TCPA Compliance: Add These Words to Your Lead Form

22 Jun TCPA Compliance: Add These Words to Your Lead Form

Communication is key, especially with customers and prospective customers – but you already knew that.

You communicate with your customers in a variety of ways – email, website, face-to-face, phone calls and even texting is becoming more prevalent.

If you’re not using texting in sales, you’re missing out on a channel that can be more effective than email or phone calls. Texts are rarely missed or deleted and they are more familiar to younger generations than any other channel.

There is a catch to using texts in business, however. You need to have prior consent before messaging someone’s personal phone.

The Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) requires a business to receive consent before calling, texting or delivering a voice message to a prospect’s or customer’s phone.

If you look through your current database, how many contacts have given you consent to call or text them? Do you know? If you are like most companies, the answer is very few. This means if you wanted to start using SMS texting in the sales outreach process tomorrow, you would not have a wide audience to use it on, if any.

Even if you are not planning on using any kind of texting service tomorrow, you need to plan ahead and add opt-ins to your lead forms now, so that when you are ready to use texting down the road, you are well prepared and have a large quantity of opt-in leads.

To be compliant, you need to clearly state that the person filling out the form understands that they are opting into automated texts and calling. A couple of examples are:

By clicking ‘Submit’ I agree by electronic signature to be contacted by [Company Name] through a live agent, artificial or prerecorded voice, and automated SMS text at my residential or cellular number, dialed manually or by autodialer, and by email.

By clicking, I am providing my electronic signature expressly authorizing [Company Name] to contact me by email, phone or text (including an automatic dialing system or artificial/pre-recorded voice) at the home or cell phone number above. I understand I am not required to sign/agree to this as a condition to purchase.

Automated reach-out services in sales and customer support are becoming more commonly used. As technology continues to advance and automated texting is more widely-used in business, it will be those who implemented this easy opt-in section that will reach a wider audience, and in turn, close more deals.

At Aktify, we talk to marketing and sales professionals who wish they had added this to their lead form years ago, so they could be more effective now. If you add this to your forms today, there is no doubt you will be grateful you did in the future.