What is a Keyword?

This is one of the most commonly asked questions that people seem to have the biggest trouble with. We think we have a perfect way to help you understand how this works.

When you sign up for an email account with, lets say, Google, you pick a username and it might look something like this:

Kathy@google.com

Right? Well, Google owns google.com (obviously!) and they allow you to use their website to send and receive emails. There are millions of people that use Google, so they need a way to route your emails to your account. That's why they have you select a username. If you just sent an email to google.com without putting a name in front, then the message would just go to Google and we're sure they don't want your emails. At least we hope they don't...

This is exactly how ExpressText works. We own the text message number 545454 and we allow you to use it. It works great for sending out text messages, just like google.com works great for sending out emails. But what happens when you want people to respond to your message?

Well, you need a keyword that will route that message to your account. If you don't, then people will send messages to 545454 and because we own it, the messages will come to us. We don't want your text messages either. So in order to solve this problem, all you do is set up a keyword and now people can send text messages directly to your account!

You might put something that looks like this on your website:

Text Kathy to 545454

Now, anyone who wants to send a message to Kathy can do so directly to her account. Just like email, there are a lot more things you can do like create auto response messages and conduct voting polls, but we just want to make sure you get the basics.