Knowledge base

Set up a text-to-subscribe service

Text-to-subscribe is a great way to allow your customers to respond to your adverts and promotions when they’re away from their computer. With one text message they can subscribe to your SMS and email mailing lists and receive back immediate automated responses.

For example, we have a customer who posted a message on their restaurant menu inviting people to sign up to receive their latest email offers. All guests had to do was text our shortcode, 61211, followed by a keyword and their email address. The International number is 447624802887. The guest instantly received a welcoming text message and an email was sent straight to their inbox. It’s easy to include offer details or vouchers in the email and the SMS, so you can create your own incentives for people to use the service.

The first step is to create an SMS list. In Collect click the ‘add list’ button and enter the name of your list. Make sure you select the SMS list button, and then click OK.

The next thing to do is create an email list which will capture any email addresses. So repeat step one, but ensuring you select the email list button.

Once both lists are in place, you’ll need to allow email registration to your SMS list. To do this, in Collect, first click ‘options’ and then ‘add action’.

In the new window you’ll be prompted to select a keyword, in addition to your company keyword. For example you could use ‘your company’ followed by a word such as ‘exclusive’ or ‘club’ which will be unique to this promotion.

Beneath this you’ll see the option to set a reply message. We recommend setting this up, as it means that the subscriber will receive an immediate SMS response from you so that they know things worked. For example, you might like to say thank you to them for joining your SMS/email service. Once ticked you can enter in the contents of your message. Next click Proceed.

On the next page you’ll be presented with a list of actions. In order to allow email registration you’ll need to tick the ‘SMS email registration’ box. Once ticked, below you can select the list email addresses will be added to. Now, click Finish.

Back in Collect, you’ll see the email registration and reply message actions have been added to your new SMS list.

The next thing you might like to do is trigger an email to be sent when a subscriber joins the list. You might use this to send your subscribers a response as they sign up, for example by sending them a welcome email. To set up a trigger head over to the Marketing Automation section, under Send. To learn more about triggering actions when a subscriber is added to a list head over to our handy step-by-step guide.
 

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