A text goes out to a customer. It never arrives, and nothing in the dashboard says why. The usual advice is to rewrite the message, cut the exclamation points, or drop the word "free" and shorten the link. That treats the symptom. For most business texting that stalls before it starts, the cause sits one step earlier, in a form called brand registration. It has nothing to do with wording.
The system carriers built to stop spam
Every business that texts customers from a ten-digit number now runs through A2P 10DLC, Application-to-Person messaging on a 10-Digit Long Code. Carriers built it after spam traffic made unregistered business texting a problem worth blocking outright. Twilio, the messaging gateway under a large share of business texting platforms, started phasing in enforcement on July 5, 2023. By August 31, 2023, unregistered 10DLC traffic was blocked across the board.
Registration runs in two stages. First you register a brand, your business's legal identity, verified against outside records. Then you register a campaign, what you're texting about and why, reviewed against carrier use-case rules. Both have to clear before a single message goes through.
Where it actually breaks
We registered Level 99's own business texting in July 2026. The brand got approved July 21. The campaign cleared the next day. Getting there meant running into Twilio error 30794 and 30795, the two codes that account for most rejections. Both are EIN verification failures at the brand stage.
The brand check runs your business name, address, and EIN against the IRS record for that EIN. It is not a fuzzy match. "Level 99 LLC" and "Level 99, LLC" read as different strings to that check. An old address still on file with your registered agent fails it. So does a DBA used on the form instead of the legal entity name, or a suite number typed differently than the IRS has it. Any of these produces a rejection that reads like a vague EIN error, with no indication of which field was actually wrong.
The form asks for the business name four separate times across the brand registration flow. It has to be identical, character for character, all four times. Nobody warns you about that going in.
The fixes that actually reset the clock
Not every correction restarts review. Fixing a typo in a field that didn't cause the rejection changes nothing; the same mismatch fails again. What resets the clock is matching the specific record the check failed against.
Pull your entity's EIN confirmation letter (CP 575) or a recent IRS notice, and copy the legal name and address exactly as printed there, not as you write it on an invoice. If you operate under a DBA, register the legal entity name instead, unless your platform has a separate DBA field for that. Then confirm your registered agent's address matches what's on file with your state and the IRS; a move that didn't get updated everywhere is a common, silent cause of a rejection nobody can explain.
Once those match, resubmission usually clears in a day or two. Submitting again without changing the underlying mismatch just burns another review cycle on the same error. Twilio's standard brand vetting runs $41.50 one time, plus a $4.50 flat brand registration fee, plus $11 if you need to appeal a rejection. Campaign review, once the brand is approved, takes up to five business days for standard use cases.
The part after approval that still trips people up
Getting a brand and campaign approved doesn't end the compliance work. Carriers and the CTIA's messaging guidelines care about what happens between you and the person receiving the text, not just who you are on paper.
The consent checkbox label should name the actual registered business, not a shortened version of it or a separate brand name. A mismatch between the entity that registered and the entity the customer sees in the consent language is exactly what the review process exists to catch. Keep a visible carrier liability disclaimer too (message and data rates may apply, and carriers aren't responsible for delayed or undelivered messages), and honor STOP in plain language, immediately, with no exception carved out for "important" messages.
Never import opt-in lists you bought, rented, or inherited from somebody else's form. The CTIA's guidance is specific that a business "should not use opt-in lists that have been rented, sold, or shared," and a list like that is also the fastest way to generate the spam complaints that get a campaign suspended after it's already approved.
The CTIA also splits consent into tiers. Conversational, informational, and promotional messaging each carry different expectations, and a sequence of appointment reminders is held to a lighter standard than a marketing blast. Know which tier a given message falls into before it goes out.
Why this is worth getting right the first time
A rejected brand doesn't just delay texting. It delays every automated reminder, follow-up, and confirmation that depends on texting, which for most service businesses is the majority of customer-facing automation. What those automations actually cost once they're running already accounts for registration as part of setup, not an extra line item discovered later, because we paid every one of those fees ourselves before we ever quoted them to a client. Getting a client's brand and campaign approved cleanly, the first time, is part of what Level 99's setup fee covers.
This post explains how the registration system works and where it commonly fails. It isn't legal advice, and specific consent language or opt-in requirements for your business should be confirmed with your own counsel.
FAQ
My brand got rejected with an EIN error. What's the first thing to check?
Compare the legal business name, address, and EIN on your registration form against your IRS CP 575 confirmation letter or a recent IRS notice, character for character. Most EIN-stage rejections come from a mismatch in one of those three fields, not from the EIN itself being wrong.
Does resubmitting a rejected brand reset the review clock?
Only if you changed something that mattered. Resubmitting with the same mismatched field just produces the same rejection again, on a new clock. Fix the actual mismatch first.
Can I register under my DBA instead of my legal entity name?
Most platforms want the legal entity name that matches your EIN, with a separate field for a DBA if the platform supports one. Using the DBA in the primary name field is a common cause of brand-stage failures.
How long does the whole process take if nothing gets rejected?
Brand vetting and campaign review each run on their own timeline, with campaign review taking up to five business days for standard use cases once the brand is approved. A clean submission with matching records can clear brand and campaign review within about a week.