I'm Derek Johnson with tatango.com.
And today, I'm gonna be talking about how autocorrect on a mobile phone can impact the
amount of SMS subscribers you have in your database.
So let me explain.
Let's pretend my business name is Pizzaz.
And to opt in to receive text messages from my business, I'm encouraging consumers to
text "Pizzaz," the business name, to my short code.
So let's look at the phone right here and let's walk through this.
So I'm gonna have my customers text the short code and text the word "Pizzaz" and send.
But as you can see here, my phone autocorrected "Pizzaz," my business name, to "Pizzazz."
And because "Pizzazz" is not one of my keywords, the consumer would receive, "Sorry, that's
an invalid keyword."
Now, if this happens, the consumer has not opted in to receive text messages from this
business, which is losing SMS subscribers because most likely the consumer thinks this
is somehow broken or not working anymore and they're gonna give up.
Again, you have to make text message marketing and opting in to a text message marketing
campaign simple.
If it's not simple, a consumer is gonna move on and do something else with their time.
So there's a few different things I want to point out on how you can correct for the autocorrect.
So the first one is you're gonna want to make sure that you're using a dedicated short code.
If you're using a shared short code and you have not registered the keyword "Pizzazz"
as your keyword, there's no way that the software provider that is providing the shared short
code is going to know what that consumer is trying to do.
So they're gonna get back a very generic error message, and that error message, being generic,
is not going to help the consumer whatsoever.
So always choose a dedicated short code when setting up your text message marketing campaign.
The second is to make sure that if you are using a keyword that potentially could autocorrect
or consumers can misspell it, make sure to claim those keywords in the software provider
that you're using.
So if you want to use the keyword "Pizzaz" and you know that it can autocorrect to "Pizzas"
or "Pizzazz," just take all those keywords under the same campaign as "Pizzaz."
So that way, if a consumer text in the wrong word, misspells it, or autocorrects, the consumer
is going to opt in to the SMS campaign.
The second piece of information that I think is really helpful especially when you tried
collecting all the keywords and the misspellings and the autocorrects, there are going to be
consumers that just completely mistype your keyword and you can't plan for that.
Now, in that case, this type of message, while it is informative, "Sorry that's an invalid
keyword," it really doesn't tell the consumer the information that they need to rectify
the situation.
So in this example, what I would do is I would say, "Sorry, that's an invalid keyword."
And then in this area, I would put something along the lines of "To subscribe to receive
offers from Pizzaz, reply Pizzaz."
This way, if a consumer text something that you had no clue that they could ever think
that Pizzaz would mean, so if they typed "slice" or something completely out of the ordinary,
well, then they'd still get a text message that instructs them on how to opt in to the
text messaging campaign.
Just by texting "Pizzazz" to the short code and then receiving, "Sorry, that's an invalid
keyword," well, it helps them a little bit understand kind of what is wrong.
It doesn't give them any instructions on how to make it right, and how to make it right
is for the consumer to opt in to the campaign.
So hopefully, this video today helps you, not only plan for the autocorrect, but then
also make sure that if they do send a message and a keyword that is not part of your planning,
that you can help them and give them the instructions that they need to finish the opt-in process
so that they become an SMS subscriber for your business.