How to Get Customers to Text You First

There are two ways to start a text conversation with a customer. You message them, or they message you.

Almost everyone tries the first one, because it feels like the thing you control. It is also the one that gets numbers flagged, generates spam complaints, and puts you in front of a person who did not ask to hear from you.

The second is better on every axis — deliverability, cost, response rate, regulatory exposure. It just requires designing for it.

Why "they start" is worth engineering for

The complaint risk disappears. A message from a stranger has a report button sitting next to it. A reply in a thread the customer opened does not. This is the single biggest factor in whether a sending number survives.

Consent is built in. No consent record to maintain, no audit question to answer later. They texted you. That is the record.

Response rates are not comparable. Someone who scanned a code to reach you is in a completely different frame from someone interrupted by an unknown number.

It costs less. On senderZ, reaching someone who has never texted you counts against your monthly allowance. Someone who starts the conversation themselves does not count at all.

The mechanism

You need one thing: a link that opens the customer's Messages app, already addressed to your number, with a short message written for them. They tap send.

curl -X POST https://api.senderz.com/v1/invites \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SENDERZ_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"label": "Front door sign", "opener": "Hi!"}'

That returns a short link you can use two ways — as a button href, or encoded as a QR code to print. Both work on iPhone and Android.

Where to put the ask, ranked by what actually converts

1. Physical, at the moment of contact. A QR on the counter, the table, the receipt, the packaging, the van, the door. This converts best because the customer is already thinking about you and their phone is already in their hand. Scanning hands straight off to Messages with no browser in between.

2. Order and booking confirmations. They just bought something and they are paying attention. "Questions about your order? Text us" with the link, in the confirmation email or the thank-you page.

3. Email signature. Zero effort, works forever, compounds quietly across every email your team already sends.

4. Website. A "Text us" button beats a contact form for anything urgent. Put it where the phone number would go.

5. Ads and social. Weakest, for a specific technical reason: in-app browsers inside Instagram and X frequently block the handoff to Messages. Send that traffic to a page with the link rather than linking directly.

What to write in the opener

The opener is the message they send you, prefilled. Three rules:

Keep it short. Long prefilled bodies get truncated by browsers before the Messages app ever sees them. "Hi!" works. So does "I have a question."

Plain ASCII only. An emoji or an accented character flips the message from GSM-7 to UCS-2 encoding, which halves the segment size and risks mangling on the way. Android customers reach you over SMS, so this is a live constraint, not a theoretical one.

Let it be theirs. The opener should sound like something a customer would type, because that is exactly what it is. "Hi!" reads as a person. "REQUEST INFORMATION — PROPERTY 4821" does not.

Giving them a reason

A link on its own converts poorly. A link with a reason converts well.

• "Text us for a table tonight"
• "Questions about your order? Text us — we answer in minutes"
• "Text to reschedule, no phone tag"
• "Text HOURS for today's opening times"

Notice what these have in common: each promises something faster by text than by the alternative. That is the whole pitch. Nobody texts a business for fun; they text because calling is worse.

Moving an existing customer base over

If you already have a list of customers, you are not stuck. You are just doing one round of SMS.

Send them a single message over SMS — the rail built for reaching people who have not written to you — with the link and a reason to use it. Everyone who taps it becomes reachable on iMessage permanently, and never costs you allowance again.

One round of SMS to convert a list is a fundamentally different proposition from sending cold SMS forever.

Measuring it

Two numbers matter, and the gap between them is the interesting part:

• Scans — how many people opened the link
• Sent — how many actually went through and messaged you

A high scan count with a low send count means the opener or the reason is wrong, not the placement. A low scan count means nobody is seeing it.

curl https://api.senderz.com/v1/invites \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SENDERZ_API_KEY"

Give each placement its own invite — "front door", "receipts", "email footer" — and you will find out within a fortnight which of your assumptions were wrong.