Texting Young Living Customers: What Belongs in a Text and What Belongs in an Email

Sooner or later, every Brand Partner hears it: “Nobody reads email anymore. You should be texting your people.” It usually arrives right when you’re staring at an open rate you wish were higher, so it sounds convincing. But email and text are both working channels, and they do different jobs. The Brand Partners who communicate well learned which message belongs where, and they set up texting properly from the very first send. The skill worth having is a working answer to one question: does this message belong in a text or in an email?

This week’s training walks through exactly that: which messages your customers genuinely appreciate getting by text, how someone gives you real permission to text her, when a text is worth the interruption and when it works against you, and the setup that gives you a dedicated business number so your personal cell stays personal. If texting has felt like a gray area you’d rather avoid than get wrong, this is the plain-English version.

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The texting side of this runs on GetOiling’s two-way texting add-on, which gives your account its own real phone number. You can grab a $1 trial, add texting, and set your own business number up this week. And you won’t be figuring it out alone: we run a free group Weekly Work Session call every Thursday at 12pm ET, where you bring your questions and whatever you’re working on and get real help in real time.

Probably, for some messages, and with permission. That’s the honest version of the answer, and it’s more useful than the one you usually hear. The case for texting is real: a text is read quickly, it feels personal, and it’s the natural home for anything time-sensitive. The case for email is just as real: an email can teach, it holds photos and links and full thoughts, and it stays findable when your customer wants to come back to it. Your customers live comfortably in both. What they notice is whether you use each one well.

So instead of asking which channel wins, picture the message itself. A reminder that class starts tomorrow night wants to be a text. Your monthly note about what you’re loving and why, with photos and a recipe and a link to order, wants to be an email. A quick “your order should have landed today, let me know how you like it” is a text. The wellness routine you wrote up for the new customer who just got her first kit is an email she’ll want to find again in a month. When you sort messages this way, the debate dissolves into something much more practical: two channels, each doing what it does best, both pointed at the same relationship.

Here’s a rule of thumb you can run any message through. Text the moment; email the substance. If a message is short, timely, and personal, it belongs in a text: the class reminder, the order check-in, the “thinking of you, how’s the sleep blend working?” note to one person. If a message carries teaching, multiple links, images, or anything your customer might want to re-read later, it belongs in an email: the newsletter, the class follow-up with the recipes, the welcome series for a brand-new customer.

Length is the tell. A text that scrolls has picked the wrong channel, and an email whose entire body is “starts in an hour!” has too. Frequency matters just as much. Email earns a regular weekly or monthly spot your readers come to expect; texts should feel occasional and worth the interruption. A customer who gets one genuinely useful text a week will read every one of them. And when a message is both timely and substantial, use the two channels together: send the email that carries the substance, then a short text that points to it.

Class night is the perfect example of the pairing in action. The evening of the class, a short text goes out: “So glad you came tonight! Keep an eye on your inbox in the morning, I’m sending everything we covered.” The next morning, the email lands with the recipes, the photos, and the link to order. The text made sure she knew it was coming; the email did the heavy lifting; each channel did the job it’s built for. Used sparingly, for the moments that genuinely matter, that one-two is how your best content gets seen without either channel wearing out its welcome.

Permission is what separates a welcome text from an unwelcome one, so it’s worth getting right from the start. In GetOiling, someone gives you texting permission in one of two ways. The first is a text-in keyword: you pick a word, share it at a class or on a graphic (“text OILS to my number”), and when someone texts it, she’s opted herself in, and the keyword can drop her straight into a campaign you’ve already set up, so a welcome message goes out without you lifting a finger. It’s a lovely fit for in-person moments, because the people in that room are exactly the ones who want to hear from you. Put the keyword on your class slides, on a little sign at your vendor table, anywhere the warm people already are. The second path is a phone field on one of your forms, where she checks that she’d like text updates as she signs up.

