New Text Message Rules

It. Cool.

What's up, man?

Hey, bud. How are you doing?


All right, two questions, and lower my hand here. Okay, so two questions real quick. First, what is the email for your team? Because I got a bunch of people that want to work with you all as the head of marketing.

Amazing. Thanks, man. Yeah, just drop in. That's a very cool starting point. So drop into me and CC, two Chris at Cometsuite as well. Just dropping the chat there. Yeah, that'd be amazing, dude. All right, cool.

Yeah, I'll send you a bunch of people.

Amazing, thanks.

Very excited to work with you all.

Yeah, man. Cool.

And then second question, what is going on with this whole A two P ten DLC thing? I got a client out right now in Australia that is freaking out because he has to open up, like, a business in the US now or something. Do you know anything about how that Twilio?

Right.

So I got that notification a few days ago. So what it looks like is that Twilio has basically said the phone number formatting can't be done that way. So I haven't dug into it a lot, but this is how I read it. So I read that notification from Trulio and I went, what the hell? And it was like so the notification was written in big, scary letters and it was like, you are no longer authorised to send to the ten digit formats of whatever.

Right.

I actually think it's going to be a GHL question, mate, to be honest. So the way that I read it was that Twilio is now enforcing a specific international number format and you can only send text messages using that format. I don't think you'd need to have a business anywhere else. The way I read it was it's just the formatting of the number. So you cannot send text messages to a specific format. I don't know the details, but I read it and I went, okay, that's cool. It's going to come down. Kayla, you know that one?

Yeah. About two days ago, Sean put out a video on this.

Oh, cool. I didn't see it.

Yeah, so if you go on the high level official site, let's see, today's Wednesday. I think it was Monday that it came out, and it is pretty far reaching. My understanding is that essentially people don't like text spamming. They've talked to their congresspeople who have put pressures on the carriers. The carriers have been put pressure on companies like Twilio to make sure that everyone that's sending is approved. So what we need to do as agency owners is to get our clients through that approval process.

Got it. Okay, let me drop that as number one video here. I've just seen it in the group, guys, so I just put that in the chat. Yeah. So the carriers have now announced a timeline for full blocking of non ATP compliant registered phone numbers, starting july 5, which is not too far away, ending August 31, messages will be blocked. This only applies to US bound traffic if you're outside the US. Okay. So you need to create wow. Yeah. You do need to create a US entity. Interesting.

That sucks.

Oh, man. All right, so, Kaylin, I can see you posting there, man. Thank you. It's nice to get the insight.

So then, Walt, are you saying that if you're in the US and you have a US entity, you don't need to worry about it?

Let me just kind of read a little bit more, guys.

You still need to register. You still have to go through ATP authorization and everything. You have to actually apply. It actually takes like four to six to eight weeks. It's actually kind of a thing.

Wow.

Do any of you all know if there's a cost associated with it or if they're charging for it? How much is it?

It's like $11, $16 a month, something like that. And then supposedly 800 numbers, you can get around it and use 800 numbers. But again, then your open rates are going to be lower because people see it as an 800 number. So you can't do the local so 800 numbers are not as stringent with it. But yeah, if you want local area codes, you have to go through I mean, it's not that, but I use LC phone, so they have it all set up, like in the back end to kind of basically you just have to make sure you have to make sure your business when you register it's exactly how it appears on your ein and all of that. Like, even if a comma is off, it'll get denied. So as long as that's all squared away and then you submit it, that'll get approved and then you can get your ATP authorization done. But that takes a while. I've got a couple of clients. I'm still waiting on it. But you can still technically use the numbers. It's just that kind of has to go through that process. But yeah, they're making you do it.

So you basically do have to open up if you're international, like Australia, you have to open up an entity in the US to get that ein and all that.

Wow. So this is literally saying that you cannot use again. Yeah, this is brand new for me, so I kind of skimmed over it and didn't realise it was so deep. Wow. David, do you know that you need to have that US entity?

I'm not 100% on that. I'm in the US. We had the I N's and everything already set up. There is a plethora of choices between sole proprietor and LLC and corporation and all that kind of stuff. So I'm not sure exactly how that it sounded like. Maybe that will be the case if you're outside, but wow. I do know with LC and everything, there's like a separate kind of approval. Like you'll notice in the back end, if you're outside the US pilot already has kind of like a little set up for that.

Oh, is it really? Okay.

There's something to that. Yeah. Where if you're like, you're outside, you click in and there's a whole other little process for that.

Amazing. I'm just switching over to agency mode on my GHL account.

David, it's a phone verification. Yeah, there's a phone verification under the phone numbers.

All right.

Maybe this is an opportunity for people outside the US to partner with companies in the US.

Yeah, I was actually thinking about saying that outside and I thought, you know what, I hesitated for one reason. I would be cautious. I was talking to a friend of mine who runs a digital marketing agency and runs millions of dollars worth of Facebook ads and had a long term client who their account got shut down by Facebook, as so many accounts have done. And my friend thought he was doing the right thing. He was like, oh, just run it under my account, man. And then his account got banned. So I would hesitate there. If somebody's trying to get around the rules, don't put yourself in the way would be my suggest.

