SMS surveys are surprisingly simple. You can 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.
1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
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.
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 Messaging Best Practices
Beginner's Guide to SMS
SMS Compliance Guide
