Posted on February 16th, 2010 by Henry.
Categories: All Bulk SMS Account Documentation, Distributed SMS Articles, News and Case Studies

The Mobile Marketing Association best practive guidelines state that you need to have an unsubscribe service so that customers who no longer wish to receive your text alerts can easily remove themselves from your list.
Text Marketer offers all customers a free unsubscribe service when they set up a free bulk sms account.

How does the sms opt out service work?

The opt out service works, using a keycode and a five digit short code. Customers who wish to unsubscribe from your list, simply text a unique keycode to a 5 digit short code, (88802). Their mobile number is then captured by your account and added to your unsubscribe list.
Your account will then check your unsubscribe list before sending out an sms campagn. This means that you cannot send an sms to an unsubscribed customer by mistake. IMPORTANT NOTE: This does not work for the Quick Campaign feature, only for full campaigns using uploaded list data.

How do I set up the unsubscribe service on my bulk sms account?

Setting up the unsubscribe service is free and is available to you as soon as you set up your free account. Immediately after setting up your free account, you will receive a welcome email containing confirmation of your username and password. This email also contains your unsubscribe keycode. This will be a 4 letter code, (eg WJBC) To unsubsbribe, your contacts simply text this code to 88802.

….for existing customers

…. go to “Text Response” / “Short Code Log” in your account to see what your STOP code is.

How can I see the list of people that have unsubscribed from my list.

To view your unsubscribers, go to Text Response – Short Code Log. Here you will see your unsubcribe keycode, in brown, along with the toal number of users that have unsubscribed. To downoad an excel spreadsheet or .csv file, cick on the grey download icon on the right hand side. The mobile number is in column C. You will need to format the column so that you can view the numbers. Click on the column header to hightlight it – right click – format cells – select ‘number’ and click down to 0 decimals places. You will then see the numbers in international format.

What’s best way of wording  the unsubscription option in the outbound text?

There are 2 options here.
Option 1 – Set the sender name as 88802. (Go to Sender - Set Sender Name – Change to 88802 and click Submit.) 88802 is the short code that you use for unsubscribing.
Then at the end of your texts add ‘Reply [code] to cancel ' (use your key code.)

Option 2 - If you wish to keep your sender name as it is, you need to give fuller instruction on how to unsubscribe. E.g ‘Text [code] to 88802 to cancel.

Keywords are not case sensitive.