Text Surveys

Survey your audience using simple text messages.

SMS surveys are a simple and fast way to collect valuable information for your business or organization. Whether you're looking for people to vote or gather feedback in general, handling it all through text messaging makes it easy.

Hundreds of brands rely on SlickText to power their texting surveys and collect feedback at scale. Our service is highly configurable and 100% automated.

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Example of a text to vote survey on an iPhone

Used By the World's Greatest Companies

How Text Message Surveys Work

SMS surveys are surprisingly simple. Consider them a modernized way to collect feedback that is handled entirely through text messaging. You can craft them to be any length, using different types of questions, and with personalized responses for better engagement. The best part is that they're 100% automated. Let's take a look at how texting surveys work.

Setting Up a Text Survey

We’ve made setting up text message surveys really easy. From your SlickText dashboard you can manage all of your surveys and create new ones with just a few clicks. They can be sent to existing subscribers or when someone texts a unique keyword to your short code. Creating a text survey is broken up into 3 simple steps.

Basic Setup

The first step is to provide some basic basic information about how you want your text survey to function. This includes things like what keyword you'd like people to text in order to start your survey; How often a person is allowed to take it; and whether or not the responses should be anonymous.

Creating Your Questions & Survey Flow

The second and most important step in building out your text survey is to add questions. We support three different question types which are numeric response, multiple choice, and open ended. Each type has its own configuration that allows you to validate people's responses and even map them to custom subscriber fields for future segmentation and retargeting.

Additionally, we have full support for merge tags and personalization of all survey questions and responses. This helps make each experience as intimate and engaging as possible. We allow for as few or as many questions as you'd like and give you the ability to edit all of the data at any time.

Survey Completion

The last step in setting up your text survey is to configure your completion message. This is where you can thank people for participating and even request for them to opt into a mass text messaging list for future engagement. Our system is smart enough to know who is on your list, who isn't, and prevent redundant messages from being sent to anyone.

Survey Question Types

Our text surveys offer three different question types that are based on the type of response you’re looking for. Those three are numeric, multiple choice, and open ended. The purpose of having structured response-types is to keep people focused and the data clean. Let’s look at each in more detail.

Example of the question types in our text survey builder

Numeric Response

Numeric responses are survey questions that require a simple numeric response. To answer this type of question, people can simply text back with a number ranging from one to ten. These types of questions are great for collecting ratings or net promoter scores.

Multiple Choice

Multiple choice questions are just what you might think. This survey question type allows you to provide a list of possible responses. People only need to text back with the letter that corresponds with a given option. This keeps response data clean and makes for easy analysis.

Open Ended

Open ended survey questions are ones that allow respondents to text back with anything they want. These types of questions are great when looking to collect contextual feedback.

In all cases, each SMS survey response can be used for list segmentation. This is huge for organizations looking to create future personalized text message engagements.

SMS Survey Analytics

Analytics and reporting is a core component of our SMS survey feature. Without good data, there's no reason to conduct one in the first place. Our analytics dashboard provides a wealth of real-time information about your survey results, the respondents, and gives you deep insight into everything you need to know.

Aside from the basics like what the responses were and the ability to download the data, we'll shed light on additional things like:

How many people took your survey
How many people completed it
How long, on average, it took to complete it
What the completion rate was
Where in the survey people seemed to lose interest
Where the respondents are located geographically

Furthermore, we even have support for anonymous text message surveys so you can collect data without people having to expose who they are or where they're from.

Screenshot of an texting survey's analytics dashboard

When Are Texting Surveys Helpful?

Whether you're using text message surveys for marketing or just to collect feedback, there are many ways that they can help. From a marketing perspective, brands will use them to collect customer interest on different products and services. They then use that data to segment their lists and send targeted group texts at a more granular level. Some companies use SMS to capture feedback on how they're doing or to solicit product reviews.

Aside from marketing, organizations use SMS surveys to allow people to provide their opinions on important topics. People today are busier than ever and most find that providing feedback via text messaging makes for the easiest and least intrusive way to voice their opinions.

Text Survey FAQs

Running text message surveys is easy. We also know that they can be complex depending on your goals. It’s likely that you’ll have questions and here we’ll cover the most common ones we receive regarding SMS surveys.

Is there a limit to the number of questions I can have?

No, there is no real limit to the amount of questions you can have in a text message survey. Just know that the longer the survey is, the less likely people are to complete it. We recommend surveys to be no longer than four to six questions.

What are the different types of survey questions?

Our text message survey questions are built around three specific answer types. There’s numeric, multiple-choice, and open-ended. Each has its own requirements and helps keep people focused on providing clean and digestible responses.

Can people opt in after completing my text survey?

Yes, people can opt into a mass text messaging list once they’ve completed your survey. After the last question, you have the option of asking people to join your list. If they reply with the word YES, they will be subscribed to future texts.

How do I send a survey via text?

In addition to people texting a keyword to a number to take a survey, you can also text your survey to a list of people. After you’ve finished building the survey, you’ll be given the option to send the first question in the series to any of your SMS lists. When people respond, the’ll be given the additional questions in expected order.

How much does it cost to run a text survey?

Running a text survey is really cost effective. At just pennies per message, it’s a cost-effective way to capture feedback; especially given how great SMS engagement rates are. Additionally, you’re not charged for incoming text messages. Only the questions and auto-responses count towards your total allotment of texts.

Can I run an anonymous survey?

Yes! One of the great and unique features that our texting survey software has is the ability to anonymize responses. This optional feature redacts all personally identifiable information from the analytics and reporting. It’s a great way to put respondents at ease when collecting feedback on sensitive topics.

Why choose us

Why Choose SlickText For Your Text Surveys?

You might be asking, "What's so great about SlickText?" We know there's a few SMS survey services out there but here are are some reasons to choose us...

Setup is Simple

Don't waste time fiddling with glitchy services to get your survey up and running. Our software is tried and true with flexible features and a simple setup process. Have your text survey ready for participants in just minutes.

Total Automation

After setting up a survey, you'll never have to touch it again. It will run on its own collecting data and interacting with each person individually without any intervention. Our system neatly collects the data in real time so your only job is to analyze the results.

Powerful Analytics

Good reporting is key for any engagement too. With our text surveys, you'll be able to analyze all of the data in a gorgeous, user-friendly dashboard and download the responses and reports to be shared with colleagues.

Smart Reengagement

Getting everyone to participate is important. Our SMS survey software allows you to segment out people that haven't yet taken your survey or who didn't finish and send them a message to re-engage.

Advanced Segmentation

Use people's survey responses to segment them into buckets for hyper targeting in future campaigns. By mapping people's response to custom fields you create, you can segment your lists by things like interest and opinion really easily.

3rd Party Integration Support

In more advanced cases, you'll find yourself needing to send survey data to other 3rd party applications. We make this a snap. Whether you need to sync collected emails with 3rd party email services or pass customer data to your CRM, we can pipe the information wherever it needs to go.

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SlickText is a 100% opt-in service. We do not provide lists of phone numbers nor do we access or share our users' contact lists. To learn more about our stance on spam and data privacy, view our anti-spam and privacy policies.

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