Understanding Potential Text Delivery Issues

With SMS messaging you've likely experienced instances where a text you've sent to a friend or family member was never received or vice-versa.

Text-Em-All sends your text message to your contacts' phone carrier (AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile), and they then have the responsibility to deliver it to your contacts' phone. 

Common reasons text messages are not received

• Carrier Filtering

  • Mobile carriers have filters in place for automated text messages to prevent spam messages. Here are a few filters that can have your text messages blocked:

• Sending the same exact text broadcast repeatedly (changing up your wording a bit shows the carriers that you are not sending out SPAM).
• Using all caps, special characters, and excessive punctuation (THANKS, ASAP, @, %, !!!, ???).
• Including an email address in the text.
• Using too many numbers or dates, or listing a phone number in the text that is different from the number that sent the message.
• Use of redirecting or generic shortened links (like a bit.ly).

• Invalid Numbers

  • The numbers you are contacting may not be working numbers. You can see which numbers are Invalid from your Broadcast Details results page. 

• Delivery Issues

  • Mobile devices are constantly updating for improvement and depending on where the mobile device is and the amount of service it is able to obtain, text messages can have issues being delivered:
  • Devices could be roaming or in and out of service.
  • The device could be performing an update.
  • Carriers could be experiencing an outage in a specific area.
  • Carriers can experience a delay in delivery so the message shows up later than when it was originally sent. 

• Message Arrived Out Of Order or Incomplete 

  • On occasion, if your text message is longer than 160 characters, it may arrive at your contact's mobile device incomplete or jumbled into different segments. Unfortunately, this issue occurs on a third-party carrier level and is out of Text-Em-All's control. 

Please note: If you are sending text messages to phone numbers registered in Canada, there are some additional things to keep in mind that affect text delivery. Read here to learn more. 

If you are receiving reports of anyone in your audience not receiving your text, please let us know! Our Customer Experience team is happy to help research further and can be reached at 877-226-3080 or support@text-em-all.com.