SMS marketing checklist: 32 checks before you send

Why a checklist rather than general advice

SMS is a channel with no correction. A bad email ends up among the unread and is forgotten. A message arriving at half past ten at night, to people who never asked you to write, is remembered — and paid for in unsubscribes and reputation.

So there’s no room here for general advice like „be short and clear“. The concrete question is: do you have a record of when and how every number consented? Does the message carry your company name? Is there a way to unsubscribe, and is that unsubscribe actually honoured?

There are 32 such items, in five areas. They take fifteen minutes to work through and prevent mistakes that can’t be undone.

What one item looks like

Every item has five parts:

• The check itself — one sentence. For instance: every message contains the sender name and a clear way to opt out.
• Why it matters — the concrete consequence. With SMS that’s usually an unsubscribe, a complaint or a blocked number.
• How to fix it — the steps. What changes in the text, in the settings, or in how you collect numbers.
• Impact rating (1–3) — how much it changes the campaign result.
• Estimated cost of the fix (1–3) — a one is changing the message text, a three is changing how you collect numbers.

The items come with recommended tools, marked free or paid.

You score with four buttons: Good, Could be better, Bad, Not applicable. The last is excluded from the score — if you don’t have a shop, promotions don’t drag your result down.

The repair plan

Everything scored „Bad“ or „Could be better“ goes into the repair plan, sorted by the formula (impact + cheapness) × urgency.

With SMS almost the entire list of fixes gets solved in one day, because the cost per item is low. No code, no design — what changes is the text, the send time, and the rules about who gets a message.

So here the repair plan usually looks like a list of seven to ten items that all get done at once, before the next campaign.

It exports to PDF and CSV.

Why there’s no automatic check here

With the site checklists the tool fills in part of the scores itself, because it can open a site and read it.

It can’t do that with your SMS sending account. It has no access to your number database, your sent messages or your delivery reports — and doesn’t ask for it. All 32 items are scored by you.

That’s hardly a burden. Thirty-two items take fifteen minutes, with your sending account open in another tab. Most answers are visible at a glance: either you have a record of consent or you don’t, either the message carries the company name or it doesn’t.

A real example

A chain of four shoe shops sends an SMS before every sale, to a base of 5,100 numbers. The last campaign: 41 orders and 180 unsubscribes.

The checklist is done in twenty minutes. Result: 11 good, 9 could be better, 9 bad, 3 not applicable.

The repair plan:

1. Numbers were collected at the till, with no recorded consent to messages — impact 3, cost 2.
2. The message starts with „Sale!“ and has no shop name — the person doesn’t know who’s writing — impact 3, cost 1.
3. Sending goes out at 20:45 — impact 2, cost 1.
4. The same text goes to everyone, regardless of whether they’ve bought in the past year — impact 2, cost 2.

The first three were fixed before the next campaign. The result of the following message: 66 orders and 34 unsubscribes. Same base, same discount, changed text and send time.

The fourth item, splitting the base by who has bought recently, went into the plan for the following month.

Honestly: SMS is the most expensive channel per message sent and the easiest to overdo. This checklist helps you use it properly, but it doesn’t answer whether it’s worth it for you at all. That depends on your margin and on how often you genuinely have something urgent to say.