The trigger word is the smallest decision in a comment-to-DM campaign and one of the most consequential. It decides not just how many people comment, but which people — and those are very different things.
Below are 51 words worth stealing, grouped by what you are actually selling. First, the four rules that decide whether any of them work.
The four rules
1. Specific beats generic
"Comment YES" gets more comments. "Comment CHECKLIST" gets more customers.
A generic trigger collects everyone: people who want the thing, people being supportive, people who comment on everything. A specific trigger collects people who want the specific thing you named. The second list is smaller and worth far more.
If you are optimising for the vanity metric, use YES. If you are optimising for revenue, name the offer.
2. It has to be spellable
Every misspelling is a lead that gets nothing. "ENTREPRENEUR" will be mangled by a meaningful share of your audience. So will anything long, hyphenated, or containing a doubled letter people forget.
Short, phonetic, unambiguous. If you would have to spell it out loud twice, pick another.
3. Say it out loud in the video, and write it in line one
Most people never read past the first line of a caption. If the instruction lives in line four, it does not exist. Say it in the reel, put it on screen, and lead the caption with it.
4. Match on whole word, not exact
Almost nobody comments only your keyword. They comment "LINK please!!" or "guide 🙏" or a whole sentence with the word buried in it. Exact matching discards all of those.
Whole-word matching catches the word inside a sentence without firing on unrelated words that merely contain it. It is the right default in almost every case. There is more on match types in the comment-to-DM guide.
The list
Lead magnets and freebies
Best when you are trading something useful for a follow or an email.
GUIDE · CHECKLIST · TEMPLATE · PLAYBOOK · TOOLKIT · SWIPE · CHEATSHEET ·
WORKBOOK · BLUEPRINT · STARTER
These work because they describe the format of the thing. Someone typing TEMPLATE has already decided they want a template.
Courses, programmes and cohorts
ENROL · WAITLIST · COHORT · SYLLABUS · MODULE · INTAKE · SEATS · DOORS
WAITLIST and DOORS carry urgency without you having to manufacture it. SEATS implies scarcity that is true if you actually cap the cohort — and hollow if you do not.
Coaching and services
BOOK · CALL · AUDIT · CONSULT · SLOTS · APPLY · DISCOVERY · REVIEW
AUDIT is the strongest on this list for most coaches. It implies something is being examined and returned to the person, which is a far more compelling promise than "book a call".
Ecommerce and physical products
SHOP · SIZES · RESTOCK · DROP · BUNDLE · SHIPPING · COLOURS · STOCK
RESTOCK and DROP are the two that reliably outperform. Both attract people who already want the product and are waiting for a reason to act.
Pricing and quotes
PRICE · PRICING · QUOTE · RATES · COST · PACKAGES
The highest commercial intent on the entire list. A person typing PRICE is further along than a person typing GUIDE, and your DM should reflect that — send the actual numbers, not a booking link.
Discounts and promotions
SAVE · CODE · DEAL · OFFER · EARLY · VIP
Use sparingly. Training an audience to expect a discount on every post is a slow way to damage your pricing.
Content and resources
LIST · RECIPE · PRESET · SOURCE · STACK
STACK works unusually well for anything tools-related — "comment STACK for the full list of what I use" converts because it promises specificity.
Words to avoid
YES, ME, INFO, SEND, PLS, INTERESTED. These collect volume and almost
nothing else. They also collide with ordinary conversation, so your automation fires on
comments that were never meant to trigger it.
Anything over about ten characters. Typo risk climbs and comment intent falls.
Words that appear naturally in your own niche's chatter. If you post about fitness and choose REPS, you will trigger on half your comment section. Pick something people would not type by accident.
Emoji-only triggers. They look clever and fail constantly — different keyboards, skin tone variants and platform substitutions mean the character you match on is often not the character they sent.
Should you use the same word every time?
Mostly yes, if your offer is the same. Consistency trains a returning audience — people who have seen three of your reels already know to type GUIDE.
Change it when the offer genuinely changes. Running PRICE on a lead-magnet post and GUIDE on a pricing post will confuse people who have learned your pattern.
If you run several offers in parallel, use a distinct word per offer rather than one word with branching logic. It is simpler for you and clearer for them.
Measure the word, not just the post
Two reels with identical reach and different trigger words will not produce the same number of leads. That difference is worth knowing.
Track, per campaign: comments received, DMs sent, and what share of those people did the thing you actually wanted — followed, clicked, booked, bought. A word that produces 400 comments and 3 sales is worse than one producing 90 comments and 12.
If your tool exports leads, the export is where this analysis actually happens.
Start here
If you want one word to test first, pick the one that names your offer most literally. For a freebie that is usually CHECKLIST or TEMPLATE; for a service, AUDIT; for a product, RESTOCK or SIZES; for anything where money is the question, PRICE.
Run it on one post, see what arrives in your DMs, and adjust from there. The list above is a starting point, not a ranking — the right word is the one that describes your offer in the fewest unambiguous letters.