SMS contact imports are best used to update subscribed email contacts who are already in your PodOps audience. If your subscribed email contacts opt in to receive SMS marketing from you, add them to your existing SMS audience as subscribed SMS contacts, then send them marketing text messages.
In this article, you’ll learn how to import SMS contacts to PodOps Connect.
The first step to building a successful audience is to get consent from contacts who want to receive your marketing text messages. Consent is not only common courtesy, it’s required by PodOps’ Standard Terms of Use.
Although people talk about consent in a variety of ways, it’s something very specific when it comes to SMS marketing. Consent is expressed, verifiable permission by an individual to receive marketing communication from you.
When you use PodOps’ SMS signup form, we track and record the date and time of the consent request and approval once provided by the individual, so you have a verified consent record. You must secure this consent before you send someone an SMS with PodOps Connect. Never assume you have permission, and when in doubt, get confirmation.
Any list of contacts obtained from a third-party source, no matter how reputable, violates our terms and puts you at risk.
Third-party lists of SMS numbers are prohibited under our Terms of Use. This includes purchased or rented lists, and lists scraped from third-party sources including public websites. Your audience should be collected entirely by you.
You can store different contact types in your PodOps subscriber lists, including contacts who haven’t signed up to receive SMS marketing content. You’re required to respect the permission levels for contacts on your audience. Take a look at this article on contact types to help you determine which marketing materials to distribute to different contacts.
PodOps has some built-in tools to help keep your subscriber lists clean, but you should exercise best practices for audience collection and maintenance. Poor subscriber list maintenance can result in low engagement, abuse complaints, and compliance issues. Depending on the situation, these issues can force us to shut down your account.
In addition to our requirements, follow these recommendations to optimize the health of your audience.
If you can, it’s best to organize your subscriber lists with tags. PodOps treats all the subscribers that come through your podcast website(s) or are imported separately, and billing is based on the total number of contacts across all your audiences. Tagging your contacts is a good way to segment and manage subscribers, rather than adding duplicates of the same individual. We try to help manage your duplicates by merging those with a matching name and email. If there is a variation in name or email, this can create a duplicate record, increasing your subscriber count, and monthly charges.
For subscribed contacts, permission can go stale if you don’t actively engage with them. If you have subscribers you haven’t engaged with regularly, you may want to reconfirm your contacts to make sure they still want your marketing SMS messages. This will help reduce bounced messages and abuse complaints.
We strongly recommend that you periodically re-engage inactive subscribed contacts to confirm their interest in your business or podcast. If your inactive subscribers don’t respond to your re-engagement campaign, it’s best to unsubscribe them.
If you use PodOps for SMS marketing, individuals who subscribe to your podcast via your podcast website(s) can update their personal information and subscription preferences by visiting your website and clicking Profile.
