What You Need to Know About Choosing SMS Keywords

Keywords are a big deal in SMS marketing. They’re more important than ever, whether you use a shortcode or a virtual mobile number (VMN) if you’re planning on using two-way messaging.

Keywords are technically all the same – and I mean technically speaking. They are all implemented the same way from both your point of view and that of the person replying to your message. But in practical terms, keywords can be divided into two categories:

• Brand keywords
• Special or Campaign keywords

As the name suggests, a brand keyword is the primary keyword you use to identify your brand. It’s most often used with the primary campaign to gather opt ins for your marketing list, member list, or volunteers. You’ll use it on your website, printed materials, videos, radio, and everywhere you advertise to drive signups to your SMS list. So whatever word you choose, it should be recognisable as your brand. It won’t be something you can change often or easily if you use print or other types of advertising. Changing it might confuse customers too.

As an example, let’s say you have a high street retail store called Kelly’s Fashions. You could use KELLY or KELLYS as your keyword. But then there might be dozens of Kelly’s pubs in the area. That word just might not be unique enough depending on your clientele, location, or any number of factors. So you could choose KFASHIONS, KSFASHIONS, or KELLYSHOP. You could also use a nickname people have for the store (assuming you approve of it!).

Other organisations might want to use different keywords to keep track of different lists. Are people signing up as donors to your charity or as volunteers? You probably wouldn’t want to send out the volunteer details for your event to everyone that donated money. That simple “Please arrive by 6” message aimed at volunteers could easily confuse a donor who then shows up two hours early for the start of the 8 pm dinner event.

Those are just a couple simple examples of why you’d want to use more than one keyword. But can you see both the challenge in developing your keywords and the benefits you’ll receive from doing so? Good.  Now it’s time to get to a few more things to keep in mind when you’re brainstorming ideas.

• It must make sense. Unless you have a compelling reason to choose a selection of random characters for your keyword, just don’t do it. It’s confusing for the people trying to type it in to reply to you. If it’s hard they just might not even do it. Using “YES” is always better than “R5K” when asking if they agree to receive your text messages. Want them to enter a contest? How about using “ENTER” instead of using something cryptic like your internal tracking number for the contest “458708”. While that may make sense to you, people will wonder what it really is they are replying to with some strange set of numbers.
• Use real words. This is probably one of the hardest things to do when creating keywords. Some are simple and obvious like “YES” and “NO” or “PIZZA”. Finding a real word that makes sense and applies to your message could be difficult. But there’s a good reason for trying: autocorrecting software. Most mobiles today try to anticipate, or correct, the words we type while texting (and other activities). So if you choose a word that is a deliberate misspelling of another word, you may end up getting very few replies. The feature works so fast most people don’t know it’s corrected a word before they send it (happens to me all the time!). Given the potential number of keywords, most SMS services only do a positive check for the word. Any misspellings get “lost” or at least not logged as replying to the correct keyword. You can’t prevent this from happening since the autocorrect settings are unique to each mobile (as it learns how the person types). However, the goal is to not make it happen by getting tricky with words. You can set up checks for all possible misspellings too, but isn’t that much more work?

• Test them out. Unless you work or live in a vacuum, you have the ability to do a test run of your keywords before you put out your campaign. Ask people in the office for feedback on the keywords you’ve selected. Do your best to get a variety of people, and not just people you’ve been working with to choose keywords. Objective feedback is best and it’s easier to get that from people not intimately involved in the selection. What sounds great to you, might make no sense to everyone else.

Making a keyword fit every guideline on this list isn’t always easy. That’s why I called them guidelines. Use them, adapt them, and refine them to fit your own situations. Please feel free to share any additions or changes with us in the comments so everyone can learn from the shared experiences.