A Short Code is an supremely powerful channel for text marketing when used smartly. Short Codes are fixed, easy-to-remember registered numbers five-to-six numeric digits in length. Most savvy marketers invest heavily in Short Codes to drive their text marketing strategy. It serves as your mobile marketing address, like Burger King’s 32111.

Types of shortcode : shared shortcode & dedicated shortcode
Shared Short Codes are Short Codes that are shared with other companies. Thus, multiple marketing campaigns are run on a single short code – con-currently.

How would you identify responses to your campaign?

Each company sharing the Short Code is assigned a unique keyword which is mentioned in the campaign advertisements. Every customer is expected to use that unique keyword while participating in the text campaign. Thus, each text campaign is differentiated based on the use of this unique keyword in the text response sent to the shared Short code. For example, john’s BURGER and peter’s PIE share the short code 35111. As a part of their campaigns, John asked his customers to respond with the keyword ‘BURGER’ whereas Peter’s asked her clients to revert with the keyword ‘PIE’. Their customers respond with the respective keywords as communicated to them, enabling the messages to be delivered to John and Peter accordingly.

Getting a shared code is quicker because it has already been certified for use by multiple companies. It is also a more affordable option since the leasing and maintenance costs are shared across companies. A shared Short Code is hosted by an aggregator.

A well planned SMS Short Code strategy can prove to be extremely beneficial and lucrative when implemented well. Here are the steps to get you started:

Set Your Campaign Goal: Short Codes are excellent for text marketing whether you plan to send advertisements, coupons, information about sales, or other promotional messaging. As Short Codes are country-specific, they operate only within the country in which they are registered and can be responded to only by the numbers located within the country.
What do you want to achieve with your text campaign? If you want customers to respond to your Marketing, Short Code’s the code for you.

Apply For A Shortcode: it can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks to get approval, depending on a range of factors including the type of code you have applied for but shared shortcode is just 3days. Bulksms can serve as your main LINK during this process. We will also set up your Short Code so that you can start sending and receiving texts.

Audience and Best Practice: What should be your text content strategy? You can run campaigns to generate leads, nurture them, engage customers and encourage them to become loyal customers. We can help with the tips and also create a marketing campaign tips.

Inspection: Stating the obvious, one needs to track campaign performance to see whether it is fetching the desired results. For instance, A shortcode owner needs to keep track of the number of entries it received for its marketing campaign via texts, compared to entries from the internet. In our health reports, one can see the number of incoming texts received within a particular period, the delivery rate of outbound SMSs, etc.

To summarize, a Short Code enables 2 way communications between you and your customers and when used smartly, can power a brand ahead of its competition. It acts like the fuel that powers your SMS machinery and is a great way to get your customers to remember your brand, so they can engage with your campaign, the way you want them to and also get paid through it.

Finally, if your organization needs help getting started with Short Codes you can have us do that for you.

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Godwin.