Understanding your customers’ satisfaction is crucial for all businesses. Happy customers not only tend to make repeat purchases and spend more but can also become brand advocates, influencing others to seek your products or services. Therefore collecting the right feedback can be invaluable.
“If we don’t know what we are doing well as a business, we can’t do more of it and if we don’t know where we’re doing wrong, we can’t correct it” – Brian Halligan CEO, HubSpot.
This is why sending bulk SMS surveys could prove particularly useful.
What are the benefits of using an SMS survey?
Surveys serve as a valuable tool for gathering both customer and staff feedback, efficiently collecting information on a large scale in a structured and straightforward manner. In certain situations, SMS proves to be the most effective survey channel, offering numerous benefits for delivery and response.
SMS is convenient for recipients
Text messages boast an impressive open rate of up to 98%, and within less than 3 minutes of being sent, about 95% of them get read. In our mobile-centric world, businesses can utilise this advantage by sending surveys directly to employees and customers, ensuring instant visibility and offering recipients the flexibility to respond at their convenience.
SMS benefits from increased conversion rates
Businesses using SMS benefit from an average conversion rate of 32% – which is even more impressive considering the average for email is just 3%. So companies conducting an SMS survey, benefit from greater response levels, and thus more data to inform business decisions.
Best practice tips for SMS surveys
1. Start with an introduction
Whether you wish to conduct the survey internally or externally, introducing your brand or business and including an explanation as to why you are running the survey, adds credibility to your message and improves the likelihood of response.
2. Keep your survey brief
A single SMS is 160 characters and while it is possible to send longer messages, we recommend that the entire survey consists of no more than 4 – 5 questions and each is kept concise. Afterall, you want recipients to remain engaged throughout and complete the entire survey.
3. Make your required answer clear
To maximise the potential data of any survey, it makes sense to include different questions types. For example, asking recipients to rate something from 1 – 10 or reply with a simple Y or N. Whatever the type of response required, brands need to make sure this is clear to recipients.
4. Personalise your SMS survey
Personalising your SMS survey can be achieved in a number of ways with TextAnywhere. Your survey could include a customer’s name, or details of their recent purchase, or companies could even use branching logic, to take respondents on different survey routes depending on how they respond to individual questions.
If for instance, one of your questions asks customers how successful they believe the implementation of your new online services have been on a scale of 1 – 10? 1 being poor and 10 being fantastic. All of those who respond with an answer between 1 – 6, can be sent a follow up question asking them to provide some detail for their previous answer. Whereas those who respond with a score between 7 – 10 can simply move onto the next question.
5. Test different send times
As send time can have a large impact on engagement rate, we recommend testing different send times with target audiences. The most effective send times will depend on things like audience demographics and the type of relationship a brand has with its customers. For example, if this relationship is more professional, it may be that the best time is during the morning, Monday – Friday. But for B2C businesses who may have a more informal relationship with customers, sending over the weekend may be more appropriate. Ultimately the only way to find out for sure, is to test different send times and monitor the response.
6. Incentivise your survey
Where possible, it is always worth offering an incentive to recipients for their valuable time and feedback. Brands can offer a discount on future purchases or even entry into a prize draw. Afterall, the feedback provided could prove insightful and it’s likely to boost survey engagement.
Finally, if you’d like some inspiration for your own business survey, see our post – 15 SMS survey ideas that could improve your business, and if you would like any help creating or sending an SMS survey, please get in touch!