How to write a business text people don't hate

There is one fact that determines everything else about writing for this channel: your message arrives in the same list as the customer's mother, their partner and their group chat. Not a marketing inbox. Not a promotions tab. The list they check when they are waiting for something that matters.

Everything below follows from that.

Say who you are in the first six words

The customer has not saved your number. If the message opens with *Your appointment is confirmed*, they have no idea whose appointment it is, and the half-second they spend working it out is the half-second in which they decide you are spam.

One message, one purpose

If you catch yourself writing *also*, you have started a second message — and it is usually one that should not be sent. The reminder is the reminder. The review request is a different message at a different moment. Bundling them halves the effectiveness of both and doubles the irritation.

Delete the marketing furniture

The formatting conventions of bulk SMS are exactly what people pattern-match on when deciding something is spam. Every one of these makes a message look automated:

• ALL-CAPS business names
• Short links on a domain the customer does not recognize
• *Msg&data rates may apply* when you are not legally required to include it
• Emoji used as bullet points
• Exclamation marks doing emotional work the sentence cannot
• The word *Hi* followed by a first name that is obviously a merge field

The test is simple: would a person who works at your business type this to a customer they know? If not, do not send it. You are not writing a broadcast that happens to arrive individually — you are writing to one person, several hundred times.

Make replying cheap

The most valuable property of this channel is that the customer can answer, and the most common mistake is writing messages that give them nothing to answer. A closed question with two options gets a response; an open one gets silence.

• Good: *Tuesday or Thursday?* — one tap of thought.
• Bad: *Let us know if you'd like to reschedule at your convenience.* — a task.
• Also good: anything a 👍 can answer. Accept the tapback as consent and stop asking.

Length is not the constraint people think

iMessage has no meaningful character limit, so the 160-character discipline of SMS does not apply. That does not mean write more. It means write the natural length of the thought instead of compressing it into something that reads like a telegram.

Two full sentences that sound human beat one clipped fragment that saved you a segment you were not being billed for anyway. This is a real advantage of per-line pricing that almost nobody uses.

The hour test

Before any new play goes live: send the message to yourself, put the phone down, and pick it up an hour later as if you were the customer. Read it cold.

If your first instinct is mild irritation, the problem is not the copy — it is the play. No amount of rewriting fixes a message that should not have been sent. Kill it and pick a different one from the use cases.

The rules, condensed

Timing gets its own treatment in the best time to send a business text, and if you want copy you can adapt rather than write from scratch, there are 24 templates here.

The last four are as much compliance as craft. The consent and compliance guide covers what is legally required versus merely wise, and the distinction is worth knowing before you scale a play up.