "Reply STOP to opt out."

Your responsibilities

  • Choose audiences you have a lawful basis to text, and keep records of that basis beyond what the app stores.
  • Honor revocations everywhere, immediately — the app automates STOP handling, but requests can arrive through any channel.
  • Check the state rules that apply to where your contacts live, not just where you operate. See State-specific variation.
  • Review Cold SMS risk before texting anyone who has not clearly opted in.