Hi Holly Taylor

That is so exciting! We actually just did a user group on getting started with SMS and had a customer, Janelle Brackett, share her tips, tricks and best practices for getting started! Plus, the Iterable team also went through some best practices as you're getting started as well.

You can watch the recording here.

Ryan Glanzer Any learnings from getting started with SMS on your team?

Holly Taylor

I checked in with our internal team about your question around customizing unsubscribe or HELP messages, and the guidance I received was to set that up in Twilio.

Alternatively, you can use workflows to listen for key words and send them out via an SMS node - but best practice here is to use Twilio's service.

Support article: https://support.twilio.com/hc/en-us/articles/360034798533-Getting-Started-with-Advanced-Opt-Out-for-Messaging-Services

Holly Taylor - what I've found recently is something I need to talk with our AM about to find a better solution. We have a custom opt in keyword that we advertise to our customers as well as being able to sign up for SMS directly on our platform. We host our manage preference page for opting in and out. What we discovered recently was that if a customer sends STOP to opt out of SMS messages, that status is only held at Twilio and doesn't get back to the status in Iterable. So if you look up a customer's preferences in Iterable it seems to be out of sync with what Twilio has.

I found this when I was trying to proof a message to myself and it never came through - which exposed the issue. The only way for me to opt back in was to send START to our short code number. That isn't a key word we advertise to our customers for opting in, it doesn't support the need for asking if a customer wants to opt into marketing, transactional, or both SMS messages, and it doesn't seem to update the visibility of status within Iterable. I do like a sign up experience I had recently on another site to where I had to reply with a number to indicate which messages I wanted to sign up for, which I would like to pursue if we need to rely on opt in/out status through Twilio for SMS rather than Iterable.

Maybe I'm just doing something wrong, but this is something we really need to work on and straighten out soon. It's on our list to discuss.