Text Keywords + Workflows
Set up smart automations that respond instantly when someone texts your keyword.
In this training, we’ll walk through how to:
– Create a keyword trigger
– Use SMS, Facebook, or Instagram as the reply channel
– Automatically reply with links, collect emails, and build your contact list
– Add actions, branches, and wait steps to customise your workflow
– Test and publish your workflow
By the end of this lesson, you’ll have a working automation that replies when someone texts a keyword—perfect for lead magnets, giveaways, or event callouts.
Transcript
Using a text keyword process to gather contact information during speaking events, lead magnets, and other marketing initiatives can be incredibly useful. It provides an easy and convenient way for interested parties to provide their contact details, making it simpler to follow up and engage with them in the future.
By using a specific text keyword—such as “Text MY ACCOUNT NUMBER to receive your copy”—you can create a call to action and incentivise people to take that action. It also enables you to segment your audience and target your messaging more effectively based on their interests and preferences.
Log into your account. You will see various features and tools on the left sidebar. We are going to start this lesson by opening Automation. This is where you can edit, create, organise, and manage all of your account workflow automations.
To the right of that, you can create new folders to organise your workflows into, and most importantly, use the Create Workflow button.
After clicking that button, a screen will appear giving you the option of how you want to start your workflow. You can choose to import an old campaign (though newer users won’t see these as workflows have replaced them), use a system default template, or start from scratch.
Templates are very helpful to explore when learning how to build workflows. In this example, we’re starting from scratch so we can walk through it together.
Once your blank template opens, you’ll see your workflow editor. On the top right is the Test Workflow button, which lets you use an existing contact to test it. Next to that is the Draft/Published toggle to turn your workflow on or off, and the Save button with last save time in the very top corner.
You can name your workflow by clicking the pencil icon or double-clicking the default title. You can also toggle between Actions, Settings, History, and Status.
Let’s start with Settings, where you can customise specific options for this workflow.
Now we can add our triggers. A trigger is what fires off your workflow—it can be a specific behaviour, action, or reply. Click within the trigger box to add one. You can use multiple triggers, or leave it blank if you’re manually adding contacts via bulk actions or another workflow.
You’ll see a pop-up appear asking which trigger you want to use.
Here’s an example of a simple workflow: a trigger based on a keyword being texted to your account number, which sends a page URL back to the contact. In our example trigger, we used the Customer Replied trigger, set the Reply Channel to SMS, and specified the keyword or phrase.
This isn’t limited to SMS—you can also use keywords for Facebook Messenger, Instagram DM, phone calls, and more. Once the workflow is triggered, you can add as many actions as needed—wait steps, emails, internal notifications, and more.
When you click the plus icon to add an action, you’ll see a full list of available actions like If/Else branches, Go To steps, Wait, etc.
Here’s a simple example: we used an SMS action to reply to the contact with a link to their next step. In another example, instead of just replying with the link, we asked for their email address. If they provided it within a few minutes, we updated the contact’s email field and then sent more information to their inbox.
That’s it. Make sure to follow any lesson instructions below and mark this as complete to keep moving forward.
