At what point has it all gone too far...Part Deux
Posted by Mark Lederhos on Fri, Mar 19, 2010 @ 05:52 AM
A simple, but pertinent example relates to the typical "disclosures" required in an SMS Text message - phrases such as "Text STOP to cancel" and "Msg&Data rates may apply", etc. We recently submitted a simple auto-responder SMS Text campaign - a simple message flow that involves a single MO (e.g. the user sends a keyword to the short-code), followed by a single MT (e.g. the service responds with a single SMS text message). The single MT message that is sent was required to include these "disclosure" statements. A typical SMS text message only supports 160 characters, and so when all the required "disclosure" statements were taken into account, we were left with about 90 characters for the actual message content! In other words, about 43% of the message text was carrier mandated "disclosures" - and all of this was required for a simple auto-responder! 160 characters is limiting enough, how much more so is only 90 characters ... how informative/valuable can your message be with only 90 characters?
One of the carrier mandated phrases that needed to be included in the MT was "Text STOP to cancel". Note that nothing is actually "cancelled" if the user sends STOP to the short-code because they have not opted into anything in the case of an auto-responder. Why does this phrase need to be included in the text for an auto-responder MT message? The normal argument put forward is that of "consistency" - the argument suggests that sending STOP is the mandated way to opt-out, e.g. from a subscription service, so to keep things consistent, support for STOP with an auto-responder makes sense. It has been our experience that the presence of the phrase "Text STOP to cancel" for an auto-responder actually confuses users who get concerned that they have opted-in to a service when that was not their expectation - so they actually text STOP to cancel, even though they had not opted into anything in the first place - surely this is not a good user experience?
Any thoughts?