Texting compliance

Registration (the approval playbook) gets your messages delivered. Compliance keeps them legal. The rules below are the US baseline (TCPA and the carrier codes of conduct); if you operate elsewhere, local rules apply on top.

Consent comes first

Text only people who agreed to hear from you — and keep proof.

• Consent should name your business, say that texts are coming, and be tied to the phone number that gave it.
• Keep the record: when, where (web form, verbal on a call, paper), and what the person agreed to.
• When you trigger texts through the ClearTalk API, you can attach the consent record to the request itself — it's stored with the lead's enrollment as a compliance record you can produce later.

Respect quiet hours

Don't text before 8am or after 9pm in the recipient's local time — a widely adopted baseline, and some states are stricter. ClearTalk resolves each lead's timezone (from what you pass in, or inferred from their area code) and texting campaigns pace their sends accordingly, but the responsibility for when campaigns run is yours: set sensible sending windows and per-day caps on the campaign.

Opt-out must always work

Every conversation must honor "STOP" — and in ClearTalk it does, automatically:

• An inbound STOP immediately ends the conversation, marks the number opted out, and adds it to your Blocked from Texting list. No further campaign messages or follow-ups will reach it.
• Your first message to a new contact should identify your business and mention that "Reply STOP to opt out" — carriers look for this in registered sample messages too.
• Opt-outs can also notify your own systems the moment they happen (see the webhook reference) so your CRM's do-not-disturb list stays in sync.

The suppression lists

Under Do Not Call in your dashboard live two lists that act as a final safety net:

• Do Not Call — numbers never dialed. Populated manually, by CSV import, or automatically whenever a call's result is Do Not Call.
• Blocked from Texting — numbers never texted. Populated by STOP replies and by your team blocking a contact. Each entry links back to the conversation that caused it.

Blocking a contact from a conversation stops both calls and texts, cancels any scheduled follow-ups, and is reversible if it was a mistake.

The short version

1. Get consent, keep the record.
2. Send inside 8am–9pm recipient-local time.
3. Identify yourself and offer STOP in the first message.
4. Let the automatic suppression do its job — and sync opt-outs to your CRM so no other system texts them either.

For the mechanics — what lands on the blocklist, and the one situation where unblocking is legitimate — see Opt-outs and blocked numbers.