Mass text messaging for business puts your message on thousands of phones within minutes, which is exactly why it needs rules before it needs content. In a company of 60 people, the risk is not that nobody sends texts. It is that five people send them, to overlapping lists, with no record of consent and no agreed tone. This article answers one question: how do you set up mass texting for businesses so that it is lawful where you send, controlled inside the company and still fast enough to be worth having. It covers who may send SMS marketing at volume, from which number, with whose approval, and how you keep a record of every send.
The risk is people, not technology
The platform will send whatever it is asked to send. The problems that cost firms their lists come from people: a sales lead who texts the whole database on a Friday evening, two teams who message the same clients in the same week, an old spreadsheet imported as if everyone on it had agreed. Governance fixes those. Better copy does not.
Mass marketing text messaging is regulated differently from email
Mass marketing text messaging sits under stricter rules than most firms expect. In the US, the Telephone Consumer Protection Act requires prior express written consent for marketing texts sent with automated systems, and carriers expect business sender registration before they deliver application-to-person traffic reliably. In the UK, the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations require consent for marketing texts to individuals, with a narrow soft opt-in for existing customers who bought something similar and were given a chance to refuse.
None of this is legal advice; check your own position with your adviser. The practical point is that consent has to be recorded, dated and tied to the contact record, not remembered. The platform holds that record. Your job is to make sure every route into your CRM captures it.
Three roles that cover most firms
Sender: the person who builds and schedules marketing texts, usually marketing or a sales lead. Approver: one person who signs off any marketing text before it reaches more than a handful of contacts, often the managing director or head of marketing. Responder: anyone who answers replies in Conversations, usually sales and client service staff, who reply one-to-one but do not send in bulk.
Everyone else uses texting for one-to-one service messages only. Set user permissions so that only the named senders can run bulk actions on contacts, and the rest of the rules mostly enforce themselves.
Before you start
- A written texting policy that names the senders and the approver.
- Consent captured on every form and import, stored as a field or tag with a date and source.
- An eligible sending number, with US carrier registration approved if you text American mobiles.
- Opt-out and sender information switched on in the platform's SMS compliance settings.
- A saved smart list for each approved audience, filtered by the consent tag.
How to set it up
Once the policy, permissions and smart lists exist, every approved send follows the same platform steps.
- Go to Contacts.
- Select the contacts you want to message, using the approved smart list.
- Choose the Send SMS Bulk Action.
- Select the sending phone number when required.
- Enter your SMS message or insert the approved snippet.
- Review the recipients and message.
- Choose Send immediately, Schedule for later or Use Drip Mode.
- Configure any additional delivery settings.
- Review the campaign before confirming the send.
Before the final confirmation, the approver checks three things only. Is the audience filtered by consent? Does the message name the company and include an opt-out? Is the send time sensible for the recipients' time zone? The person who wrote the text should never be the person who approves it.
Which number the texts come from
Recipients judge a text by the number it arrives from. Most firms use one main business number for marketing sends and keep advisers' assigned numbers for one-to-one conversations, so a client always knows who they are talking to. If you text several countries, a local number for each market reads better than a foreign one and usually helps delivery.
A send log you will actually use
The simplest log is a tag. Name it after the send, such as "sms-2026-10-landlord-update", and apply it to every contact in that send. Pair it with a line in a shared document: date, list, message, approver, result. The Bulk Actions page in Contacts also keeps each send with its stats, which gives you a second record of what went out.
If a contact complains or asks what you sent them, you can answer precisely. If a send performed well, you can repeat it with confidence.
Suppose the firm has 9,000 contacts, 4,200 with recorded text consent, split roughly evenly between the UK and the US. If marketing, sales and events each send their own texts, some contacts could get four in a week. Restrict bulk sending to two named people and add a shared send calendar, and the same contacts would get no more than one marketing text a week. Fewer texts per person should mean fewer opt-outs. The inputs are illustrative.
The decision most firms get wrong
Most articles on mass texting assume the goal is reach, so they focus on sending more. For a business that sells advice or services, reach is cheap and trust is expensive. A text to a client's personal phone is a request for attention in their private space. Used for a genuine reason, it earns replies. Used weekly for generic promotions, it trains people to ignore or block you.
So set a frequency ceiling before you set a sending plan. One marketing text a fortnight to any individual is a reasonable starting point for most professional firms. Transactional messages such as reminders and confirmations sit outside that ceiling.
Moving people off personal phones
Staff texting clients from personal mobiles is the biggest governance gap in most firms. There is no record, no opt-out handling and no access when the person leaves. Move every client conversation into Conversations, using the mobile app for replies on the move. The SMS business text messaging guide covers that change.
What it replaces and the time it costs
A controlled setup replaces ad hoc texting from staff phones and separate apps. The weekly cost of running it is small: perhaps an hour for the approver and an hour for whoever answers replies. Setting up the policy, the forms and the consent tagging takes a day or two the first time.
Importing an old spreadsheet and treating every number on it as consented. If you cannot show when and how someone agreed to texts, put them in an email flow first and ask for consent there.
When not to use mass texting
Do not mass text cold lists, purchased data or contacts scraped from the web; the guide to cold SMS marketing explains why. Avoid it for complex content too: a text that needs a paragraph of explanation should be an email. For list cleaning and pacing, see bulk text marketing, and for a send with a target and an end date, plan an SMS campaign.
Troubleshooting
Staff can still run bulk sends
Their user permissions still allow it. Review each team member's permissions and remove bulk messaging from anyone outside the policy.
Consent tags are missing on new contacts
A form or import path is bypassing the tagging. Check which form the untagged contacts came from and add the consent field to it.
US texts deliver slowly or not at all
Carrier registration may be pending, or the message content may not match the use case you registered. Keep marketing texts consistent with the registered description.
A contact says they never agreed
Look up the consent tag and its source on the contact record. If it is missing, apologise, turn on DND for SMS on the contact and fix the route they came in by.
Frequently asked questions
Is mass texting legal for B2B contacts?
Rules differ by country and by whether the number is a personal mobile. In the UK, texts to individual sole traders and partnerships are treated like consumer texts. Get consent regardless, and read the B2B SMS marketing guide for the business-to-business angle.
Can we stop a bulk send once it starts?
Queued sends can be paused, edited or cancelled from Bulk Actions before the remaining messages go. Messages already delivered cannot be recalled.
Is mass texting covered by the platform licence?
Yes. Bulk SMS is part of the licence and message usage is billed as used. There is no separate tier for volume.
How often is too often?
If opt-outs rise after a send, you have passed the limit for that audience. Start conservatively and increase only when replies stay healthy.