Building trust in your customer communications

SMS cuts through the noise. (Image: BulkSMS)

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In an age where true attention has become one of the scarcest commodities in customer engagement, the decades-old SMS channel continues to command exceptionally high open rates and high perceived importance. It’s largely thanks to tight regulations and industry oversight that SMS has maintained its status as an invaluable marketing communications channel.

It means SMS still cuts through the noise because marketing lists must be permission-based, while message frequency is naturally constrained by cost and compliance. Smart marketers respond by segmenting more thoughtfully, using SMS for ‘moments that matter’ such as order confirmation, process notifications, limited-time offers, high-stakes customer updates and integrating SMS within a broader, consent-driven customer journey. It’s this behaviour that keeps SMS in the premium tier: relevant, important and worth reading.

“SMS sits in a very privileged position in South Africa’s communications landscape. It’s one of the most tightly regulated and therefore most trusted channels that a business can use. In South Africa, this is not an accident. It’s the direct result of a tightly woven regulatory and industry framework centred on POPIA, the WASPA Code of Conduct and ICASA’s oversight of electronic communications, that have collectively protected SMS from the spam and phishing that erodes trust. Regulation hasn’t killed SMS messaging, it’s what keeps it effective and relevant,” explains Richard Simpson, Managing Director of BulkSMS.

Simpson unpacks the South African regulatory and compliance environment that has ensured that SMS is the best channel for customer communications:

The Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA) fundamentally changed how organisations treat a mobile number. It is no longer a commodity to be traded and sprayed; it is personal information governed by strict conditions of processing. Three POPIA principles are especially important for SMS:

• Lawfulness and consent: Direct marketing by electronic means, including SMS, is only allowed under defined conditions. This means you must have informed, voluntary, specific consent or a narrowly defined existing customer relationship, with a clear opt-out in your SMS communications.
• Purpose limitation and minimality: POPIA expects you to collect only what you need, for a specific purpose, and then use it in line with that purpose. That pushes marketers towards clear value exchanges where the purpose of the SMS messaging is clearly defined as promotional.
• Data subject rights: People have the right to object to direct marketing, to withdraw consent and to ask that their information be deleted. If you ignore those rights, you’re not just annoying – you’re non-compliant, and a person could lodge a complaint with the SMS industry regulatory body against your messaging.

“POPIA forces brands to reserve SMS for higher-value, higher-relevance marketing engagements where consent has been gained. That makes every legitimate SMS more likely to be read, and more likely to be trusted,” explains Simpson.

WASPA (Wireless Application Service Providers’ Association), of which BulkSMS is a longstanding member, provides an industry code of conduct that keeps the SMS channel responsive and healthy. WASPA’s Code of Conduct applies to its members – the aggregators and service providers that move the bulk of South Africa’s A2P (application-to-person) SMS traffic – as well as their clients who use their services. WASPA’s code applies local laws and regulations to the mobile messaging industry to prescribe how mobile messaging should be done in practice. Key features of this code for direct marketing messaging include gaining consent from customers and retaining proof of that consent; a simple, standardised opt-out mechanism; content and fairness controls; and a compliance and enforcement mechanism where consumers can lodge complaints directly with WASPA – https://waspa.org.za/. Sanctions can include warnings, fines, suspension of services and even expulsion of members depending on the severity of the non-compliance.

“Every time WASPA clamps down on non-compliant actors, it protects the integrity of the channel for everyone else. Less spam and fewer scams mean legitimate, permission-based messages stand out,” says Simpson.

The Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (ICASA) provides the regulatory umbrella for electronic communications. It licenses mobile network operators, manages numbering resources and sets the broader rules of the game for aggregators and other mobile services that ride on those networks. While ICASA may feel distant from day-to-day SMS campaigns, its role is crucial in three ways:

• Ensuring networks remain stable and reliable: Regulatory oversight of operators helps ensure quality of service, coverage and competition, all of which underpin the reliability of SMS as a near-real-time channel.
• Numbering and sender identification: ICASA’s management of number ranges, short codes and related frameworks enables dedicated short codes and enterprise long codes that are recognisable and auditable; clear differentiation between legitimate A2P routes and informal/grey routes that might be blocked.
• Alignment with consumer-protection principles: ICASA works alongside other bodies (like the National Consumer Commission and the Information Regulator) to ensure electronic communications protects consumers. That shared stance signals to the market that abusing channels like SMS won’t be tolerated. This is clearly evidenced in a recent case where the Information Regulator has initiated court proceedings against a company after it failed to pay a R100 000 fine for spamming people despite multiple requests from them to stop. Following its investigation, the regulator determined that the company had breached the conditions for legally processing personal information and contravened section 69 of POPIA, which regulates direct marketing through electronic communications.

BulkSMS has formulated a best practice guide for brands looking to use and invest in SMS marketing communication. Best practice looks like this:

1. Get permission: Before sending your very first message to a customer, make sure you have their consent.
2. Identify yourself: When sending business messages, make sure that the message recipient (your contact) knows who it’s coming from.
3. Store your customer’s information securely: BulkSMS promises to adhere to the best data privacy practices when collecting, processing and transmitting customers’ personal data. BulkSMS expects you to do the same for your customers as per the data protection laws and regulations that apply to your organisation.
4. Include opt-out instructions: Your customers need to know how to opt out, or revoke, their consent to receive your SMS communications, at any time, especially if they are marketing messages.
5. Know your content: There are different rules that apply when it comes to the nature of your business message, namely promotional (or marketing) messages and transactional messages, which come with different compliance requirements. Some countries also have regulations around the registering of SMS message content and sender IDs.

In a digital ecosystem drowning in noise, the most powerful advantage a channel can offer is trust. In South Africa, SMS has kept its place in the trust hierarchy because there’s regulation and enforcement in place to deal with SMS spoofing, phishing and spam.

“Brands that invest in proper consent, compliance and campaign discipline will continue to enjoy the benefits of a channel that lands in the one place people still reliably and quickly check: their SMS inbox,” concludes Simpson.