Getting the most out of SMS Surveys

SMS is an excellent way of conveying your message in a concise and simple manner. SMS is effective and common for everybody, whether it is sending a personal message or a piece of business information. Businesses use SMS for sending marketing messages, product updates, payment due reminders, notifications related to delivery, payment made, or any information related to the business and customers.

When it comes to sending surveys, businesses use several channels for this purpose like email, website, QR codes, and social media. Despite these channels, SMS is still in use and proves to be effective even in modern times. SMS Surveys have the highest open rate among all, as high as 98%.

Reach a Wide Audience with SMS Surveys📈

With SMS Surveys, collect feedback in a fast and easy way through Survey Invitations sent via text message.

Customer Surveys are an excellent way to know what they think about your products and services and the experience that you provided them. Whether deciding on a new product, a product feature, making any other changes to your business or working on a particular marketing strategy, customer surveys can help you find your customers' opinions. This enables you to work on them to enhance Customer Satisfaction.

In this article, we will find some great ways to use SMS Surveys in such a way that it yields you the maximum results, and you can fetch the most out of your SMS Surveys.

What is an SMS Survey?

A survey that is sent to the customers through the feature of Short Messaging Service (SMS) that is available on mobile phone devices, is known as an SMS Surveys.

An SMS Survey message consists of a short message for the customers to invite them to take the survey, and the survey link is provided in the SMS itself. The customers can easily go to the link and open the survey to respond to it and submit their responses.

Advantages  of SMS Surveys

SMS Surveys are beneficial for your business in these ways:

1. Cost-Effective

SMS is the most cost-effective form of communication. Sending SMS Surveys does not require any special devices or setup. You can send SMS Surveys through any mobile phone through bulk messaging which involves only a nominal cost.

2. Broad Reach

Almost everybody uses mobile phones nowadays. Around 90% of the US population uses mobile phones. Where there are mobile phones, you can send SMS Surveys. So the reach of SMS Surveys also becomes the same as mobiles which are pretty vast.

3. Ease of Use

You can send SMS Surveys to multiple people easily within minutes with the minimum manual tasks required.

4. Excellent Open-Rate

The open rate of SMS is 98% which is an excellent and the highest open rate among all the channels.

5. Good Response Rate

As SMSes have a great open rate, the response rate of SMS Surveys automatically becomes good because the more people open the message, the more there are chances of a response.

6. Faster than other channels

SMS is a quicker way to send surveys and get responses as compared to other channels. When people open the SMS and view readily accessible links, it becomes hard not to open it. And going to the link takes them to the survey and captures responses.

7. Suitable for any Mobile phone device

SMS Surveys can be sent to any mobile phone device, whether smartphones or any other mobile device.

Getting the Most out of SMS Surveys

Here are some tips that will help you to get the most of SMS Surveys:

1. Introduce yourself on the Survey

With all the business and personal messages in your customers' inboxes, your message can lose its identity and value. Nowadays, people receive so many messages in their inbox that it’s hard to differentiate between spam and valuable messages. In such a  case, it’s necessary to introduce yourself to the brand.

For this, you need to White-label the survey SMS Sender ID and use your name in the 11 characters of the sender ID. If your brand or business name has more characters than that, you can use its short form. This introduction will help your customers to recognize you quickly and take the survey.

2. Keep the Message Short and Simple

SMS itself means a Short Messaging Service. So there is no point in creating a big lengthy message to invite customers for a survey. Also, a long message will go to the customer in chunks, making it hard for the customers to read it as an SMS has a limit of only 160 characters.

Just keep your message short and simple to invite the customers for the survey followed by the survey link, which the customers can easily open through the same message and take the survey.

3. Personalize your SMS

Did you know that 72% of customers like to engage only through personalized messages? Personalization has the power to engage your customers with your brand. So personalize your messages as per your customers. For personalization,

• Mention your customers’ names in the message.
• Mention the name of the products they purchased.
• Mention the place or branch they visited.
• Mention the customer care or sales executive with whom they had an interaction.

