Text messaging compliance for a one-person agency: 10DLC registration without a compliance department

If you send texts to leads from a regular phone number through any business texting tool, the carriers expect you to be registered under 10DLC. Unregistered traffic gets filtered, throttled, or blocked. Here's the process for a solo agent.

Brand registration. Your business entity, EIN, address and website go into the registry. Sole proprietors can register with reduced throughput. Have the EIN letter and a website that describes what you do.

Campaign registration. What you'll text about, sample messages, how consent is collected, how opt-out works. Insurance marketing is a scrutinized category; the reviewers want to see the opt-in language from your lead forms and a privacy policy on your website that mentions texting.

The website matters. Registration reviewers look at your site. A site with no privacy policy, no mention of SMS, or a contact form that doesn't disclose texting gets rejected. Fix the site before you submit.

Opt-out. Every campaign needs STOP handling that actually works. If your CRM does it automatically, say so in the registration. If it doesn't, you need a different CRM.

Timelines. Brand approval can be quick; campaign approval can take days to weeks and can bounce back once or twice. Don't plan a launch around it.

What happens if you skip it. Deliverability drops quietly. You'll think leads are ignoring you when the texts never arrived.

Quiet hours and frequency. Federal rules and several states restrict marketing texts to daytime hours in the recipient's time zone, and some states cap frequency. Your CRM should enforce the recipient's time zone, not yours.

Has anyone been through a campaign rejection and what did the reviewer flag?