Removing phone numbers from your SMS list when messages cannot be delivered is an important step in maintaining your SMS program. Carriers are required to provide a list of phone numbers that have been deactivated on their service or if the number permanently fails to be delivered to a contact. When these occur you are required to remove these numbers from your SMS lists. You may also want to remove a number from your sends if it is temporarily suspended.
Learn more about how Listrak handles these situations below:
Opting Out Phone Numbers in SMS
When Listrak receives information from a mobile carrier that a phone number is no longer active or cannot receive messages the system will automatically opt-out the phone number from all lists associated with a sender code.
There are four main reasons a phone number may be opted-out:
A deactivated mobile number means that the subscriber of the service has decided to surrender their phone number back to the wireless carrier. The number stays with the carrier and is considered a deactivated wireless number. Deactivated numbers can be recycled and activated for new subscribers. Typically numbers are reassigned to new customers between 30-90 days after they were deactivated.
💡 New customers will NOT be opted into the program that the previous mobile user was subscribed to.
A disconnected mobile phone number could mean that the subscriber of the service has not paid their bill and therefore is disconnected by the carrier.
A mobile phone number that is porting is moving from one service provider to another. Messages sent when a phone number in the process of being ported will often fail to be delivered. On average, porting a phone number takes 7-10 days to complete; however, this may take more time in some cases. The process has a few steps and may differ from carrier to carrier.
Permanent failure is recorded when Listrak receives a response code back that indicates the phone number will not receive messages.
Learn more about the carriers and the information provided to Listrak.
Managing Suspended Numbers in SMS
Deactivated numbers are automatically removed from your list and will remain removed unless they specifically re-opt in to your program. However, some contacts may only want to temporarily suspend their number, for example, if traveling overseas or if a device is stolen. In this situation, you would want to stop sending to a contact to reduce messaging cost, but not remove a contact from your list.
At this time Verizon is the only carrier that allows customers to temporarily suspend their number for up to 30 days. When Listrak receives this information from Verizon the following actions will occur in the Listrak SMS Platform.
Contacts will be automatically be removed from the contacts who can be sent a message. When creating a filter, suspended contacts are not included in this list count.
Contacts will remain opted-in to your SMS program and will not be required to re-opt in to the program if they re-activate their number.
Contacts will still appear in the list of contacts when viewing contacts and still be calculated as a subscriber in your list dashboard.
If a contact permanently deactivates their number after suspending it, the number will be opted-out of all lists on your sender code, following the deactivation process described above.
💡 Your List Dashboard will now display information on how many contacts suspended their number
Opt-Out Reporting
You can view the phone numbers that are currently opted-out and view the different reasons that a contact was opted-out from your SMS program.
To view opted-out contacts navigate to Contacts > SMS Contacts Contacts > Select the Opted-Out tab. 💡 If you have multiple sender codes, you will need to select the correct sender code from list navigation dropdown menu.
For each of the lists for a given sender code, you can view more about opted-out reasons for each list. This will show you a high-level view of the percentage of contacts who were opted out in different ways during the selected timeframe.
In the Manage tab, select Lists
Click on the desired List Name
On the List Health section, scroll to Opt-Out Reasons
Learn more about the opt-out reasons reported on the List Dashboard.
Carrier Information
Listrak will receive information from the following carriers about deactivations and failures:
Verizon
C Spire
T-Mobile
Cell Com
Virgin Mobile
Sprint (Sprint, Nextel, and Boost)
NTelos
AT&T
US Cellular
These carriers can provide information to Listrak about codes received when a message is sent to specific numbers. These codes indicate a permanent failure error:
341 - Value of mobile operator ID does not exist
345 - Mobile operator not found for the destination address
349 - Unable to determine carrier ID from destination address
560 - Mobile operator blocking the end user from this sender code
561 - Content blocked by mobile operator for this end user
565 - End users connected to this MVNO cannot receive sender code messages
568 - Destination address not provisioned for SMS
573 - Sender code blocked by end user
592 - Account not provisioned for global one- or two-way SMS
603 - Content blocked by user opt-out (contact has responded STOP)
629 - Destination address unable to receive SMS
3041 - US standard rate message blocked by the aggregator deactivated numbers firewall