You can use a good SMS Survey Software or app to make personalized messages for your multiple customers with the help of Placeholders. Placeholders help you to put these name of these details in the messaging format so that it automatically takes the respective details of the customers without requiring you to manually edit them

4. Send Follow-up Survey Messages

Because of the large number of messages your customers receive daily, they may skip your message or forget to take the survey. So for the customers of whom you don’t receive any response for some days, you can also send a follow-up message.

You can send this follow-up message after 5 to 7 days of sending the first message gently reminding them about the survey.

5. Send Surveys at Appropriate Timings

The timing of the survey is an essential factor affecting the response rate of the survey. Ensure not to send your survey messages at odd times like early morning or late at night, especially on Monday mornings when most people push themselves to continue their regular work after the weekend. At such time, sending even a short survey adds to their task making the survey an additional work they don’t want to pick up.

6. Do A/B Testing for Timings

For deciding on the most appropriate timings, you can also do A/B testing. In this, you can shortlist two timings that seem good to send your surveys and divide your customers into Group A and Group B. Send these groups your SMS Surveys at those two different timings and see from which group you get more responses. Choose the timings for the future at which you got the maximum responses.

7. Send Mobile-friendly Surveys

Most people use smartphones these days to access the internet and do various stuff that they once used to do on PCs and laptops. And when we talk about SMS, it is a feature of mobile phones only, so most customers would open the link shared through the SMS on their mobile phones only.

Make sure your surveys are optimized to open and work well on mobile devices. The interface of your surveys must be friendly to mobile users and should be openable and clear on mobile screens.

8. Avoid Oversending of Surveys

Anything in excess can do more harm than good. Likewise, although SMS Surveys are a great way to gather feedback and gauge satisfaction, if sent in excess, they can cause the customers to lose interest in responding to them.

You can use the feature of Survey Throttling in your SMS Survey tool to avoid oversending of surveys. This tool can help you control the number of surveys your send. You can make settings in the software so that it doesn’t trigger more than one survey a week or two surveys a month, and so on.

9. Ensure you are doing it Legally

Take care of the country’s laws whether it is allowed to send surveys to your customers or not. From deciding the timings of your survey to tracking your respondents, make sure you do everything according to your country's legal system in terms of sending SMS to avoid various legal repercussions.

10. Send Automated Surveys

Automate your Surveys with the help of a good SMS Survey Software or App so that you don’t have to send your survey messages manually every time. Set triggers of sending SMS Surveys just after a transaction like a purchase, a bill payment, a delivery, a hotel checkout, etc.

You can also automate relationship surveys like a monthly survey,  a quarterly survey, or an annual survey.

Where to Use SMS Surveys?

Although, SMS is the most cost-effective and responsive way of collecting survey responses, yet there are some use cases where you can get the most of SMS Surveys. Let's explore these use cases of SMS Surveys.

1. You can use SMS Surveys to get Delivery Feedback for the goods delivered to the customers. If you are in the eCommerce business or in a restaurant business where delivery of your products is involved, SMS Surveys are best to gauge the delivery experience of your customers and the effectiveness and attitude of your delivery staff.
2. You can use SMS Surveys to collect feedback about the Purchase Experience of the customers by sending SMS Surveys just after a customer has made a bill payment.
3. You can use SMS Surveys to collect feedback about the Flight Travel Experience of the passengers by sending SMS just after the end of an air journey.
4. You can use SMS Surveys to collect feedback about the Hotel stay of your guest by sending surveys just after the check-out of the guests.
5. You can use SMS Surveys to collect feedback about a Dining experience by sending SMS Surveys just after a bill payment.

These are some use cases in which sending SMS Surveys can help you collect feedback and get the most of SMS Surveys.

Learn more about the SMS Surveys

• 10 Best SMS Survey Software
• 5 Ways to use SMS Surveys for Patient Feedback
• Announcement: Get Real-Time Feedback With SMS Surveys
• Effective Ways to use SMS Surveys to collect Customer Feedback