Campaign Registry Form Best Practices

Hello everybody. My name is Drew and today we're going to be talking about how to submit a texting campaign to the campaign registry which is a necessary step for all users who want to use VipCloud to send texts. when you are setting texting up, you do need to send some information regarding your texting use case to the campaign registry. And since this can be a bit nuanced and a bit detail oriented, we are creating this guide. I should also just mention that because of that nature, I'm going to be reading from a script a good deal here. So, you're going to see my eyes going back and forth from the camera to my notes here. I apologize for that, but it's because I want to make sure that I don't miss anything and that I give you the best possible information here. And another disclaimer here too is the fact that just the nature of how the campaign registry works. And by the way, we are going to define what they are in just a second.

this is a bit of a moving target and we're giving you the the latest information that we know of in the you know late winter of 2025 and these things can change over time. So, um, we are going to do our absolute best to keep all of this up to date. We might update the page where this video is, uh, hosted in our help center as well. And so, you might see some notes in the help center that are little updates as well. So, just be sure to, uh, to check in on that. Um, and we're all going to do our best to uh, give you the best info possible. Um, so also, what are we going to cover here today? We're going to talk about what the campaign registry is, how you can complete that form for the campaign registry in Viploud and also how to use Vipcloud to create a texting opt-in form.so what is the campaign registry? They are a governing body that oversees all A2P 10digit texting campaigns.

And A2P means application to person. Pretty much anytime that software is sending a text to a person, that software needs to register the use case of that user with the campaign registry. the reason for this is that the campaign registry exists to try to stop spammy messages from being uh, being sent and all legitimate platforms need to play along with this. This is not a VIP cloud thing. It's a software texting people thing. All right. So, let’s dive right into it. So, I'm sharing my screen. First of all, we need to navigate to text settings for this. You can get there by going in the sidebar. You'll see where it says communication. Click on communication. And then down towards the bottom of the communication sidebar, you'll see text settings. And then here you can see where you are in the process. And this little bar right here, subscription number. You do need to complete those steps first. And then the third step here is the registry.

which you can click on the registry to go straight to that page. As you can see, because it's where we are in this account, it takes us straight there. So, we need to put in the personal information for you, the user. And the most important thing here at the very top is you're going to say what kind of business type you have, which is sole proprietor, but most in most cases it's going to be sole proprietor or private company. And if you're having trouble deciding which one makes sense for you, if you have an EIN for your business, then you should choose private company. If you don't have an EIN and you file your taxes with your social security number, then choose sole proprietor. The differences between these two are pretty minimal. So, in this case, we're going to go with private company. You just fill out your legal business name.you fill out your brand name. If you have a DBA, you'll use that there.

Right there. Your EIN, your website, and then um if you chose private company, you can you'll have to choose what kind of business category yours fits in. These are a little bit broad, but just do your best to choose something that that makes sense for your your business. And then you fill out your personal information. So your first name, your last name, your phone.if you're mobile, now note here, you'll see these little notes along the way. Don't put in the texting number that you've chosen for any of these. So for phone, you're probably going to want to choose your business number. And then for mobile phone, what's really important here is that you are going to be texted a a code to validate your registration at the end. So make use a number where you will conveniently be able to receive a text for that code because that's a necessary step here. And this number can be the same as the phone number you put above. Put your email.

This is filled out for you by default. your US address. We'll put that in there. and so that's all pretty straightforward. So now we get to some of the more nuanced things. So we need to describe the use case for doing this. And so the campaign registry is looking to confirm that your use case is one where you are sending messages that are wanted and expected. They're trying to make sure that you are not going to be spamming people, that you're certainly not going to be doing lead generation. That really is just a no-go here. Uh, full stop. Um, they want to make sure that people are people want to receive your messages and they know who you are. So, you're going to be describing something like along those lines. And as you can see right here, uh, keep to just a few sentences. And I'm going to show you an example here. Be filling out all of these questions here with with examples.

