The Mobile Marketing Association best practice guidelines state that you need to have an unsubscribe service so that customers who no longer wish to receive your text alerts can easily remove themselves from your list.
Text Marketer offers all customers a free unsubscribe service when they set up a free bulk sms account.
Download the PDF instruction manual for the main functions of the system
How does the SMS opt out service work?
The opt out service works, using a keycode and a five digit short code. Customers who wish to unsubscribe from your list, simply text a unique keycode to a 5 digit short code, (88802). Their mobile number is then captured by your account and added to your unsubscribe list.
Your account will then check your unsubscribe list before sending out an sms campaign. This means that you cannot send an sms to an unsubscribed customer by mistake (note: the unsubscribe list is not used for either the API or the Email-to-SMS product).
How do I set up the unsubscribe service using the API?
You can pipe incoming SMS from your stop keyword to an internet connected application using our incoming SMS Gateway. In this way you can then build a stop list of your own in your application.
How do I set up the unsubscribe service on my bulk SMS account?
Setting up the unsubscribe service is free and is available to you as soon as you set up your free account. Immediately after setting up your free account, you will receive a welcome email containing confirmation of your username and password. This email also contains your unsubscribe keycode. This will be a 4 letter code, (eg DVCT) To unsubscribe, your contacts simply text this code to 88802.
How do I see what my code is in my account?
Go to “Incoming SMS” / “Reply Data” in your account to see what your STOP code is.
How can I see the list of people that have unsubscribed from my list.
To view your unsubscribers, go to Incoming SMS –Reply Data. Here you will see your unsubscribe keycode (with ‘about unsubscribe keywords’ next to it), along with the toal number of users that have unsubscribed. To download an excel spreadsheet or .csv file, click on either the ‘download to CSV’ or ‘download to Excel’ link on the right hand side.
The mobile number is in column C. You will need to format the column so that you can view the numbers. Click on the column header to highlight it – right click – format cells – select ‘number’ and click down to 0 decimals places. You will then see the numbers in international format.
How can I add people to my stop list manually?
Simply go to GROUPS | UPLOAD NUMBERS TO A GROUP and then choose your stop list group. It will be named like “Short_[your stop code]”. Then copy and paste the number/s you wish to add in the numbers box and press submit. (Similarly, you can remove numbers from the stop list by going to GROUPS | REMOVE NUMBERS and entering the numbers there, ticking ‘also remove from stop list’ and clicking delete).
How can I take people off the stop list?
See removing numbers from a group.
What’s best way of wording the unsubscription text in the outbound message?
There are 2 options here.
Option 1 – Set the sender ID as 88802. (Go to Send SMS – Default Sender ID – Change to 88802 and click Submit.) 88802 is the short code that you use for unsubscribing.
Then at the end of your texts add ‘Reply [code] to cancel ‘ (use your key code.)
Option 2 – If you wish to keep your sender name as it is, you need to give fuller instruction on how to unsubscribe. E.g ‘Text [code] to 88802 to cancel.
Keywords are not case sensitive.