Every guide to texting leads says the same things. Personalize. Provide value. Stay compliant. None of them tell you which words get your texts blocked.
We sent 165,000 texts to business owners in eight weeks and got more than 11,500 replies. This is what we learned the expensive way.
Carriers block words, not just numbers. One follow-up of ours was blocked on 82 of 86 T-Mobile numbers. We changed one line and it passed on 42 of 43. What got us blocked was asking for "a number" or an "amount".
Check each carrier on its own. AT&T blocked almost nothing of ours, so the overall delivery figure looked fine while T-Mobile was blocking that one text almost every time.
Test new wording on about a hundred numbers on each carrier before a list gets it. That is how we caught the bad ones before they burned a whole list.
"Who is this?" isn't a no. 38% of the people who replied "who is this?" kept talking after we answered. For everyone else who replied without saying stop it was 43%. Basically the same. Answer it like a normal person.
A reply isn't interest. Our own system was marking almost anyone who replied as interested. When we read the threads on one list, 11 of 838 delivered texts turned into someone agreeing to talk. Count by reading the threads, not by labels.
Speed beats the perfect script. When someone replies, answer in minutes, not hours.
Your daily limit belongs to the business, not to your numbers. T-Mobile capped us at 2,000 texts a day, and adding numbers did nothing.
The full post has all nine, with the wordings that got blocked:
https://talalevel.com/blog/what-165000-sales-texts-taught-us/