Email invites sit unread, and paper RSVP cards rarely come back. A text that asks one question, "Reply YES or NO," usually gets an answer within the hour from the people who actually plan to come. Organizers and venues switch to texting for that reason: it turns an RSVP from a chase into a reply.
Texting a few hundred guests is also where an event moves from personal texting to business messaging, with the rules that come with it. This guide covers how to structure the invite, how to handle YES/NO replies, when to send reminders, what consent you need, and what a typical event costs on Ready, with the math worked out.
Who you can text, and how you know
Every guest on your list should have agreed to receive texts from you. That covers people who checked an "event updates by text" box when they bought a ticket, members who opted in on your signup form, and past attendees who agreed to hear about future events. A phone number pulled from a spreadsheet of people who never opted in is a cold list. You reach those people by phone or mail. Do not text them.
Two things keep you on the right side of the rules:
- Keep the consent record where the opt-in happened. That means your ticketing platform, your form tool or your CRM: the timestamp, the checkbox wording and the page it was on. Ready records your attestation on each bulk send and each API send that sets
consent_attested(who sent it, to how many people, and when). That gives you an audit trail of your sends, but it is not a per-guest consent record, and a guest replying YES does not create one either. - Honor STOP immediately. Ready handles inbound STOP and UNSUBSCRIBE automatically, and the opt-out applies across every campaign on the account. A guest who opts out of your gala reminders won't receive next season's invite by accident.
For the wider legal picture (TCPA exposure, quiet hours, what counts as consent), read Is Mass Texting Legal? Rules Every Business Must Follow. We treat compliance features as risk reduction. The sender is still responsible for the list.
One more case: if the event is a fundraiser and your texts ask for donations, email support@tryready.com before your first send and wait for our reply. Signing up and registering is not enough on its own for donation appeals.
Mass text, not group chat
An invite should go out as individual one-to-one texts, not a group thread. In a group MMS, every guest sees every other guest's number, every "can't make it!" reply goes to everyone, and one person replying STOP doesn't remove them from the thread. A mass text sends a separate message to each guest, and every reply comes back only to you. Mass Text vs Group Chat vs Group MMS covers the tradeoffs in detail. For RSVPs, the answer is always a mass text.
The invite: one question, one segment
Here is a sample invite we wrote for a fictional supper club:
Riverside Supper Club: our spring dinner is Sat May 15, 7 PM at Hale Hall. Reply YES to save a seat or NO if you can't make it. Reply STOP to opt out.
That message is 150 characters of plain GSM-7 text, so it fits in 1 segment. The design choices behind it:
- Name yourself first. Guests won't recognize an unfamiliar number, so the sender's name has to appear before anything else.
- Ask for a single word. "Reply YES or NO" is much easier to tally than "let us know if you're coming," which brings back answers like "prob!" or "me +2?"
- Include the opt-out. Carriers expect it, and it costs you about 22 characters.
- Put details behind a link only if you need to. Date, time and venue fit in the text itself. A link to a full event page is fine, but it adds characters and can push the message into a second segment.
Collecting YES and NO replies
Replies arrive in Ready's Inbox, threaded per guest. If you connect Ready to GoHighLevel, they also land in the GHL conversation for that contact. From the inbox, you can tag or segment the YES guests to build the reminder list. Some guests will send replies that need a person to read them, like "YES but can I bring my sister?" Those are the guests who make an event go well, so answer them yourself. New AI reply agents can't be created; replies come from your team.
If you run the event from your own software, you can read replies with GET /v1/messages and match YES/NO in code. See the messages docs.
Reminders: when to send them
A simple schedule that works for most events:
| Message | Sent to | When | Typical length | Segments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Invite | Everyone opted in | 3 to 4 weeks out | ~150 chars | 1 |
| Confirmation reply | Each YES | Same day as reply | ~100 chars | 1 |
| Week-out reminder | YES list | 7 days before | ~130 chars | 1 |
| Day-of logistics | YES list | Afternoon of the event | ~120 chars | 1 (2 with an emoji) |
The day-of text is the one guests actually use: doors time, address, parking, and "reply here if you're running late." Watch out for emojis. This draft is 119 characters with one emoji:
Tonight 🎉 Doors 6:30 PM at Hale Hall, 41 River St. Parking in the back lot. Reply here if you're late. STOP to opt out
One emoji switches the whole message to unicode encoding, which drops the limit from 160 characters to 70 (67 per part), so this becomes 2 segments. Remove the 🎉 and it is 1 segment. Curly apostrophes don't cause this problem on Ready, because we convert them to plain ones before sending.
