Bulk SMS in retail: lawful promotions and a registered sender
· 3 min read
SMS still has the best open rate in direct marketing, and in retail —sales, stock, collections— it converts like no other cheap channel. But 2026 has changed two things every campaign must have sorted: consent is enforced more, and the branded sender becomes regulated.
First, consent (LSSI)
- With prior consent: the unticked box your customer ticked. Keep it with its date and IP.
- Without express consent, only to customers and for products similar to those they already bought (art. 21.2 of the Spanish e-commerce law, LSSI), with an easy opt-out in every sending.
- The Robinson List (art. 23 of the Spanish data protection act, LOPDGDD) before every campaign to non-customers.
- Identify yourself and offer a way out: “Sale -30% until Sunday. Shop X. Unsubscribe: reply STOP”. Bulk sending without consent is a serious infringement with fines from €30,001 to €150,000 (arts. 38.3 and 39 LSSI).
Second, the sender (Alias Registry, CNMC)
Since 15 September 2026, the alphanumeric sender —“ShopX” instead of a number— must be registered in the CNMC Alias Registry (Order TDF/558/2026). Traffic with unregistered aliases is cut at origin: either it falls back to a numeric sender or it simply does not go out. Our platform checks every sending against the official download of the Registry before it goes out, and warns you in advance if your brand is not registered — not when the campaign has already failed.
Have you not registered your brand yet? It is requested on the CNMC electronic office with a digital certificate, or we can help you with the procedure.
What makes money, measured
- Segmentation by purchase, not cold lists: less volume, more sales.
- Business hours and a respectful frequency: every extra sending burns the whole list.
- SMS of 160 real characters: our sending screen counts the characters and the parts before you confirm — one character too many doubles the cost of the whole campaign.
- An estimated cost before you confirm and a published price per country.
Campaigns from the dashboard or the API, with lists, the exclusions applied to them before sending and statistics per campaign.
The retail calendar, with the sender in order
The dates that fill the tills —sales, back to school, Black Friday, Christmas— are prepared weeks ahead: approve your texts, review your lists and check your sender before the peak, not the day before. Registering the alias with the CNMC is not instant, and an unregistered brand in November is a December campaign going out with a numeric sender.
The text that converts fits in a single SMS: a concrete offer, a deadline, and the opt-out. Our sending screen shows you characters and parts before you confirm — and the cost estimate for the whole campaign, with your real list and the published price per destination, before you spend a cent.
After sending, look at the statistics per campaign: delivered, failed and at what cost. A list that piles up dead numbers makes every following campaign more expensive; cleaning it with the delivery data is the cheapest margin improvement there is in this channel.