A great new feature added to Text Marketer accounts today. If you have a keyword on your account and receive incoming SMS’s, you can now reply to them by email. In effect, you can have a ‘text conversation’ with people simply using your email program!
What you need to be able to do this:
1. A Text Marketer SMS account
2. A keyword on your account (you can get any keyword free for a week to trial this), configured to copy incoming SMS’s to your email address.
Once you have these, the process is very simple.
Let’s take the example of a hairdresser, Zaks. Their keyword is ZAKS on our shortcode 88802. So, any message starting with the keyword ZAKS sent to 88802 will go to their account and be sent by email to the address/es they set.
Zaks send out a campaign with their Sender ID set to 88802 so people can reply, such as, “50% off all cut & blow drys this Monday & Tuesday. Reply with name, day & time to book yours, starting your reply message with the word ZAKS.”
All replies will then be sent to the email address Zaks have set up.
When an email response is received they can simply hit the reply button as normal and type a return message to the client. The only difference from a normal email reply is that you must type ## at the end of the text reply you want to send (otherwise it will send all the text in the email).
So, their email reply might look something like, “Thanks Joyce. I can confirm your appointment for Monday at 10am. See you then. Zaks. If you want to reply to this message remember to start your message with the word ZAKS.##”. This will go straight back to the client.
In essence, so long as the person starts any message with the keyword ZAKS you can continue to have a text conversation with them using solely your email program.
For more advanced options on replies please see our email to sms instructions.
FAQ’s on replying to SMS’s using Email
Q. How many characters can I have in my reply.
A. Up to 612 characters including spaces.
Q. Does it cost anything to reply.
A. It simply uses the credits system of your account, so whatever you’re paying per credit at present.