So here we use SMS as a way to communicate with existing customers about our latest software releases and newsletters if SMS is their preference. We also give SMS as an option to communicate with prospective customers if they opt in. so as you can see here too, it's okay to to text people who are prospective customers. just make sure that they choose to be receiving texts from you. Um, next we're going to go into the optin process. And this is also extremely important and every detail matters. So, they're looking to learn how your contacts here have given you their number and how they communicated with you that they want to receive texts from you. So the easiest way to do this is in our experience is with signup forms because sign up forms create a clear way for people to opt in and it also creates a paper trail where everything is just really nice and defined. You can really state the terms and they can really clearly opt in and then you got a record of it.

and also note here that every way that people can opt in or every way that you mention people opting in is going to be something that you're going to need to demonstrate to the campaign registry. Um, and so again, this is also where signup forms really make it easy because you can just simply link to your signup form to the campaign registry and they can go see like, okay, excellent. This is how they opt people in. So here is an example. So because we we in in this example here we mentioned two different types of people who are receiving messages from us. So we use two signup forms to opt in our customers and prospects. On our request a demo page we have an optional check box that they can click if they want to receive SMS. Oh and then you'll want to link to that.then here we also have a newsletter sign up with the same checkbox for opting in to receive SMS and again so link goes here and link goes here. Also this might be a good time to show you what this looks like in practice.

So here is a Viplow landing page and we have a signup form here. That does that that gives pe the prospective customers an option to opt in to receive text messages. And we're going to go into more details at the very end of this showing you how to create a form like this. Um, and in this kind of case, this is a perfectly easy thing to submit in this form. And there we go. We could just link that right there. And that makes it easy for them to verify. Now, we're going on to the last section of this form, which is where you provide some sample texts toto the campaign registry. And so, um there's certain things that are really important toto pay attention to when creating these sample texts and some things that are actually less important. So for instance, it's not if it's not essential that these are perfect copy and perfect representations of exactly what you would send to your um to your contacts.

but they do need to broadly be a match. If something completely comes out of the blue that is not at all like what you sent to the campaign registry, um it is possible that you'll have delivery issues as a result. Um, so precise copy doesn't matter that much. Um, but also another thing that's really important is if you ever intend to text a link, you must include a link in one of your sample messages. Um, so just we encourage everybody when you're submitting one of these, include a link for sure because you never know when you might want to include those. Um, and then also any short links that you might use, you also need to include those in these um in these sample messages. So, I'm going to give you a couple examples here. Um, one other thing I should mention as well, um, and this is the case for these sample messages, and it's also critically, um, just when you're sending text messages in general that are from software to people, is you don't want the message to begin with or to end with a link.

The links need to be in the middle of the message. For some reason it's considered spammy to begin or end your message with a link. Um and then also one other thing that's really important in these is that as well at least if you are filing this as a private company you need to include in all of your sample messages you need to include your company name somewhere in all of them. So, um, all of these examples are going to cover that and I'm going to show you and remind you of all of those throughout these as well. So, thank you for your interest in a VIP cloud demo. So, we mentioned the company name in the message. We noticed that you haven't scheduled a demo yet and we are really looking forward to answering your questions. You can schedule one right now by following this link. And so, we have a link in here which is important. And this is a short link as well and then looking forward to speaking.

So we are finishing the message not with a link but with a non-link. Example two, the latest from Viplad's blog. We mentioned Viploud, the company name.learn all about CRM in this article. What is CRM? Link to the blog and then let us know what you think. So, we got again another link in here. It's not a short link, which is fine. And then we don't finish the message with a link. And then lastly, hey, first name. This is, you know, your first name is a like me, the sender from BCloud. Um, so it's fine to include um merge tags in these samples. Um, so we got that right there. And then from Viploud. So, this is including the company name. Here's the discovery call template you requested. Link to a short link featuring that downloadable. Um let us know if you have any questions. So, um again, we included a short link and a different link which is actually by by design in this case.

