With the latest research showing SMS wine marketing is performing 32-times better than email, many DTC wineries are now learning to use text messaging to grow their business.
The great news is wine lovers are especially interested in staying in touch with their favorite brands using text messaging, and a new crop of SMS wine marketing solutions is now available.
But there seems to be a problem with industry awareness about the compliance rules all wineries must follow. Misinformation spread by shady sales reps and rumors on social media are putting some wineries at risk of severe consequences.
So in this article, we’ll demystify SMS wine marketing compliance so your winery can confidently profit from text messaging without any worries.
What Regulations Apply to SMS Wine Marketers?
Text marketing is primarily regulated by the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA). And unlike email marketing, these regulations are strictly enforced by the FCC.
We don’t want to scare you, but failing to follow the law can have serious consequences. For example, in 2012, Papa John’s agreed to pay over $16 million to settle a class-action lawsuit brought against them for failure to get proper consent before texting their customers.
In addition to the TCPA, wine marketers are also regulated by the Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association (CTIA) which prohibits sending text messages about regulated products to consumers who aren’t of legal age.
And for SMS wine marketers accepting credit cards, you should also be familiar with the payment card industry’s PCI-DSS standards for securing payment card data.
PCI-DSS isn’t the law, but it governs your relationship with credit card processors. And if you don’t comply with these standards, your business can be subject to costly fines and even lose the ability to accept credit cards.
The good news is that compliance isn’t complicated! But it is mandatory to comply with three simple rules:
Express written consent
Age verification
Payment card security
Express Written Consent
Complying with the TCPA requires any business sending automated texts to obtain “express written consent” before sending any text messages.
That means you can’t just upload the names of your wine club members, purchase a list of phone numbers for text messaging, or assume you can text customers because you already have an existing business relationship.
If anyone tells you otherwise, you might ask them if they’ll foot your legal bills if they’re wrong.
You might be thinking, what’s “express consent,” and how is that different from plain ole “consent”?
When you sign up for a service like Gmail, and you agree to their terms, you consent to a bunch of language you probably didn’t read. But that type of consent isn’t good enough for text marketing -- you can’t bury consent to receive texts in a privacy policy or a user agreement.
By law, you must provide clear and conspicuous disclosure of what the consumer is consenting to and who they’re consenting to get it from.
In practice, asking your customers to opt-in to text messaging depends on whether you’re sending transactional or promotional messages.
If you only send transactional messages containing information necessary to use your products or services, obtaining customer consent can be simple. By adding a prompt to your checkout process that says, “provide your mobile number for shipping and delivery updates,” customers consent when they enter their digits.
But the key term here is “necessary.”
If your customers opt-in to receive text messages about their order, you can’t assume they’re opting in to receive texts about future releases. In the eyes of the FCC, these messages are “promotional” in nature and require your opt-in message to include specific elements:
Who will be texting them
What type of messages you’ll be sending, and how often you’ll be texting them
Confirmation that customer consent isn’t required for any purchase
Instructions on how consumers can stop receiving your automated texts
A link to your privacy policy and a disclaimer about data and message rates that may apply
Fortunately for wine marketers, we’re already familiar with the importance of compliance. And most of the SMS wine marketing solutions now available offer built-in consent forms that comply with the law.
But if you need extra motivation, consider the fines of $500-$1,500 per violation that are the most common punishment for non-compliance.
Age Verification
In addition to the TCPA’s regulations about obtaining express written consent, wine marketers are also governed by the Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association’s (CTIA) prohibition against sending text messages to consumers who aren’t of legal age.
These rules apply to any business promoting products or services associated with sex, hatred, alcohol, firearms, and tobacco, otherwise known as SHAFT.
The CTIA’s SHAFT guidelines aren’t the law, but all wine marketers should carefully follow them for a couple of reasons.
First, if someone lodges a legitimate complaint that you’re sending text messages to anyone younger than 21, any reputable text marketing service will quickly terminate your ability to send any text messages at all. And in our view, every winery also has a moral obligation to limit their marketing activities to target only adults over 21.
So what are SMS wine marketers to do?
The answer is to use “age-gates” around all your offers to send text messages. Most text marketing vendors accept a wide range of age-gates as long as they protect you from knowingly sending text messages to minors. Examples of age-gates supported by most text marketing services include:
A website that requires visitors to confirm they’re over 21 before entering
An automated data collection system that requires text marketing subscribers to enter their DOB or confirm they’re over the age of 21
A wine commerce system that includes DOB data confirming the age of your subscribers
Signage in your tasting room that makes it clear your text marketing offers are only available to adults over the age of 21
Some shady sales reps working for text marketing vendors targeting the wine industry are actively spreading misinformation about the age-gates required by the CTIA because their systems don’t offer the tools needed for wine marketing.
If anyone tells you there’s only one way to build an age-gate for text marketing, consult your compliance team first. But you might also want to select another vendor that offers better technology tailored for the wine industry.
Payment Card Security
All SMS wine marketers that also accept credit/debit cards, should know never to encourage customers to transmit card data via text because it’s not secure and violates the agreements you have with your payment processor.
For more than a decade, all merchants accepting payment cards have been required to comply with the payment card industry’s data security standards, also known as PCI-DSS. Complying with these standards offers your winery an essential element of protection in the case of a security breach.
Merchants that don’t comply with PCI-DSS guidelines then suffer a breach that exposes payment card data may be liable for fines of several hundred dollars for each card compromised. So it doesn’t take many customers for a non-compliant winery to incur fines that might put you out of business.
Astonishingly, some text marketing vendors are actively encouraging wineries to put themselves at significant risk by using non-compliant methods to collect payment card data.
If anyone tells you they have a way for your winery to see the full 16-digits of a payment card online, they’re inviting you to violate the terms of your merchant agreement by offering a solution that doesn’t comply with PCI-DSS.
As tempting as it might seem to collect payment card data you can copy & paste into a commerce system, ask yourself why you don’t have access to this same data through your online store or your payment card processor’s portal.
The answer is that it puts you out of compliance with PCI-DDS, it’s not secure, can hurt your customers, and expose your business to unnecessary risk.
Fortunately, there’s an easy way to use text messaging to invite your customers to update payment card data in a way that complies with PCI-DSS requirements.
Since all modern wine commerce systems comply with PCI-DSS, and most have a page where customers can update their card data securely, texting a link to this page is the best way to use SMS messaging to help customers change their payment information.
The Bottom-Line on SMS Wine Marketing Compliance
Compliance with the law should already be familiar to any wine marketer. After all, we’re selling a highly regulated product.
Although SMS marketing has its own unique rules, compliance issues shouldn’t keep your customers from staying in touch with you via text. And now that you understand the three most important compliance rules that apply to SMS wine marketing, your wine business can profit too.
To learn more about text marketing compliance, check out The Complete Guide to SMS Compliance, and if you have any questions at all, make sure to consult your compliance team.
Happy Selling!