If your organization is new to text messaging you probably have a lot of initial questions.

In this guide, we'll focus on answering one simple question: What are the best strategies for building a texting list?

The goal is to leave you with a series of tangible text messaging ideas that you can implement in your own organization!

Text messaging is a great way to grow your audience - to you that may mean customer, subscribers, or leads. To the team at MessageDesk, that just means more people who have subscribed to receiving text messages from your organization

Here are 3 popular ways organizations build their texting list:

You've probably seen these before - it's when a business has some sort of promotion that can be redeemed if you text a keyword to a certain phone number. In the example below the keyword is "Discount" and it automatically sends the customer a discount code.

How does someone know to text "Discount"? That's up to you! Maybe you put this key phrase on a banner you hang at an upcoming event or you add it to the bottom of the next email you send to an existing list.

There's a thousand different ways to advertise your key phrase. But, It's usually best to incorporate the advertisement in something you and the organization are already doing.

For more information on how to set up your first keyword triggered campaign, check out how MessageDesk Autoresponders work here.

This is a great way to get new customers, clients or volunteers to join a texting list. Next time they are at checkout or are signing up for an event just give them the option to sign up for text message reminders by jotting down their phone number.

Or you can use Autoresponders & Keywords to generate the list. It could look something like this:

With MessageDesk, anytime someone texts one of your "keywords" we automatically add them to a group. This way you can always send a text broadcast to the people who have previously "subscribed" by texting a specific keyword.

You can learn more about MessageDesk Autoresponder and Keywords here.

Another great way to build your text messaging audience is to use texting as your customer support or help center. Instead of having people submit a form on a website, have them text in a keyword like "HELP" and trigger a response as follows:

By using text messaging as your support system you can start automating some of the responses for questions you receive all the time. This way you and your team can save time and improve efficiency.

Then, you can broadcast an update text message to anyone who has previously texted you asking for HELP with that product/service/procedure.