You Can Now See Phone Number Provisioning Status for ThruText Campaigns

In late February we announced that we would delay ThruText campaign launching until the sending phone number was fully “provisioned” with downstream carriers (AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon).

After further consideration, we have decided to continue launching campaigns immediately, and instead provide information about phone number provisioning status on the post-launch campaign details page (see below):

‍

This help article has more details about this change.

We changed our approach for two reasons: 1) We heard from numerous clients that they did not want launching delayed; 2) Additional analysis showed that the negative delivery implications of sending on un-provisioned numbers were less than we initially thought.  

We still recommend waiting until the number is fully provisioned before sending your messages. Overall, we see 10% fewer messages delivered from un-provisioned numbers, with the worst impacts on larger campaigns.  

We also still recommend the following best practices for maximizing deliverability.  

1. Launch your campaigns the day before you plan to text
2. Don't launch more than two campaigns at once

While phone number provisioning often happens very quickly, sometimes it can take many hours. So planning ahead and staggering launching will help ensure that your messages reach their intended recipients. For more best practices on accommodating the provisioning process, check out this help article.

Phone Number Provisioning FAQ:

What does it mean for a number to be fully provisioned?

This is (yet another) 10DLC thing. Whenever we launch a campaign, we purchase a sending phone number for you and then associate that phone number with your TCR use case. Once that happens, each of the major carriers has to confirm that they recognize this association and give us a “thumbs up.”    

Why are we showing you information about phone number provisioning?  

This is all about maximizing your deliverability. When text messages are sent via numbers that are not fully provisioned it can generate delivery errors. We are proud that our deliverability has always been above 90%, and we want to keep it there by letting you know when your sending phone numbers have been optimized for maximum message delivery.

Why are we showing you this information now?

Until late 2023 we did not have programmatic (API) access to data about whether a sending phone number was fully provisioned. Now that we can access that information via API from our downstream vendor, we can show it to you.

‍