Everything You Need to Know About DNC Compliance
Most of us have received an unsolicited phone call, usually at the most inconvenient time imaginable. Telemarketers are a pretty tenacious bunch, after all — so much so that in 2003, the United States Federal Trade Commission established the National Do Not Call Registry. Other countries, such as Canada, have similar rulesets.?
Given that you're in the business of sending out promotional messages, you'll want to make sure you understand the rules. Let's talk about that. Today, we're going to go over everything you need to know about complying with the rules of the Do Not Call Registry — including how and why it's important for texting.?
What is the DNC??
The National DNC Registry is a voluntary registry of consumers who don't want to receive unsolicited sales calls. Anyone can register their home or cell phone number free of charge, at which point you may no longer contact them. This no-contact rule applies to both live calls and robocalls, though there are some exemptions.?
There are also eleven states that maintain their own DNC lists independent from the national registry. These are Indiana, Colorado, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Texas, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Florida and Wyoming. Each state list has its own rules around non-compliance.?
Businesses must also maintain their own internal DNC lists so that they can keep track of consumers who've asked not to be contacted.?
The National Registry is also part of the telemarketing sales rule (TSR), which lays out guidelines for communication, disclosures, security, and transparency. The TRS contains provisions prohibiting calls to consumers who requested not to receive them and for anyone on the Registry.? Businesses are expected to maintain their own internal records of customers who've requested not to receive communications.?
Per the FTC, the TSR (and the DNC by association) applies broadly to "brokers, dealers, transfer agents, municipal securities dealers," as well as "futures commission merchants, including brokers, commodity trading advisors, commodity pool operators, leverage transaction merchants, floor brokers, or floor traders."?
We've listed exemptions to the DNC registry below.?
If a customer has purchased, rented, leased, or subscribed to one of your products or services in the last year-and-a-half, they have what's known as an established business relationship with you. This means that unless they specifically ask you not to contact them, you can reach out to them with promotional messages and offers. You can also reach out to a customer with promotional messages up to three months after they inquire about or apply to one of your services.?
Finally, you can contact someone who's given express written consent for you to do so.?
Political Calls
Calls made for the purposes of promoting a political party or candidate are exempt from the DNC. This includes polls about someone's political beliefs or opinions. Note that this exemption only applies if the calls are being made without the intent of having someone purchase goods or services.?
Charitable Contributions
If you're calling someone to solicit a donation, contribution, or gift of some kind, you're exempt from DNC compliance. This applies even if you're a for-profit organization. Registered nonprofits, naturally, are also exempt.?
You still need to honor a customer's request if they ask not to be contacted again, however.?
Debt Collection
If you're contacting someone to notify them of an outstanding debt or credit issue, you're not subject to the usual DNC rules. Collection and enforcement agencies are generally also exempted from requests not to contact a customer.?
Informational
Calls that are entirely informational, such as a notification about an upcoming doctor's appointment, are exempt from the DNC. Note that this only applies so long as the call doesn't solicit any goods or services. If you combine an informational call with a promotional message, you're no longer compliant.?
Business to Business
Calls made between businesses for any purpose are generally exempt from the DNC.?
Why is DNC Compliance Important?
To put it bluntly, any company that fails to comply with the National DNC Registry will have to deal with a substantial financial penalty, with fines of up to $51,744 for each violation. Regulators may choose to treat each call as a separate violation. For certain violations, your business could even face legal consequences.?
We'll talk a bit about how you can avoid these penalties in a moment — first, let's discuss what any of this has to do with texting.?
How Does DNC Compliance Apply to Texting??
Although it's not obvious at a glance, the DNC doesn't just apply to phone calls. It encompasses texts, as well. The Registry prohibits telemarketers from sending SMS messages just like it prohibits them from making phone calls. It's important to understand that the DNC Registry and TSR are not the only things you need to understand when it comes to promotional communication, as well.?
The Federal Communication Commission's (FCC's) Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) is also incredibly important, as it sets out a number of foundational guidelines and restrictions for telemarketing calls. The Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association's Messaging Guidelines, meanwhile, establishes a set of best practices for more effective and consumer-friendly promotional communication. While TCPA compliance is mandatory, compliance with the CTIA Messaging Guidelines is technically voluntary.?
We say technically because there's plenty of carriers who'll outright refuse to work with you if you're non-compliant.