So, we got our calendar short link and we have our content short link. and then we don't finish with a link. So, uh, if you are in a if you're a multi-user account and you have like a team of people who are going to be sending texts, I highly highly recommend that you click this right here, save description and all of this for the other users in your account. So what that means is that all your other users would need to do is just make sure that their personal information is good and they don't need to go through this whole process. So once you figure out a campaign registry that gets accepted then um it's really easy going forward from there and then you have to say I confirm that all this is accurate and then you can submit for review. you are able to edit this if things change. And also I I do want to stress that um our upstream carrier who works with us on this um they are really great and if anything doesn't check out for some reason, they they always provide us with a really like a good plain English like hey this or this needs to change and it'll be accepted.

so don't sweat it if you know if this gets rejected or something like that. Um really the only the only showstopper is if there's just something that like critically does notwork with ATPcampaigns in the campaign registry. Some of these finer details they can be ironed out and figured out and we are here to help you through that process. Um and um yeah and so now I want to lastly show you how to create an example optin form using VCloud. So we're going to jump over here and so we're going this is a signup form and I'm going to show you just how to make one like what you can see here on this Vip landing page. So go to automations go to sign up forms. Create a new signup form. And you can add all these fields. The main important fields here obviously are the phone number or mobile phone. So you need to be collecting their phone number in order to be able to text them.

Any other contact information, that's up to you. First name, last name, email are, you know, good standbys. Um, but this is the the big important one of creating a checkbox that looks like this right here where in nice big text we are asking them is text a good way to get a hold of you? Check this box to agree to receive SMS messages from your company name here. Um, by the way, my I I encourage you just to copy this almost word for word. You can reword like a little bit of the positioning here if you want, but really just this this question here is I'd say where you can get take some creative liberties from here on. Just do it all word for word would be my recommendation. So you can create this by going to create consent field right here and we're going to go to text optin and under the field name that's where you will put in all of this right here. Um and then hit save. Um, next to add all of this stuff, just copy this.

And I'll include all this stuff here in the um all the legal ease basically in the help article. So, under add description, you you can see how this um that underscore shows up when you hover over where it says add description. Double click there and you can edit. And then I'm going to paste and merge formatting or paste as plain text. And now we've got the rest of this. So the description is, you know, is text a good way to get a hold of you? Check this box to to agree to receive SMS messages from Viploud. And then it goes um and I guess that that's the title. Then the description says message frequency may vary and message and data rates may apply. Apply stop to unsubscribe at any time. View our privacy policy here. So then you need to go like highlight over this link and then you're going to link this to your privacy policy. So this is also one really important note is that you need to have a privacy policy.

So we and and this is another thing that I'llthat I'll link in the help article here, but um you can get a free privacy policy from a site called IUBenda. So I'm going to link to that and um they they're able to like look and see like what kinds of stuff your site has that might need a privacy disclaimer like any kind of like cookie tracking, stuff like that. Um, so they they find your all all that stuff on your on your website that you might need and so then you can create a page on your website that hosts the privacy policy documents and that's what needs to be linked there. So for like VipCloud, you know, we got our privacy policy right here on our website slashprivacy and insert the link and save. And then there we go. Oh, lastly this and this is important too. You can't force people who are submitting your form to opt into texting. That just unfortunately doesn't fly with the campaign registry.

So you'll see right here actually for instance on our on our website we are saying that you need to give us your phone number if you want to fill this form out. But it's up to them if they check this box to agree to receive SMS messages. So, um yeah. So, basically this little slider here when you're creating your form for required, this needs to not be required, which I know could be a bummer for some people, but you know, you unfortunately you can't force them to opt in when they're filling out the form. I'm just going to make sure I'm not missing anything here. Yep, that is everything here.so I know that is a lot, but um yeah, let us know if you have any questions about all of this. We know there's a lot of moving parts. Um, also note that you could do everything that we said here and for some reason something you we still might get a little bit of push back when submitting the form. So also know that this is something that takes days like can take a week take more than a week to get all of your ducks in a row and um have everything be accepted by the campaign registry. So, this is definitely not something to leave until the last minute before you need to get a text campaign out. Definitely do all of this as far in advance as you possibly can. Um, because there are just a lot of upstream providers that need to check off to that need everything to to to work for them and it's just a highly regulated space. It's just the reality and the nature of the beast. Um, but let us know if you have questions. this goes as smoothly for you as possible. And yeah, thank you so much.