Best Practices for SMS Keyword Marketing Strategies

If you’re looking for an easy way to optimize your SMS marketing strategy, you should consider using keywords. SMS keywords allow customers to easily connect with your marketing campaigns by texting you a simple keyword. You can use SMS keywords to promote your marketing campaigns, automatically subscribe users to your contact list, and track customer engagement.

SMS Keyword Marketing Benefits

One benefit of using SMS keywords is that they provide a simple call to action to your audience. Your customers don’t need to fill out a lengthy membership form or give out their contact information to a cashier to receive discounts and special offers; they can just text a keyword to your phone number. 

By making the process of connecting with you as easy as possible, you’ll be able to expand your subscriber base and increase the audience for your SMS marketing campaigns.

Another advantage of SMS keywords is you can use them to easily track how people heard about your business or organization. You can use different keywords in different ads, and then see which ads are driving the most customers to text your company. 

This valuable data will help you design more effective marketing campaigns and can also show you what products or services are most exciting to your customer base. Consider these best practices for SMS keyword marketing to help you organize, plan, track your campaigns, and boost your customer engagement.

Best Practices for SMS Keyword Marketing Strategies

To see the best results from your SMS keyword marketing campaigns, you’ll need to choose your keywords strategically. With the help of creative marketing and autoresponders, you will have the greatest chance of success with your keywords. Here are some tips for getting the most out of your SMS keyword marketing campaigns.

Choosing Your Keywords

Selecting the most effective keywords is critical to the success of your SMS keyword marketing campaigns. Overall, your goal when choosing a keyword is to make it memorable enough to stick in your customer’s brain but easy enough that they can type it without any mistakes or autocorrections.

Make your keywords as short as possible, so they’re easy to remember and to type. A keyword should ideally be one word without a hyphen. The more words you use, the more likely your customers are to make a spelling or spacing mistake.

Use simple spellings that aren’t likely to be autocorrected by the user’s phone. If your organization’s name or the title of your campaign include an intentional misspelling (like “EZ” instead of “Easy”) you should steer clear of using that word as a keyword. And avoid special characters, because they’re harder to find on many mobile keyboards, and they’re harder to remember than words.

Finally, you want your keywords to be relevant to your marketing campaign, your business, or the service you’re offering. You want your customer to easily connect the dots between the keyword and the service they’re signing up for.  

Promoting Your SMS Keyword Campaigns

Your SMS keyword campaign will only be successful if your customers know about it. You want to make it as easy as possible for people to find your keywords and opt in to your text message campaign. This means you’ll need to employ a variety of promotion strategies.

• Social Media – Create hashtags for your keywords, publish ads on social media using your keyword, or add your keyword to your social media bios.
• Point of Sale – Invite users to text your keyword while they’re checking out online or in a brick-and-mortar store. You can also add your keyword to paper receipts.
• Online – Add your keywords to your website’s landing pages and your email signatures. You can also directly ask your email subscribers to join your SMS keyword campaign for a more active promotion strategy.
• Product Packaging – You can add your SMS keyword to your product packaging alongside your contact information. For example, a restaurant marketing campaign could customize their pizza boxes with their logo, phone number, and a keyword like “slice” to offer discounts in the future.  

SMS Keyword Autoresponders

Most SMS keyword campaigns use autoresponders to confirm that users are opting in to receive text messages and to provide information about how they can opt out in the future. You should employ this strategy to save you from having to manually respond to your customers and to give your customers an immediate confirmation that they’ve successfully joined your campaign. You can also create autoresponders to reply to customer service requests, frequently asked questions, and other customer communications.

Finding the Right Tools for Your SMS Keyword Marketing Strategy

To effectively use SMS keyword marketing strategies, you must have an SMS delivery platform that provides you with the tools and support you need to succeed. You should look for an SMS provider that gives you custom keywords, unlimited contact lists, and API tools, as well as personalized support and set-up assistance. With the right tools and a little creativity, SMS keywords can take your marketing campaigns to the next level.

Jeff Winaker

Jeff Winaker is the CEO of NorthText. He’s passionate about helping clients reach their customers faster with SMS marketing. He resides in the Bay Area with his family.