A phone is the most intrusive surface you will get access to

No. They are separate permissions and they need separate evidence. Somebody who agreed to receive your newsletter has not agreed to receive a text, and the fact that your platform stores both an address and a number on one record does not make them one consent.

The practical consequence is that an SMS list is built rather than converted. You ask for the permission explicitly, you make clear what will be sent and roughly how often, and you record when and where the person agreed. It is slower than switching a channel on, and it is the difference between a list you can defend and one you cannot.

Substantially, and the differences are not cosmetic. In the United States, marketing texts sit under the TCPA and its associated rules, which are built around prior express written consent for marketing messages, and separately under carrier requirements that govern message content, sender registration and traffic on the networks themselves. In Canada, CASL treats a text as a commercial electronic message and requires express or implied consent, sender identification and a working unsubscribe mechanism. In the United Kingdom, PECR governs electronic marketing alongside the UK GDPR, with consent generally required and a narrow soft opt-in for existing customers. In Australia, the Spam Act 2003 requires consent, accurate sender identification and a functional unsubscribe facility.

That is a descriptive summary, not advice. We are a marketing agency and we do not practise law. What we do is build the consent capture, the records and the suppression so that whatever position your counsel takes can actually be enforced by your systems, and we ask you to confirm that position with counsel before a first send into any market.

Less often than the platform will let you and less often than the first month’s results will tempt you to. There is no universal number, because it depends on how much genuine reason you have to make contact, but the useful test is whether a given message would be missed if it never arrived.

The commercial reason for restraint is more compelling than the compliance one. Unsubscribes on this channel are permanent in practice, and a subscriber lost in week three is a customer you cannot reach in month twelve. Sending less is how the asset keeps its value.

Quiet hours are the periods when marketing messages should not be sent, and they are set by a combination of regulation, platform rules and ordinary judgement. They are calculated against where the recipient is, not where you are, which is the part that catches out businesses selling across time zones.

We enforce them in the platform rather than in a process document. A rule that depends on somebody remembering to check the schedule will be broken by the first person who sets up a send on a Friday afternoon.

Order confirmations, delivery updates, appointment reminders and two-factor codes are a different category of message with different expectations attached to them, and they are among the most appreciated things a business sends.

The failure mode is drift. A promotional line gets added to an appointment reminder, and now a message somebody never opted into marketing for is carrying marketing. We keep the two apart deliberately, in separate flows and often separate sending identities, because mixing them puts the messages people genuinely want at risk.

No, and we would not run the campaign. A purchased list carries no consent that belongs to you, no record of when or how it was given, and no way to prove any of it if you are asked.

It also damages the thing you are trying to build. Complaints from people who never asked to hear from you affect the sender identity that carries your legitimate traffic, including the messages your actual customers want.