Link Leads Blog · August 2, 2026
Carriers throttle or block unregistered text traffic, and insurance sends get extra scrutiny even when they're registered correctly. Here's the actual process — brand, campaign, vetting score, and the mistakes that get insurance campaigns rejected or capped.
10DLC (10-digit long code) is the framework the major US carriers use to let application-to-person text traffic ride on standard local numbers instead of short codes. If your number isn't registered, carriers apply default throughput limits that are low enough to make a real campaign painful — a few hundred messages a day, sometimes less — and unregistered traffic is increasingly filtered outright. For an agent about to text a few thousand records off an aged list, registration isn't a formality, it's the difference between messages landing and messages disappearing into a spam filter no one tells you about.
10DLC has two separate registration steps, both run through The Campaign Registry (TCR) but usually submitted from inside whatever SMS platform or dialer you use. Brand registration identifies your business — legal name, EIN or sole-proprietor status, address, and contact details. Campaign registration identifies what you're actually sending — the use case, sample messages, opt-in language, and opt-out handling. You need both, in that order, before a number is fully provisioned. A brand with no campaign attached still can't send at scale.
Use your real, matchable business information — the legal entity name and EIN as they appear on your official filings, not a DBA or a shortened version. Mismatches between what you submit and what carriers can verify against business databases are one of the most common reasons a brand gets a low trust score before you've sent a single message. If you're a sole proprietor without an EIN, most registrars have a track for that, but expect a lower default trust tier and correspondingly lower throughput until you can register under a formal entity.
This is where insurance campaigns most often go wrong. "Low volume mixed" is cheaper and faster to approve, but it caps daily volume hard and isn't meant for anything that looks like marketing at scale. A cold text to a purchased data list — even a well-scrubbed one — reads as marketing, so register it under a standard marketing or mixed-use campaign with insurance disclosed as the vertical, not tucked under a generic category to slip through faster. Carriers specifically flag insurance and financial services traffic for closer review; misrepresenting the vertical to get faster approval is a good way to get the campaign suspended later instead of rejected up front.
Once a campaign is live, carriers assign a trust score that determines how many messages per number per day you can actually send — unvetted or low-trust campaigns are often capped in the low thousands or less across a number, while a campaign that completes secondary vetting (a paid, deeper review of the business) can unlock meaningfully higher throughput. If your plan is to work a state list of several thousand aged records on a standing weekly cadence rather than a single blast, secondary vetting is usually worth the fee — it's the difference between a campaign that can carry your actual volume and one that forces you to spread sends across more numbers than you'd otherwise need.
Most rejections trace back to a handful of repeat issues: brand information that doesn't match public records, sample messages that don't match the declared use case, missing or vague opt-out language ("reply STOP to opt out" should appear in your samples, not just in practice), and campaigns registered as a use case that's obviously narrower than what you intend to send. Submit sample messages that look like what you'll actually text — generic, no name in the greeting, agent introducing themselves, and a clear opt-out — so the registration matches the campaign carriers eventually see in the wild.
10DLC registration governs whether your texts get delivered — it says nothing about whether the numbers on your list are legal to text in the first place. Those are separate problems, and doing registration well doesn't excuse skipping a DNC scrub or a wireless/landline check beforehand; texting a landline is a bounce at best and its own compliance exposure at worst. We point our own buyers at Landline Remover to run that pass before a list ever touches a dialer or SMS platform (disclosure: that's an affiliate link and we may earn a commission if you sign up through it). Do the scrub first, then let a clean registered campaign carry a clean list — one step doesn't substitute for the other.
This is a practical process guide, not legal advice. Carrier requirements, TCR use-case categories, and vetting fees change over time and vary by SMS platform. Confirm current requirements with your SMS provider and talk to counsel familiar with telemarketing and texting compliance before you scale a campaign, especially one that spans multiple states. For the scrub step this post assumes you've already run, see how to DNC scrub an aged lead list before your first call.
Link Leads sells aged data by state and age band at a flat $0.015 per lead, so a properly registered campaign has real volume to run against — 5,000 leads in a single state is $75 in the order builder, and code PACT takes 20% off your first order. Before you commit a full campaign to a list, the math on texting 10,000 aged leads covers the cost and close-rate math, or grab the free 100-row sample to test your registration and scripts first.