Hey, everyone, Derek Johnson with tatango.com.
It is Friday and we found something really interesting and definitely something that
all text message marketers need to know.
With the new release of Apple iOS 11.2, so that's the new version of what is installed
on the phone, what we found is, if you put a dollar sign into a mass text message or
even in a MMS message, you can see what's happening is the dollar sign is essentially
making any link or so a hyperlink so you can click on the phone or it's even making telephone
numbers unclickable.
So let me show you the first message here.
I'm sorry it's a little hard to see with the glare.
So you can see the first one and the reason is, is because it has that dollar symbol by
the 5, so $5, any dollar symbol in the message is making the links and the phone number unclickable.
There is no way to make it clickable.
And this is not an SMS provider issue.
This is the iPhone doing this.
Now just so we are clear, we've already contacted Apple.
We're trying to get this resolved.
We've submitted a bug so hopefully they get this resolved.
But if you are sending a text message out with a dollar symbol, you, number one, should
not be sending out currently while this bug is live.
You should not be sending out a text message with the dollar symbol if you are using either
a link in the message or you are putting a phone number because no one will be able to
click on those.
So it makes the message almost not usable.
So one other thing that we found very, very interesting, which I think has to do with
Apple Pay, we're still kind of investigating, figuring out what's going on exactly here
but as you can see...not the best at holding this phone here.
As you can see, if you actually put anything that also is similar to a dollar symbol...and
I'm not talking about another symbol, but what I'm talking about is something like the
word dollar.
So we tested the word dollar.
Instead of the dollar symbol we put $5 and we spelled it out.
Then we spelled out five bucks.
And, as you can see, for some reason, and I think it's because of Apple Pay, the integration
in 11.2, what you can see is that it's not rendering the link, so the dollar symbol or
really any mention of dollar, bucks.
The one thing that did work, as you can see here, is buckaroos or what else is here, what
we've put, and then we just put nothing.
So save five off any purchase today and as you can see here that won't work.
So you can see the bottom two messages, those the link does work.
So I think while this bug is in place and I don't know how long it's going to last,
this is gonna have a huge impact for text messaging marketing and MMS marketing because
you're essentially not going to be able put the dollar symbol in your messages or mention
dollar or bucks and also I don't know what else they are screening for.
This is a really good example of why when before you send a mass text message, always
test it and test it on multiple phones because if you have an iOS device that hasn't been
upgraded, you will see the link.
So you always want to test on multiple operating system, multiple versions before actually
sending to all your subscribers.
So that's what's going on today.
We just figured this out.
So we are sending out an email to everybody.
When this does get resolved we will let you know.
Be sure you subscribe on YouTube to our channel.
We'll be posting a video the minute this gets resolved.
Also, we will be sending out an email, so you can go to our blog, tatango.com/blog,
the right hand side there.
There'll be an email signup and you will get an email the minute this is resolved.
So, hopefully everybody is having a good Friday.
Unfortunately, this has come up but now you know how to avoid this issue, so that your
links always appear on Apple iPhones.
Have a good day, everyone.