Texting Customers Back in Nevada: Consent Rules

A customer calls your shop at 6:40pm. Nobody picks up. At 7:05pm someone on your team, or the software you bought last month, sends a text that says: sorry we missed you, want to book tomorrow? Two weeks later the same system sends that person a text about a brake special.

Those two messages are not the same thing under the law, and most owners we talk to treat them as one thing. The first is a reply to an inquiry the customer started. The second is marketing to a phone number you happen to have. The consent that covers one does not automatically cover the other.

This post is not legal advice. It is a working map we use when we set up text follow up for a business, so that the owner knows what question to ask a lawyer instead of paying one to explain the basics.

The distinction that decides everything

Federal rules under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, summarized for consumers in the FCC's guide to unwanted robocalls and texts, draw the line at purpose. Text messages sent to a mobile number using automated equipment need the consumer's consent, and the FCC's guidance is explicit that marketing texts require the consumer to have agreed in writing to receive them. A reply to a question the consumer just asked you sits on much firmer ground, because the consumer handed you the number for exactly that purpose.

So before you write a single message, sort it into one of two buckets.

Informational or transactional. Answering the question they asked, confirming an appointment, telling them the part came in, sending a quote they requested, telling them the tow truck is 12 minutes out. The content stays inside the reason they contacted you.

Marketing or promotional. Anything selling something they did not ask about. Specials, seasonal offers, we miss you campaigns, new service announcements, reactivation blasts to old customers. If a message contains an offer, it is marketing, even if it also contains something useful.

A message that starts informational and ends with a promotion is a marketing message. Mixing does not launder it.

The consent table

Here is how the four common entry points map to what you may send. Read the middle column as the ceiling, not the target.

The last row is the one that catches people. A contact form is not consent to market. It is a request for an answer. You answer it, and if you want to send offers later you have to ask for that separately.

What written consent has to look like on a form

The FCC's consumer guidance frames marketing texts as something the consumer agreed in writing to receive. In practice that means the agreement has to be findable and provable a year later, so build the form to produce evidence:

• A checkbox that the consumer ticks themselves. Not prechecked, not bundled with the terms of service, not implied by pressing Submit.
• Language next to the checkbox that names your business, says text messages, says the messages may be promotional, and says message and data rates may apply and they can reply STOP.
• Consent that is not a condition of getting the quote. If they have to accept texts to get a price, that is a problem.
• A stored record of the exact wording that was on the page that day, not the wording on the page today. Forms get edited. Screenshots and version history matter.
• One consent per business. A checkbox that signs the consumer up for your partners is a different animal and should not be on a small business form at all.

That list is the entire difference between a defensible marketing program and a phone list you are afraid to use.

Where Nevada law actually enters

Nevada's contribution here is narrower than people expect. NRS 200.620 governs the interception and recording of telephone communications, not text messages. It does not add a separate Nevada consent checkbox for SMS. What it does mean is that the moment your text thread turns into a phone call and you record that call, you are in a different statute with different requirements, and Nevada's rule is stricter than the federal floor.

That matters because text follow up and call handling are usually the same system. We wrote up the recording side separately in the Nevada recording consent post, and the short version is that a text saying reply YES and we will call you does not get you consent to record the call you then place. Those are two separate permissions and you collect them at two separate moments.

If your business is a law firm, the analysis gets tighter again, because the first inbound message may carry facts you would rather not have sitting in an unencrypted SMS thread. That is a confidentiality question layered on top of the consent question, and we treat it that way when we build intake for law firms.

Stop means stop, and the clock is short

Whatever consent you started with, the consumer can end it. The FCC's consumer guidance is direct about this: a consumer can revoke consent, and businesses are required to honor a stop request, with the FCC giving a deadline of 10 business days to process it. Verify that timeline on the FCC page linked in the sources before you configure anything, because it is the one number in this post that a rule change could move.

Operationally, three things have to be true. STOP has to work in every thread, including replies to a human. The suppression has to be at the phone number level across every tool you own, not per campaign. And your Do Not Contact list has to survive a platform switch, because the most common violation we see is a business that changed vendors and lost its opt out history.

What this post does not settle

We are engineers, not lawyers, and none of this is legal advice. The consent table above is a design constraint we build against, not a legal opinion, and it does not cover the National Do Not Call Registry as it applies to your specific outreach, industry rules like healthcare or lending, or what a plaintiff's attorney can argue about a specific message you sent. If you run marketing texts at any volume, have counsel read your form language and your first three templates. That is a cheap hour.

What you can do today without anyone's help: open your web form, look for the checkbox, and if it is not there, stop every promotional text going to numbers that came through it.

If you want a second set of eyes on how your missed calls turn into text follow up, our free 15 minute audit walks your current setup and tells you where the consent gaps are, starting from missed call recovery.