One distinction does a lot of work here: a phone number given so you can coordinate something is permission to coordinate that thing. Marketing permission is its own yes. The numbers sitting in your Virtual Office file are the same story: you have them so you can serve the customers behind them, and texting promotions to those numbers still needs its own clear yes first. The good news is that asking is easy, and the people who say yes are your warmest audience by definition. From there, the courtesies are simple: your first text tells her she can reply STOP any time, and if she does, that’s honored immediately. Every one of those small courtesies compounds into the same impression: that a text from you respects her attention. That impression is the entire asset. A small list of people who truly said yes will always outperform a big list of people who didn’t.

Most Brand Partners who text customers today are doing it from their personal number, because that’s what was in their hand. It works until it doesn’t: your customer conversations live in the same thread as your family group chat, there’s no record anywhere in your business of what was said, and every new customer means one more person who has your personal cell forever.

A dedicated business number solves all of that at once. Two-way texting is an add-on you attach to your GetOiling account, and it comes with the fix built in: choose a fresh number in minutes, or bring a number you already use over to the platform. From then on, that’s the number your customers see on caller ID and the number all your business texting runs through. Your phone stays yours, your evenings stay yours, and the boundary between the two takes care of itself. It also simply reads better: the same number on your class graphics, your website, and the text that arrives the morning of class tells people they’re dealing with a business that has itself together.

And here’s the part most Brand Partners miss: this number is a full business phone line, and texting is only half of what it does. You can make calls from it, right from a customer’s contact record, with your business number showing on her caller ID. She can call it back, and incoming calls forward straight to your cell. When a call covers something you’ll want a record of, you can record it, have the recording transcribed, and find both on her contact record later. Because the number lives inside your account rather than inside one device, it’s also what makes everything in the next sections possible.

Once your number is set up, a text can leave your account three different ways, and knowing which is which keeps both your credits and your welcome intact. A broadcast is one message to a list, sent right away or scheduled for the date and time you pick: the class announcement, the last-call note before an order deadline. A campaign is a series of one or more messages that runs on a schedule you set once, either interval-based (a message on day one, day three, day seven from whenever each person joins) or date-based (anchored to real calendar dates, like the lead-up to a class). And booking reminders are neither: once someone books a call or a consult with you, the system sends those automatically, and you never touch them.

The cost picture follows the same lines. Broadcasts and campaign texts spend marketing credits from your plan’s monthly allotment, and you can buy more if you need them. Booking reminders cost nothing, and neither does replying in a conversation. Keep those three lanes straight and the rest of this post gets much easier: the sorting rule tells you which messages deserve a text, and the three lanes tell you which kind of text to reach for.

Broadcast texts get the attention, but the two-way conversation is where texting earns its keep for a Brand Partner. If you’ve ever answered DMs on social, you already know how this works: it’s the same back-and-forth, typed from your keyboard, except it lands in her actual text messages instead of an app inbox she may or may not open. When a customer replies to your class reminder with “can I bring my sister?”, that reply lands in your account as a chat you can answer right there, and the back-and-forth costs you nothing. Conversation is free, always. That pricing tells you exactly how to use the channel: send fewer, better broadcasts, and let every one of them invite a reply.

A question mark at the end of a text is the cheapest engagement tool you own. “Your order arrived today, right? Which oil are you opening first?” costs the same credit as a flat announcement and starts an actual conversation with an actual customer, which was the whole point of texting in the first place. One more habit worth stealing from the training: in one of your first texts to a new contact, send along your contact card file, the little attachment that adds you to her phone’s contacts with your name and photo. From then on your messages arrive labeled as you instead of as a mystery number, and messages from a saved contact get opened. It’s a thirty-second habit that changes how every future text of yours is received.

Setting the card up takes one pass. Save your own business as a contact in your phone: your name, your business number, your email, your website. Share that contact with yourself and you’ll get a small .vcf file, which is the card itself. Upload it under Files in your GetOiling account, copy the file’s link, and paste that link into one of your first texts to a new contact. She taps it, and you’re in her phone with your name and your photo. While you’re at it, store the link and your go-to line as a Saved Reply, and sending your card becomes two taps in any conversation from then on.

