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Consent is a record with a date on it, not something the front desk remembers agreeing. Here is what to ask, where to ask it, and what to keep.
7 min read · Updated October 2026
Permission to text a salon client is a stored record with a date on it, and it comes in two separate kinds: one that lets you send appointment reminders and confirmations, and a stricter one that lets you send offers. Holding the first and sending the second is the ordinary way a marketing idea turns into a legal problem.
What follows is the operational version of that — where in a salon's booking flow each permission can actually be collected, what the wording has to contain, and what to keep afterwards. The rules behind it are the United States federal ones, under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act and the FCC rules that implement it, plus the carrier-side messaging rules that decide whether your texts get delivered at all. Several states layer their own, stricter versions on top of the federal floor. We run messaging for salons; we are not anybody's lawyers, and this is a checklist to take to one rather than a substitute for asking.
The distinction that does all the work is what the message is for, not what it looks like on the handset.
| What you are sending | What it counts as | What you need on file |
|---|---|---|
| Confirmation, reminder, rescheduling, running-late note | Part of the service the client asked for | Prior express consent — the client gave you the number for this purpose, and you can show when |
| Offer, win-back, seasonal campaign, a gap you are trying to fill | Marketing | Prior express written consent — an affirmative act by the client, with specific disclosures, that you can produce later |
Almost every salon has the left-hand column and assumes it covers the right. It does not, and the gap is not a technicality: the written standard exists precisely so that a client who never agreed to promotions cannot be enrolled in them by having once given a receptionist their mobile number.
The two also fail differently. A reminder sent to someone who did not want it is an annoyance. A promotion sent without written consent is the thing that carries statutory damages per message under the statute, and a list is a lot of messages.
The federal rules do not prescribe wording, but they do prescribe what the wording must tell the client. The definition of prior express written consent wants the client to be told that they are agreeing to marketing messages, sent automatically, from a named sender, at the number they have given — and that agreeing is not a condition of buying anything.
Which produces something close to this:
Text me offers and news from [salon name] at this number. I understand these are marketing messages sent automatically, that agreeing is not a condition of booking, that message and data rates may apply, and that I can reply STOP at any time.
Three mechanical things about that box, each of which is where real salons get caught.
It has to be unticked when the client arrives at it. A box ticked by default records your intention, not theirs.
It has to be its own box. Bundled into "I agree to the terms and conditions", it carries nothing — the client agreed to the terms, and the terms are not the disclosure.
It has to be separate from the reminders box. One combined tick means a client who later wants the offers to stop has to choose between promotions and knowing when their appointment is, and most of them will choose by replying STOP to everything.
Five places a salon touches a phone number, and what each one can honestly capture.
The online booking form. The best of them, because it is the one place where the client acts, the wording is fixed, and the timestamp writes itself. Two unticked boxes, reminders and offers, directly above the button.
Intake in the chair, on paper or a tablet. Works, and is the most commonly wasted. A signed form that gets filed in a drawer and never scanned is a consent record you cannot produce in the only situation where you would need it.
On the phone. Fine for the transactional side: the client is giving you the number so you can confirm the appointment. The marketing side is harder, because a verbal yes on a call nobody recorded is difficult to evidence afterwards. The practical move is to text them a link to the opt-in instead of asking on the call.
Instagram, or any other inbox. A client messaging you is permission to answer them there, and nothing more. It is not permission to text their mobile, and the volume in that inbox makes the temptation real — we went through one salon's DMs at some length, and the numbers are large enough that treating them as a marketing list would be an easy and expensive mistake.
A number written on a card at the desk. This is the one that produces a list nobody can defend. If it is the only record, the number belongs in the appointment, not in a campaign.
Then the case that catches established salons rather than new ones: a list imported from your previous software. Consent does not travel with an export. The client agreed to hear from your salon, so the agreement survives a change of platform — but only if what you can produce survives with it, which means the opt-in wording, the date and the source have to come across in the import rather than just the mobile number. That is worth checking before the old subscription lapses, for the same reason as everything else on the migration checklist.
A consent record that cannot be reconstructed from the software is not a record. The fields worth having, per client:
Keep it for as long as you might message that client, plus the window in which a complaint could still be brought — which is years, not months, and longer than most salons keep anything. If your booking software stores consent as a single yes-or-no flag with no date and no wording, that is worth knowing now rather than later, because the fix is a field, and the fix applied retroactively is a re-permission campaign.
There is one number we can offer here, and it is a weak one in a useful way.
Across 8,359 campaign messages sent through our own platform between 2026-05-26 to 2026-09-15, 1.7% of sends produced an opt-out. That is two accounts, dominated by a multi-location studio in California, so it is not a benchmark for anything.
What it is not able to tell you is the part that matters. A low opt-out rate is consistent with a list collected properly and messaged at a sane frequency; it is equally consistent with a list collected badly whose members have not got round to replying STOP. The signal says nothing about the records behind the numbers, which is the whole subject of this piece. Treat opt-outs as the lagging indicator they are — by the time the rate moves, the thing that moved it has already been sent. And count them as a cost either way, in the same report as the bookings, which is the argument we made about campaigns generally.
Two parts to this, and salons reliably get the first right and the second wrong.
Honour the request promptly, and treat it as valid however it arrives. A client who replies "please stop texting me" has revoked consent as surely as one who replies STOP, and the FCC rules are explicit that a revocation made in any reasonable manner counts. A system that only recognises the single word is not compliant, it is just literal.
Then: work out which permission they withdrew. If your reminders and your offers run as one programme on one number, you have no way to tell, and the safe reading of an ambiguous STOP is that everything stops — including the confirmation for the appointment they have next week. That is how a marketing decision becomes a no-show, which is the quiet cost of running the two together and the reason reminders deserve their own programme.
Make the narrower choice available before they take the broad one. An offers text whose footer offers a way to receive fewer messages rather than none gives a mildly irritated client somewhere to go that is not the exit.
None of that is interesting work, and all of it is cheaper than the alternative. The campaign templates we would start from are on rebooking texts, the mechanics of running sends are on bookings, and what we do with client data on our side is set out in the privacy policy.
For marketing texts — offers, win-backs, promotions — yes. United States federal rules require prior express written consent, meaning an affirmative act by the client who has been told they are agreeing to automated marketing messages from your named salon, and that agreeing is not a condition of booking. Appointment reminders and confirmations sit under a lower bar, because the client gave you the number for that purpose.
For anything to do with their appointment, yes. For promotions, only if the booking form asked for that separately and you can show what it said and when they agreed. A single combined tick covering the terms and conditions does not carry marketing consent.
No. Consent is specific to the channel and the programme. A client who DMs you has invited a reply in that inbox; moving them onto your text list needs its own opt-in.
Only to the extent the consent came across with it. The agreement was with your salon, not the platform, so it survives the switch — but you still have to be able to produce the wording, the date and the source for each number. Where the export carried only mobile numbers, you have contact details without consent records, and a re-permission message is the honest way back.
Stop sending, promptly, and accept any clearly worded version of the request rather than only the exact word. Then check which programme it covered: if offers and reminders share one programme, you cannot tell, and the safe assumption is that both end — which is the strongest practical argument for keeping them separate.
Across 8,359 sends for two of our accounts, 1.7% opted out. It is a narrow sample and, more to the point, a lagging signal: it tells you how the last send landed, not whether the list was built on records you could defend.
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