Timing matters too. Ready holds sends outside permitted local hours based on the recipient's area. A 6:30 PM doors text goes out on time. A "the after-party moved!" text at 11:40 PM will be held until morning, so plan late-night changes accordingly. Campaigns, drip campaigns and automations wait up to 24 hours for the window; a one-to-one or API text is held only if the window opens within 6 hours, otherwise it is refused and must be resent; a one-to-one reply to someone who texted you in the last 24 hours goes out at any hour.
Worked example: a 300-guest dinner
Assumptions for this example: 300 opted-in invitees, and half of them reply (150 replies, each 1 segment). Of those, 120 say YES, and you send each YES a 1-segment confirmation. The day-of text keeps the emoji.
| Message | Count | Segments each | Segments |
|---|---|---|---|
| Invite | 300 | 1 | 300 |
| Replies received | 150 | 1 | 150 |
| Confirmations | 120 | 1 | 120 |
| Week-out reminder | 120 | 1 | 120 |
| Day-of (with emoji) | 120 | 2 | 240 |
| Total | 930 |
Ready bills replies you receive the same as texts you send. On Standard, that's $0.0075/segment plus a $0.0045 carrier fee per segment:
- Rate: 930 × $0.0075 = $6.98
- Carrier fee: 930 × $0.0045, itemized separately on your bill
Removing the emoji from the day-of text saves 120 segments, which is $0.90 at the Standard rate plus the carrier fee on those segments. That is a small amount, but it shows how segment counts drive the bill.
Two things this example leaves out. Litigator/DNC scrubbing and landline validation are off by default; each adds $0.003 per segment if you switch it on. And the first 20 free texts don't apply here, because they cover one-to-one sends only. A campaign is billed from its first text.
Register before you need it
An account can send up to 500 texts a month before it registers for 10DLC. The 300-guest event above uses 930 segments, so you will need to register. The charge at submission is the first month, $25, with no setup fee. After that it's $25/mo for registration and $2/mo per number. Most approvals take 2 to 7 days, so register when you start planning the event, not the week of the invite. If you buy a number before registering, you can send on Ready's shared registration at the same per-text rate while yours is in review.
Choose a campaign use case that matches what you'll actually send. Invites to people who haven't committed read more like marketing than reminders do. Registering a 'Marketing' Campaign When You Send Reminders Gets You Throttled explains how to match the use case to your messages.
Large events and venues: throughput
For a dinner, throughput doesn't matter. For a venue texting 5,000 ticket holders about a gate change, it does. A new standard campaign without brand vetting sends at roughly 1 to 4 segments per second. At an assumed 2 segments per second, 5,000 one-segment texts take about 42 minutes. T-Mobile also caps daily volume by brand trust score, and the lowest tier is around 2,000 messages a day. Venues that regularly text thousands of guests on event day should look at brand vetting ($79 Standard / $179 Enhanced, one-time). Vetting raises the trust score, and the daily cap goes up when the new score crosses into a higher tier.
If you send from your own system, POST /v1/messages/bulk accepts up to 100 recipients per call:
POST https://api.tryready.com/v1/messages/bulk
X-API-Key: <key>
Idempotency-Key: 7f9c2e1a-4b3d-4c8e-9a10-2f6d5e8b1c3a
{"to": ["+12125550199", "+15559876543"], "body": "Hale Hall: Gate C is closed tonight. Use Gate A on River St. STOP to opt out", "consent_attested": true}Split larger lists into batches of 100. Use a new Idempotency-Key for each batch, and reuse the same key only when you retry that batch, so a retry never sends twice. See the bulk messages docs.
The practical takeaway
Text only guests who opted in, and keep your own record of that consent. Ask for a single-word reply. Keep each message to one segment unless the emoji is worth paying double for. Send reminders to the YES list only, and register for 10DLC well before invites go out. For a broader checklist that applies beyond events, see How to Send a Mass Text to Customers the Right Way.
When you're ready to plan your first invite, you can create an account. Use the 20 free one-to-one texts to try the reply flow before you register, then send the invite as a campaign once you're approved.