How to Comply with the FTC's DNC Rules
There's a few steps you can take to ensure your business stays on the right side of the law (and avoids some potentially crippling fines).??
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Download the Registry
In order to make any telemarketing calls within a given area code, your business needs to subscribe to and download the portion of the Registry encompassing that area code. You can download up to five area codes free of charge. You'll need to pay an annual fee for each area code downloaded after the first five.
The fee largely depends on when you want to acquire the additional codes. You'll be charged $78 per area code in the first six months of your annual license. During the second half of your license, the price drops to $39.
These area codes all expire at the end of your payment period, and there's an upper limit to how many area codes you can acquire — no more than $21,402 worth.?
Establish Processes and Procedures
One little known fact about the TSR is that there's actually a provision in the DNC regulations for inadvertent mistakes. In order to be eligible for forgiveness in the event that one of your people accidentally calls someone on the DNC Registry, you have to be able to demonstrate that you've made your best effort at staying compliant. Per the FTC, the measures you must take include:?
If, with all of the above steps taken, you can demonstrate that you violated the do not call rules in error, you might be able to avoid a fine.?
Avoid Misusing the Registry
You can only download the DNC Registry for one purpose: To acquire a list of numbers that you can't call for telemarketing purposes. Whenever you access the Registry, you'll have to certify that you're doing it exclusively for compliance. Don't use the numbers on the Registry for anything else, even if it's not promotional.?
If you download the numbers from an area code and it's later found out that you used them to send out a survey, for instance, you're looking at more than a few fines. You could face legal action. Somewhat ominously, the FTC doesn't specify what that actually entails — so it's probably on a case-by-case basis.?
Additional Best Practices for DNC Compliance
Now that we've talked about what you must do to comply with the DNC, let's talk about a few things that'll make compliance a whole lot easier.?
Privacy and Consent
First thing's first, if you're going to send promotional messages to someone, it's almost always better to obtain express written consent from that person. It doesn't matter if they're a prospect, a new customer, or a long-time subscriber. Get it in writing that they're okay with receiving communication from you.?
Make it easy for customers to opt out of receiving marketing messages from your company even if they have consented. For SMS communication, allow people to reply to your messages with something like "STOP." For robocalls, let them opt-out with two key presses — one to indicate that they no longer want to hear from you, and the second to confirm it.?
Lastly, you'll want to draft a privacy policy that explains exactly what information you collect from your customers. Your policy should also explain how you'll store and use that information, including how long you'll retain information before deletion. The policy should offer consumers the chance to have their data deleted from your servers and tell them how they can go about doing so.?
There's an added bonus to that last step, too. A transparent and easy-to-understand privacy policy can go a long way toward helping you build trust with potential customers. People usually prefer to work with companies that treat their personal information with care.?
This is something you should be doing anyway, but it bears mentioning again. The TCPA and CTIA Guidelines are every bit as important to your telemarketing activities as the TSR and DNC requirements. You need to comply with all of them.?
In addition to what we've discussed above, this includes:?
Consider Using DNC Compliance Software
Regulatory compliance is almost always an incredibly complex beast. And while it's definitely possible to handle everything manually, doing so can lead to some potentially costly mistakes, to say nothing of how much extra work you're creating for everyone. With that in mind, you might be better off automating the process, at least to a point.?
Plenty of contact center solutions include automated TCPA and DNC compliance directly out of the box. There are also specialized solutions such as DNCScrub that automatically checks your customer database against DNC data and scrubs any non-compliant contact information.?
DNC Compliance is Non-Optional
It doesn't matter if you're a massive corporation or a startup. If you intend to send any promotional messaging via phone or text, you have to understand the DNC and TSR. As the old saying goes, ignorance of the law is no excuse.?
With all that said, regulatory compliance is only the foundation of your marketing. You also need to figure out how to compose and send your messages. You'll need a way of quickly reaching out to, qualifying, and responding to both leads and prospects.?
That's not something you can really do manually. Not at scale. And that's where Meera.ai comes in.?
Built from our experience in managing thousands of successful SMS campaigns, Meera is an intelligent AI texting platform that lets you automate outreach, nurturing, onboarding and more.
With Meera, you can spend less time on busywork and more time actually building relationships. More importantly, Meera makes it easy to keep your SMS messages compliant with all the relevant regulations — all you need to do is give it the proper templates, and it'll take care of the rest.??
Talk to an AI expert at Meera today to get started.