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Brand and campaign registration

Before you can register for a phone number, you’ll need to register at least one brand and one campaign. The brand represents ‘who’ sends messages (you or a third party) and the campaign represents the kinds of messages you plan to send.

How it works

Brand and Campaign are regulatory terms for sending messages in the US and Canada. Before you can register for phone numbers, you have to declare who you are—your brand—and what kinds of messages you’ll send—your campaigns.

We’ll help you register your brand and campaigns. If you want to get started right away, take a look at campaigns below. Before you contact Customer.io to help you register as an SMS sender, you’ll need to provide at least three example messages for each of your campaign use cases—each kind of message you want to send.

Otherwise, it can be helpful to understand different kinds of brands and campaigns as they come with different requirements, fees, and allowed messages-per-day.

Most senders have relatively simple brand and campaign registrations: you are a direct brand and one campaign because you send messages on your own behalf for a single, universal purpose.

But this can get more complicated if you want to send different kinds of messages—like transactional and marketing messages—or you send messages on behalf of sub-accounts.

Brand registration

Most senders are considered standard, “Direct” brands. Generally, this means that you send messages representing yourself—you don’t send messages on behalf of another company or brand.

Brand throughput

Your brand entitles you to a certain number of message “segments” per day, where each segment is up to 160 characters. In traditional SMS applications, a segment is a single chat bubble.

ISV registration

Talk to Customer.io if you want to register as an independent software vendor (ISV).

Campaign registration

Your Campaign use case type describes the general type of messages you want to send to your audience, like marketing or account verification messages.

If you send different kinds of messages, you might have different campaigns—and possibly different phone numbers for each campaign. Generally, you can have up to five campaigns per brand.

There are a few different categories of use case types:

• Standard: see the full list of standard use cases below
• Low-Volume Mixed: offers lower messaging volume (fewer than 2,000 message segments per day on T-Mobile) and throughput than standard campaign use cases. But this type also comes with a lower monthly fee.
• Special: for non-profits and emergency services. See the full list of special use cases

The different campaign types have varying monthly fees associated and messaging throughput associated with them. See a list of A2P Campaign type fees in this support article.

Note that Low Volume Standard Brands receive lower messaging throughput for campaigns than Standard Brands.

Standard Campaign Use Cases

When you register as an SMS sender, you’ll need to provide at least three example messages for each of the campaign use cases that apply to you.

When your campaigns are approved, you’ll need to work within the boundaries of your allowed campaign use cases. If you want to send messages outside of your allowed use cases, you’ll need to contact Customer.io to request a new campaign.