Client Notifications: Email and SMS

How to choose how each client receives transactional notifications, and what consent you confirm on their behalf.

By default, every notification Gilded sends to your clients goes by email — document signing reminders, payment receipts, payment failure alerts, and the "your contract is fully executed" confirmation. On Pro and Team plans you can also send those same notifications by SMS, or by email and SMS together. Couples in their twenties and thirties tend to read texts within minutes and emails within days, and the difference shows up in how fast contracts get signed and deposits land.

This article covers how the picker works, what consent you confirm, and how clients can opt out.

When You See the Picker

The notification channel picker appears on Pro and Team plans in two places:

The new event form — when you create an event, the picker sits in the Client Information section, just below the phone field.
The event detail page — the Client Contact card shows a small "Notifications: …" chip you can click to change the channel for an existing client.

If you are on the Basic plan, the picker is hidden and every client receives email-only notifications. Upgrading to Pro unlocks the SMS option without any further setup.

The Three Choices

| Channel | Who it is for | | --- | --- | | Email only | The default. Use this for older clients, anyone you have only ever exchanged emails with, or anyone who hasn't explicitly told you texts are okay. | | SMS only | Clients who have told you they prefer texts and rarely check email. Faster to read, but limited to one short message per notification. | | Email + SMS | The most reliable. Clients see whichever channel they happen to be looking at first. Recommended for time-sensitive workflows like contract signing and final balance collection. |

You can change the choice at any time from the event detail page. Switching back to email-only also clears the SMS opt-in record on file, so you stay clean on consent.

The Consent Checkbox

Whenever you pick SMS or Email + SMS, Gilded asks you to confirm:

The client has agreed to receive transactional text messages at this number.

This is planner-attested consent. Your clients do not have Gilded accounts, so there is no separate place for them to opt in themselves — you confirm on their behalf that they agreed. In practice this means a quick "we'll text you reminders and payment receipts at this number, sound good?" during your kickoff call or initial email exchange. As long as the answer was yes, you are good to check the box.

The form will not let you save SMS or Email + SMS without the consent box checked, and it will not let you save SMS without a phone number on file for the client.

When you confirm consent, Gilded stamps the client record with the date and time so there is an audit trail. If a client ever asks to be removed, the record shows when consent was given and when it was withdrawn.

What Clients Receive

These are the five client-facing notifications that follow the channel preference:

Document signing reminder — when a contract or combined document is awaiting their signature
Contract executed — when every signatory (you and the clients) has signed
Payment due reminder — when a deposit or balance payment is approaching its due date
Payment received — confirmation that their payment processed successfully
Payment failed — alert that their payment did not process and a retry is needed

Each SMS is short — your business name, what happened, and a link if they need to take action — followed by Reply STOP to opt out. The body matches the corresponding email so a client receiving both channels sees the same information twice, not two contradictory messages.

Other emails (the initial document send, intake form invitations, password reset for your own account) are still email-only — the SMS channel is reserved for the five transactional moments above.

How Clients Opt Out

Even though you confirm consent on their behalf, clients always control their own messages. There are two ways out:

Replying STOP to any message. Twilio honors the opt-out automatically and replies with a confirmation. Gilded receives the STOP webhook, switches the client's channel back to email-only, and clears the opt-in date. The next time you send a document or payment reminder, only the email goes out.
You changing the channel from the event detail page. Click the "Notifications: …" chip on the Client Contact card and pick "Email only." The phone number is preserved on the client record (you may still want to call them) but no further texts go out.

If a client texts STOP and you later confirm by phone they want texts back on, you can re-enable SMS through the event detail page — checking the consent box again is enough to record the new opt-in.

Tier and Plan Notes

Basic — email-only for all clients. The picker is hidden.
Pro — picker available on every event. SMS is delivered as part of the plan.
Team — same as Pro, available to every team member on the org.

Even if you previously set a client to SMS while on Pro and later downgrade to Basic, Gilded silently falls back to email-only — your contracts and payments keep working, just over a single channel until you upgrade again.

Creating Events for the rest of the event form
Editing Event Details for changing client information after the fact
Notifications and Reminders for the planner's own notification preferences (separate from client notifications)