How Can SMS Keywords Significantly Improve Customer Journey

Reading Time: 6 minutes

You’re severely disadvantaged if you do SMS marketing without using keywords. SMS keywords are a powerful tool that can significantly improve the customer journey and supercharge the overall effectiveness of your SMS marketing campaigns.

By providing customers with a unique and easy-to-remember keyword, your business eliminates headaches like streamlining subscribing to an SMS list and improving customer communication.

SMS keywords can also personalize the customer experience, allowing businesses to reach or engage specific audience segments and provide more relevant and valuable content.

So if you want to:

• Know what SMS keywords are
• Learn how SMS keywords work
• How to choose the right SMS keyword for your business
• The things you should stay away from

Then, this guide is for you.

What are SMS keywords?

An SMS keyword refers to a term that clients can use to text a designated phone number, VoIP, or shortcode to interact with a business. This enables the customer base to sign up for a mobile messaging campaign or join specific subscriber lists that align with their interests and can be created multiple times without incurring additional costs.

SMS keywords can have a significant role in establishing a robust contact database, which helps companies send out mass text messages with promotional content, updates, giveaways, and other valuable information, leading businesses to engage closely with their audience.

Let’s think of it as a chocolate store that creates a keyword for “CANDYFORALL” and asks customers to text that keyword to get a free giveaway bag of sweets.

Bonus Reads: Download the ebook and learn how SMS marketing can help with customer engagement.

Selecting the Right SMS Keyword

When selecting keywords for an SMS campaign, there are a few key factors to remember. This precise and effective process involves meeting specific requirements. So before randomly choosing keywords for your SMS campaigns, tick every box in the requirements below.

Focus on Simplicity

Keeping the keyword simple and easy to remember can break or make your SMS campaigns. A keyword that is too complex or difficult to remember will be less effective in growing your SMS marketing list. As a rule of thumb, you shouldn’t use any special characters or hard-to-remember elements in your keyword, as it can easily frustrate customers when signing up for your text program.

Stay on Topic

Being broad can be an advantage when gathering data about your audience, but in the case of SMS keyword campaigns, it’s a significant detriment. Your keyword should directly reflect your business, making it easy for customers to understand and remember.

For example, if you own a ski shop called “The Loft,” appropriate keywords might be “SKI” or “LOFT” if you stray away too much, you might end up with a near 0% conversion rate.

Also, it’s best to stick to a single term as a keyword to make the sign-up process hassle-free for the customers. Imagine yourself in your customer’s shoes- When signing up for something, you want to avoid remembering a long, complicated word. So it’s much needed to make things simple.

Let’s say you run a shoe store and want to initiate an SMS campaign to promote your products. Rather than going for complex and too lengthy keywords like “leather formals” or “sport sneakers,” consider choosing snappy and easy-to-remember terms such as “SHOEADDICT” or “FOOTLOVE.” This way, your customers can seamlessly sign up for your SMS campaign, increasing engagement and higher sales outcomes.

Plan Ahead

It’s also essential to plan things for any hiccups that may occur during the signing process. Take something like autocorrect as an example. ¨People will be entering the keyword on their mobile phones. This means that you should avoid using a creative spelling of a common word, even if it is your brand name, as this increases the chances that autocorrect will change it.

We recommend you test your keyword on several different phone platforms before using it to confirm that autocorrect won’t change it.

Remember, when selecting keywords for an SMS campaign, it’s essential to keep the keyword simple, easy to remember, relevant to your business, one word, avoid special characters, and plan for autocorrect. By following these tips, you can select a keyword that will be effective in growing your SMS marketing list and easily accessible to your customers.

Bonus Reads: Looking for SMS marketing strategies for B2C brands? Here’s an ebook that tells you how brands are leveraging the channel for higher CTR.

How to Create an SMS Campaign with MoEngage

Begin with scheduling a demo with MoEngage, here. 

You can create an SMS campaign by doing the following steps. 

Step 1: Go to MoEngage Dashboard and then select Campaigns.

Step 2: Click on Create Campaign > Outbound > SMS

Step 3: Choose from the below campaign types to create your SMS keyword marketing campaign.

• One time
• Periodic
• Event-triggered

Step 4: Your next step is choosing the right target audience.

Step 5: Type the name, select the user attribute, such as the mobile number, and create campaign tags to search for the created SMS campaign easily.

Step 6: If the campaign type is an Event Trigger, SMS campaigns are sent based on trigger conditions. For example, you want to trigger an SMS when the user has opened the app and has not made a purchase within two hours of opening the App.

Step 7: Choose your audience from one of the following: All users, Custom segments, etc.

Step 8: Writing the SMS content:

1. Select the SMS Connector from the SMS sender drop-down.
2. Type the content that is displayed in the SMS in the Message.
3. Personalize your message by typing @ in the message box.

(Note: You will see the character count of your message and SMS count.)

1. Add the URL in the SMS message to track SMS clicks for the URL.

Step 9: Schedule your SMS campaigns and conversion goals.

Alternatively, you can also follow the steps here.

How Can SMS Keywords Help Optimize the Customer Journey?

Spot your customers wherever they are, interact with them, and analyze their preferences and requirements; these are tips to enhance your customer journey, and one of the main channels to help you achieve that is SMS keywords. Here are six key contributors to implementing SMS keywords.

1. Streamlining the Subscription Process

Providing customers with a unique and easy-to-remember keyword makes subscribing to an SMS list much easier. User journey and experience are much smoother. You alleviate many of the headaches that come with a multi-step sign-up process that can lead to losing leads and ineffective funnels.

2. Personalize the Interaction

Offering a unique journey to your customers should be your top priority. It would help if you personalized the conversation to fit their needs and interests to achieve that.

Setting up a simple automation between your keyword generator system and your CRM database could be a fantastic option to tailor the interactions to reflect your empathy and concern for your customers.

3. Improving Communication

Regardless of size, businesses often need help managing a high volume of daily or monthly inquiries. This can lead to communication shortcomings with clients and possibly give your potential or established customers bad vibes.

Here comes the AI solution, which delivers instant automatic answers to countless customer inquiries without human touch, allowing your team to prioritize other more critical, and pressing tasks.

4. Measuring the Success of the SMS Campaign

Numbers don’t lie – that’s why it’s fundamental to use your SMS campaign results as a benchmark for measuring the effectiveness of your SMS keywords. Analyzing this data lets, you make informed decisions to improve your future campaigns and optimize the CX through this marketing channel.

5. Customer Engagement

Do you know what every business wants? A long-lasting relationship with its clients. And undoubtedly, SMS keywords have a role to play in engaging customers. With the right data, it can all run smoothly. Regular incentives like discounts, giveaways, and exclusive promotions will make a massive difference in solidifying customer engagement.

6. Collecting Feedback Instantly

About 67% of consumers have reported that they would discourage others from trading with companies that offer subpar customer service. Collecting instant feedback can be a major medium for preventing this from happening. To anticipate customer needs, engage with customers through post-service surveys and reviews. This will enable you to quickly troubleshoot any arising issues, ensuring your clients are more relaxed and increasing the likelihood of repeat business.

Start Using SMS Keywords In Your Campaigns

Cross-channel experiences should be a key focus for customer service teams. If your SMS campaigns enhance the customer journey, then it’s a no-brainer to make it the primary way you communicate with them.

Remember, SMS is a purpose-built platform that streamlines the communication process. With the contribution of AI automation, it now acts as a triggering point for rolling out an optimized customer experience across other marketing channels.

It’s now up to your team to try SMS keywords, get their hands on them, and not solely rely on AI to get things done; let humans do their creative work.