There's got to be a pathway. They're not just not going to let business happen, you know what I mean? They just want you to get approved and cut down on spam and stuff. So there's got to be a pathway for outside.

The usual. I would say the GHL guys will be all over. So I'm just looking at the LC phone system now in the back of the settings, and this will switch your default system. So we were still using Twilio, of course. LC phone is Twilio in the back end? Yeah, that's there, yeah. Look guys, I don't know about the entity side of things. Sounds like that might be a big hurdle to overcome. I think there might be either a rush for off the shelf entity registration systems, but it's not that easy. I've tried to do it myself, like create the get the Ein number and all that kind of stuff.

What exactly is a two P campaign?

So just looks like it's an authentication.

It's just approval. Yeah, it's just verifying your business and everything and you have to actually apply.

But the way it reads, it says.

Newly registered A two P campaigns are subject to manual vetting.

Yeah. So basically you verify your business and then you submit an application for how you're going to use the number. So whether it's just transactional marketing, you have to give a couple of examples of how you're going to be using it, like examples of the text messaging and stuff like that. I haven't had anything denied. There's a couple of different stages. Like with my agencybud, it got kind of approved right away. With my clients, I've still got the the business got approved, the the initial first stage of ATP got approved, but it says, like, approved in progress. And I've asked GHL a couple of times about it and they're like, look, man, it's basically on Twilio, everything's like manual, it just takes forever kind of thing. But you can use it. You can still kind of use the numbers or whatever. It's just you kind of have to scale it back. Yeah, and then, like I said, the workaround I was told is 800 numbers. You can pretty much just pop in, you're good to go. But from my perspective, I'm like, yeah, that's great, but your open rates are going to be lower because it's an 800 number.

So having that local area code definitely helps. But yeah, that's basically what ATP, you get your business verified via Ein and everything. And like I said, a comma can't be wrong on that. It has to be exactly how it appears. And then you submit your ATP and your use case and how you're going to be using the numbers and examples and if there's going to be links and there's a whole little form when you go through it. I don't know, it might be a chance to use LC because I've used LC from the beginning and they do kind of make it even though they're kind of manually doing it with Twilio on the back end, they kind of have it set up to walk you through it all.

They are all over. I was just reading as well, David, on that help doc, they've said that they've got an LC phone specialist team. It looks like the GHL team have got a bit behind that, but yeah, I agree with you. For us, I'm going, okay, cool, let's switch over to LC and then fix.

Any issues that are there like 10% difference, right? And it's 10% cheaper than Twilio anyway.

Well, maybe that takes care of the $15 fee, right? So I was just reading that fee is a $15.01 time fee, verified, and that 10% will cover it. So you should be good to go. But guys, as you're going through this process, if you find anything, drop it into the group. I think everybody would be really interested to hear about it. For me, I skimmed that. I kind of went, yeah, whatever. And now I'm looking at it going, oh crap, I should have deeper into that because it looks like it's going to be a serious effect. Yeah, cool. Thanks guys, for bringing that up. Appreciate it. Looks like I've got some reading to do and to find out what's going on there. Actually, man, we've been getting charged about close to $2,000 a month for Twilio. The other day I was going through our credit card statements, like every couple of days was a $200 charge from Twilio. And I was going, we don't really send that. I mean, yeah, we send text, but we don't really send that many. And then I was like, okay, I got Nick to investigate. And I was like, Dude, can you go and find out why we're getting charged so much?

And he came back, and he said, you're not sending so many messages, but you're sending messages that are going over the limit of the character. So some of our text messages are, like, for example, hey, welcome to White Label Suite. We've just emailed you your login details. We're thrilled to have you on board. There was, like, 17 texts in that one. First welcome text. So we're sending, like, 15 of those every day. And then it was like, even on Fridays, when we're doing our sales calls and stuff, some of our messages, we're tacking up, like, 15 or 20 text message scenes. We're like, we're only sending 500 text messages, but according to Twilio, we're sending, like, 25,000. I was like, yeah, okay, cool. We need to kind of adjust.

Just use abbreviations, dude.

For more info. Cool, guys. Yeah. Looks like some serious reading. And, guys, as you find anything, I'll do the same thing if you find out different information if you're not in the US. Looks like that entity thing is coming up. If you find an answer there, let us know. Drop in the group and share the knowledge. Voltaire, thanks, man. Thanks, man. Good to see you, bro. And yeah, looking forward to meeting those people. So, guys, we did a post in the group. We're looking our team's expanding like crazy. We've got ten open hires at the moment. We've got salespeople, we've got support, people that we're hiring, and we've got ahead of marketing. So we're looking for somebody who's absolutely at the top of their field. And Voltaire had a couple of people that might fit that, so it excited to chat to him. Cool, man. Thank you.