SMS Marketing Best Practices

When Selecting an SMS Keyword, Don’t Make This Mistake

Sometimes even the best SMS marketing intentions can go wrong. Recently when walking through Northgate Mall here in Seattle I saw the following advertisement encouraging me to interact with the ad by text message.

Northgate Mall text-to-download bad keyword.

What’s wrong with this SMS marketing advertisement? The advertisement seems to be instructing customers to text the SMS keyword NOROO2 to short code 41411, but here’s what happens when you do this on your mobile phone:

Northgate Mall SMS Keyword

Turns out NOROO2 is not the SMS keyword, but rather it’s NOR(zero)(zero)2. You can see the successful SMS interaction below:

Northgate Mall SMS Keyword

Big difference huh? This is why it’s so important when selecting a good SMS keyword, to make sure the SMS keyword doesn’t have characters that could be misunderstood by customers. Using similar looking characters in your SMS keyword is a good way to confuse your customers and result in customers not being able to interact with the advertisement.

What do you think, would you have been confused by this ad? What would you have texted, NOROO2 or NOR002? Let us know in the comments section below.


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