Is automated texting your customers legal?

Texting someone who just contacted you, to answer what they asked, is the safest message you can send. It is a response to an inquiry, not telemarketing, and it is what most service businesses actually want to do.

The exposure starts when a message promotes something, and it compounds when you message a list rather than a person. Those are two different failure modes and they need separating, because businesses tend to worry about the first and get sued over the second.

The Telephone Consumer Protection Act governs calls and texts to mobile numbers made with an autodialer or a prerecorded voice. The standard it applies depends on what the message is for.

• Telemarketing or advertising needs prior express written consent — a clear written agreement to receive those messages at that number, including disclosure that agreeing is not a condition of purchase.
• Informational messages — an appointment confirmation, a technician on the way, an answer to a question the customer asked — sit under a lower bar.

The line between them is drawn by what the message says, not by what you meant. A reply that answers a pricing question and then mentions this month’s promotion is doing two jobs under two standards, and the promotional half is the one that gets examined.

The FCC adopted a rule that would have required consent to be given one-to-one — to a single identified seller, for communications logically and topically related to the interaction that produced it. It was aimed at lead generators selling a single consent to dozens of buyers.

It never took effect. In January 2025 the Eleventh Circuit vacated it in Insurance Marketing Coalition v. FCC, holding that the FCC had altered the ordinary meaning of prior express written consent beyond its authority. The FCC then repealed the rule and reinstated the prior standard.

Practical consequence: if you are reading a compliance guide written in 2024 that describes one-to-one consent as the coming requirement, that guide is out of date, and it may be out of date in other places too. Check the publication date on anything you rely on here.

This is also why every post on this site carries the date each source was last checked. Nobody does that, and it is the single most useful thing on the page.

In our experience building this, three things account for nearly all of it.

• Scoped opt-outs. Honoring STOP for the campaign that was running, or on the channel the request arrived on, rather than for the contact permanently and everywhere.
• Consent you cannot evidence. Believing a contact opted in is not the same as being able to produce when, where, and to what. If it is not recorded, it did not happen.
• Inherited lists. Contacts imported from an old CRM, a bought list, or a previous vendor, whose consent history did not come with them.

• Separate informational replies from promotional sends, in your system, not just in your head.
• Record consent with a timestamp, a source, and the specific scope agreed to.
• Make STOP permanent, immediate, and global across channels and campaigns.
• Quarantine inherited contacts until their consent is evidenced or re-obtained.
• Register your traffic — see A2P 10DLC; it is a separate regime from the TCPA and being right on one does not cover the other.
• Have counsel read your actual message templates, not a description of them.