Effective December 1st, 2023, the state of New Jersey (NJ) is imposing new compliance regulations (Bill S921) in addition to nationwide, federal TCPA regulations and industry standards required by cellular carriers.
What Are The Key Changes?
Shorter waking hours for New Jersey residents. Starting December 1st, 2023, New Jersey's waking hours are 8:00 AM to 9:00 PM local time for both campaigns and automations.
This regulation also requires that brands disclose their business address in every message sent to New Jersey-based recipients.
How We're Solving For Business Links
Our goal is to absorb the heavy-lifting of the ever changing SMS compliance landscape by taking a product-led approach to compliance. This way, our merchants can spend more time focused on optimizing their ecommerce brand.
We also want to be mindful of the impact including a full business address would have on character count and therefore– cost per message.
With that in mind, Postscript is solving for New Jersey’s new requirements by automatically appending a shortened business link to the end of all applicable messages when sending to NJ subscribers. This link will route to a Postscript-generated landing page populated with the required business information.
Our deep integration with Shopify allows us to pull this data from your Shopify store and render it onto a landing page (shown below). Your business information is shown in English and French (Canada also requires that brands disclose their business address in every message sent to Canadian recipients).
You have the ability to view and modify the data we’ve pulled in from Shopify within your Postscript Shop Settings under Anti-spam compliance business info. To navigate to your shop settings from the Postscript Dashboard, select your store name on the left-side navigation panel.
How We're Solving For Quiet Hours
In the case of New Jersey quiet hours, Postscript will screen subscribers and customers by area code to identify New Jersey residents and prevent messages from going to New Jersey numbers during New Jersey's quiet hours (8:00 PM to 9:00 AM local time) for campaigns, automations, and flows.
No action is needed for legacy campaigns or campaign flows.
To ensure compliance, Postscript will not send campaigns or campaign flows to New Jersey-based subscribers unless the campaign is scheduled to send during New Jersey's waking hours (8:00 AM to 9:00 PM local time).
If any messages within a campaign flow are sent or scheduled to send during New Jersey's quiet hours and the target segment includes New Jersey-based subscribers, Postscript will schedule those messages to send to New Jersey subscribers when New Jersey's waking hours resume at 8:00 AM local time.
If a legacy campaign is sent or scheduled to send during New Jersey's quiet hours and includes New Jersey-based subscribers in the target segment, Postscript will automatically remove those subscribers based on phone area code and they will not receive your campaign. Your shop will not be charged for these unsent messages.
No action is needed for legacy automations or automation flows.
To ensure compliance, Postscript will not send automations or automation flows to New Jersey-based subscribers unless the automation is scheduled to send during New Jersey's waking hours (8:00 AM to 9:00 PM local).
If an automation or automation flow is sent or scheduled to send during New Jersey's quiet hours and includes New Jersey-based subscribers in the target segment, Postscript will hold off sending the message until New Jersey's waking hours which begin at 8:00 AM local time.
How You Can Prepare
We recommend updating your Messaging Terms to reflect New Jersey-specific language. For shops using Dynamic Hosted Messaging Terms and Messaging Privacy Policy, no action is required to update your Messaging Terms. Postscript has already taken care of updating the messaging terms to reflect the changes.
For shops that are not using Dynamic Hosted Messaging Terms and Messaging Privacy Policy, please find updated disclaimer language below to manually update Section 12 of your Terms and Conditions. View our full Terms of Service template and instructions here.
New Jersey: In our efforts to comply with the New Jersey telemarketing law, (as applicable to New Jersey residents), you agree that we may assume that you are a New Jersey resident if, at the time of opt-in to the Program, the area code for the phone number used to opt-into the Program is a New Jersey area code. You agree that the requirements of the New Jersey telemarketing statute do not apply to you, and you shall not assert that you are a New Jersey resident, if you do not meet this criteria or, in the alternative, do not affirmatively advise Us in writing that you are a New Jersey resident. Insofar as you are a New Jersey resident, you agree that mobile messages sent by Us in direct response to mobile messages or requests from you (including but are not limited to response to Keywords, opt-in, help or stop requests and shipping notifications) shall not constitute an “unsolicited telemarketing sales call” or “telemarketing sales call” for purposes of New Jersey Statute Title 56, Chapter 8 (including but not limited to section 56:8-128.), to the extent the law is otherwise relevant and applicable. Additionally, in efforts to comply with section 56:8-128, we will state Our company name (or any D/B/A of Ours) at the start of every message We send to you.
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