Right now, in order to send an SMS to a contact, they first have to send a message containing the word ‘START’ to our phone number. Alternatively we can manually opt people in. (Please correct me if this is incorrect, source: Collect and manage consent for SMS)
The second case (manual opt-in) requires intervention for every new contact, and the first requires our contact to manually type in our phone number (difficult to convince people to do - prone to mistakes).
We’d like to be able to send one message to a contact, asking for consent, before we have it. Something like “reply ‘START’ to opt-in to recieve messages from this number”.
Ideally, we could also customize the response so after they text ‘START’ we can auto-reply ‘Thanks for signing up’ or something like that.
This is a much more frictionless setup, and more typical with what end users will be expecting from other apps.