Using a text response option on your advertising and marketing activities can increase the response rate by as much as 20% or even 30%. By making it easier for your prospects to respond, it’s no great surprise that more of them do. But what is the best type of keyword to choose? Does the keyword itself make any difference whatsover on the response you might expect? Here are a few guidelines.
Make it relevant and memorable
Make sure you choose a keyword that will make sense to the customer. You could choose your product, company or brand name. Avoid trying to do something too clever, you’ll risk confusing people and the likelihood is that you’ll alienate your target market.
Keep it short
The longer your keyword, the more likely people are to text it in wrongly. If our text response service doesn’t recognise the keyword because it’s spelt incorrectly, then the sms response will not be allocated to your account and will be lost. We recommend keeping it to between 4 and 8 characters. The aim is to make it as easy and quick as possible to respond. Don’t make your customers work.
Let predictive text take the strain
Infuriating though it often is, most of us use predictive text. You can take advantiage of this feature to make it even easier for people to respond to your text response campaign. By choosing a predictive text word, your customers will save precious seconds and are less likely to make a typo.
Can I capture more information by asking my customers to text additional information?
Yes. The golden rule here is that as long as the keyword is at the start of the text and followed by a space, then the entire text is captured. Be careful though. The more information you ask for, the more likely it is that people will make texting errors or not bother because it’s too much like hard work. We’ve found that asking for an address for example is a step too far. Think of the hassle of toggling between letters and numbers to input a post code; fine for smart phone users (about 35%), but tedious to say the least for the rest of us.
Asking for an email address is often a great idea though. You’ll capture vital customer data at the point that they are most interested and you can also take advantage of our automated email responder. So a user texts in the keyword, followed by their email address and receives a full html email immediately by return. This additional service is free to all Text Marketer customers.
Set up an account
Setting up a text response service is a simple process and you can get the whole service up and running in just a few minutes. Stage one is to set up a free account. Once you’ve logged in, go to Incoming SMS – Set up a short Code Keyword.
We’re alway available to advise if you need help, so please feel free to call us on 0117 2050202.