The first message is a receipt

The first message most brands ever send to a customer's phone is an order confirmation, and it decides what every message after it is allowed to be.

Look at what the customer agreed to. They ticked a box at checkout, or they did not tick anything at all, and what they wanted was to know where the parcel is. Out for delivery. The driver is fifteen minutes away. Here is the number he will call from.

Nobody objects to that message. It is useful, it is read inside a minute, and it gets an open rate no email in the business will ever come close to. So somebody sees the rate, draws the obvious conclusion, and two days later the same thread carries twenty per cent off the new range. I have watched that decision made in every size of account.

That is the moment the permission is spent. It was granted for one job and used for another, and the customer has no polite way of saying so. There is no unsubscribe line at the bottom of a chat. There is one button, and it closes the door for good.

Then read the report. Delivered. Read. A tidy little funnel with nothing wrong in it. The household that used that button on Tuesday is not in a column marked lost. They are simply not in the next send, and the list is still the size it was, because a list built on order confirmations refills itself every time somebody buys something.

So the channel stops working a few households at a time, over months, and the one number that would show it is the number the channel was never built to produce.

Every figure in that report describes the people who have not left yet.