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Why Your Unregistered SMS Traffic is Giving You Issues and How to Solve it with Registration

Written by Aaron Alter
How to Register Your Long Code or Local (10DLC) Numbers with The Campaign Registry

If you’ve found yourself here, you may be experiencing low deliverability, high pass-through fees, or even blockages with your unregistered business SMS long code messages, also known as local phone numbers, aka Application-to-Person (A2P) 10-digit long code (10DLC)

Before we get into the details, below are a few terms you should be aware of in order to be able to identify and solve your SMS problems. These new terms have been created to distinguish business texting from traditional person-to-person messaging: 

  • Application-to-Person or A2P – any messages that are sent from an API, platform, or application to a person, usually a customer a.k.a the end user. 
  • Local phone numbers or 10-digit long code (10DLC) – the actual ten-digit phone number that businesses can use to send A2P text messages to customers, without being flagged or blocked by mobile carriers. 
  • The Campaign Registry (TCR) – the reputation authority for business text messaging on 10DLC. 
  • Campaign Service Provider (CSP) – the primary user of The Campaign Registry. The CSP registers their customers’ Brands and Campaigns on TCR directly. 
  • Reseller – when your messaging API provider registers your Brands and Campaigns on TCR on your behalf. If registered as a Reseller, your messaging API provider serves as your CSP of your account. 
  • Brands – In TCR, your customers are called Brands. A Brand is a company or entity that the end user, or message recipient, believes to be sending the message. 
  • Campaigns – In TCR, each Brand will have one or more Campaigns, which are messaging use cases. Examples include Delivery Notifications, Marketing, and Security Alerts etc. 

Now that you are familiar with the terminology, it is important to know that registering A2P 10DLC messaging traffic with The Campaign Registry (TCR) is technically mandatory, but many messaging API providers didn’t initially require it of their customers, leaving them in the dark and susceptible to the issues stated above. If you’re ready to get informed, reduce your messaging costs, improve your deliverability, and ramp up your throughput limits based on your messaging use case, it’s time to get registered. 

Getting started may seem daunting, so we pulled together some of the who, what, why and how to’s to help get you on the road to registration and improve your overall Q4 messaging performance (to save you from future headaches). 

Who Needs to be Registered with The Campaign Registry? 

Any business running A2P 10DLC messaging needs to register with TCR. 

Toll-free messaging also has a verification process (more on that here), but TCR is solely for 10DLC messaging. 

What is The Campaign Registry?

The Campaign Registry is a third-party hub that works with mobile network operators (MNOs) and companies that are in the messaging business to register A2P 10DLC Campaigns. As stated on their website, “TCR supports a sanctioned A2P 10DLC messaging Campaign ecosystem and provides visibility into the messaging source and content, allowing mobile carriers to provide a more reliable and simple messaging service for Campaign Service Providers (CSPs) and Brands.” 

Why is being registered with TCR important?

Registering is an important, mandatory step that was created to protect the end user (or recipient of your messages). As a legitimate sender, you’re rewarded with improved deliverability, lower pass-through fees, and higher throughput limits specifically designated based on your messaging use case. An example of a use case could be marketing, 2FA, account notifications, etc. This is the best possible A2P 10DLC experience for the sender and the end user. 

When you send legitimate but unregistered messaging traffic, you're not only risking blockages, you’re also paying up to 4x higher pass-through fees, which can take a major toll on your overall messaging ROI. 

For a deeper dive on the importance of registration, watch our Virtual Q&A with The Campaign Registry featuring our CEO, Aaron Alter, and Stefan Heller, the VP of Business Development and Strategic Partnerships at TCR. 

Getting Started: Do I register as a Campaign Service Provider or Reseller? 

Some API providers will encourage you to be a Reseller in the TCR ecosystem, meaning they will register on your behalf as the Campaign Service Provider (CSP), with you being a Reseller in between. The issue with this is that you become entrenched with your provider, making it extremely difficult (and expensive) to multithread or move to a new provider in the future. 

Registering as a CSP means that you maintain ownership of your Brands and Campaigns, and stay structurally flexible (this is not the case if you are a Reseller). The biggest misconception is that it’s more complex to be a CSP, but it actually requires nearly identical steps as being a Reseller. 

Read more on the differences of being a CSP vs. a Reseller before making your decision as it can have long-term implications. 

How do I register with TCR? 

Knowing that registering with TCR will bring you better deliverability and higher throughput, there is really only one thing left to do – register! 

The good news is that the process is relatively straightforward. If you choose to register as a CSP to maintain ownership of your Brands and Campaigns, submit your CSP application by registering at csp.campaignregistry.com

Once you are registered as a CSP, TCR will pass along the following instructions about onboarding on TCR. You will need the following information below for step two in order to register your Brands/Campaigns:

  • Customer/Brand information 
  • Company Name
  • Website URL
  • Tax ID / EIN
  • Point of contact name, contact number, and email address
  • Campaign information (each brand could have more than one campaign; one campaign equals one use case)

The campaign registration process requires providing detailed information related to the Campaign Use Case, as well as samples of the message content that will be sent during the campaign in order to calculate the accurate throughput needed. Learn more about how to choose the best TCR campaign for your business before moving forward. 

At Telgorithm, we’ve automated the registration process

As leaders in the A2P 10DLC space - we have ensured every one of our customers is compliant and up-to-date to give them the best possible messaging experience. To help make this achievable, we actually streamlined and automated registration with TCR to make it as quick and easy as possible. 

The difference is that when you integrate with Telgorithm APIs, you’re able to concurrently integrate directly with TCR’s APIs. Rather than enter your customers’ information in two places – Telgorithm and TCR, in this case – you only need to enter the info on TCR. Many vendors do not support API-based registration, or a quasi-API model, meaning you’re required to enter the information manually. If your provider only offers a manual setup, the risk of human errors such as typos and longer processing timelines goes up. 

We’ve made streamlining possible through a tight integration with TCR. When our customers register as CSPs, TCR will automatically send us the information, which we auto-import into the CSPs’ Telgorithm account. 

Another benefit of API-based registration is more privacy protection. Information such as a business’ EIN number is shared only with TCR, the official compliance source – Telgorithm, or any provider, doesn’t need access to that info.

Need one-on-one support to make sure you register correctly and maintain ownership of the registration process? Our team of SMS experts are standing by to support you! Book a meeting with us and get set up for long-term success in less than a day.

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