Here’s the part that separates texting through your business account from texting off your phone: every conversation is logged on that customer’s contact record, right alongside her email history, her notes, and everything else you know about her. Six months from now, when she texts “what was that blend you recommended for my mom?”, the answer is one scroll away instead of somewhere in a personal phone you may have replaced by then.

This is what turns texting from a scattered pile of threads into part of an actual follow-up system. You’re the guide who remembers, because your account remembers with you. The customer who mentioned her daughter’s soccer season, the one who asked about sleep support in March, the one who said “check back with me after the holidays”: each of those threads is sitting on the right contact record, waiting to make your next message thoughtful instead of generic. Picture the difference from her side. A text that opens with “how did the roller work out for your mom?” tells her she’s a person you remember; a message that could have gone to anyone tells her she’s a name on a list. Same channel, same credit, completely different relationship. That memory is what makes a small business feel personal at fifty customers, and it’s the difference between following up and starting over every time.

Everything above works because of one fact worth saying plainly: a text interrupts. It buzzes in her pocket during dinner, and it gets read within minutes for exactly that reason. That’s what makes texting unbeatable for the message that can’t wait, and it’s also what makes it the easiest channel to wear out. Recipients who didn’t ask to hear from you report the number or reply STOP, carriers watch those signals closely, and a number that collects too many of them gets flagged and blocked from sending at all. The economics point the same direction: an email costs one marketing credit, a text starts at fifteen, and picture messages cost more still. A weekly broadcast text to your whole list would drain your credits and your welcome at the same time. Save texts for the moments that earn the interruption, and let email carry the rest.

A few settings inside your account do the protecting for you. Every campaign has a Send by setting that controls which channel it uses, and it deserves a look on every campaign you run: if you built the campaign as an email series, set it to Email only, because a campaign that’s allowed to text will text anyone on it who has a phone number on file, whether or not she ever said yes to texts. Each campaign can also carry its own opt-out keyword, so a customer can text one word to leave that series while still getting the messages she wants from you. That matters because replying STOP ends every text from your number to her, immediately and completely, and it should: your first text tells her she can, and her STOP is honored the moment it arrives. The per-campaign keyword just gives her a gentler exit before she ever needs the big one. And when someone texts in a campaign’s sequential code, the whole series arrives one message at a time, minutes apart, which is a lovely way to deliver a short text-based series the moment someone asks for it.

The training below walks through the whole setup on screen, and it comes down to four moves. Add two-way texting and get your business number, so the professional identity is in place before the first message ever goes out. Open the permission paths, with a text-in keyword you can share out loud and a phone field on your forms. Check the Send by setting on every campaign you run, so each one only uses the channel its people said yes to. Then send your first short, genuinely useful text to the people who said yes, and end it with a question worth answering.

From there, let the sorting rule run the channel: text the moment, email the substance, and let each message land where it belongs. Watch the training and set yours up right alongside as you go.

The Weekly Work Session is a live group Q&A and hands-on help session every Thursday at 12pm ET. Bring your questions and whatever you’re working on, and join an upcoming session.

You came in with a question about texting and, hopefully, you’re leaving with something better: a working system for both channels. Email keeps carrying your teaching, your stories, and the notes worth saving. Text carries the timely, personal moments that deserve to be seen today. Real permission keeps every message welcome, a business number keeps it professional, the Send by setting keeps every campaign in the channel its people said yes to, and the contact record keeps every conversation where you can find it. If you already have customers who love hearing from you, this is simply the setup that lets more of them actually hear you.

See how fast it comes together. Start a $1 trial and have your business number and first keyword set up this week. If you’d like company while you do it, bring it to a live Weekly Work Session call, Thursdays at 12pm ET, and we’ll work through it together. For more on letting each customer choose how she hears from you, the contact preferences training pairs beautifully with this one.