In the world of SMS marketing, getting to know your audience is not just an important thing, it’s potentially the most important thing your brand can do. Unfortunately, plenty of campaigns fail to succeed on this front, thereby inhibiting their ability to make an impact in the mobile inbox. But what if you could combine the desire to learn more about your audience with the outreach that every brand craves? To find out how, let’s take a look at the power of SMS surveys and how this tool can help bridge the gap between your brand and the people that matter most to it.
How It Works
As the name would imply, the concept behind an SMS survey is fairly straightforward. In his look at this process, Liam Supple of Business 2 Community breaks down this approach into a few key phases. The first part starts with reaching out to your contact list and requesting some sort of information or response. Whether it’s insight into a new product or just learning a little more about your average customer, gleaning a little extra data from the survey is key to the operation. Finally, Supple points out that you’ll want to incentive the process with a reward for your loyal list members to make participating worth their time and effort. Coupons and exclusive offers work wonders on this front.
Why Bother with SMS Surveys?
Of course, at this point you’re probably wondering what you’ll get in return for firing off a well-planned and enticing survey to your shoppers. As John McMalcolm of USA Business Review explains, surveying your contact list comes with a plethora of benefits. First, there’s the sustained contact with these shoppers that keeps your brand at the forefront of the discussion.However, if you’re looking for some more tangible benefits, McMalcolm notes that most surveys conducted via SMS channels generate a 98 percent open rate and a near 50 percent response rate, so it’s safe to say that you’ll generate enough data to truly paint an accurate picture of the people that make up your contact list.On the logistics front, SMS surveys require minimal resources to reach consumers virtually instantaneously, creating a powerful confluence of viability and budget-friendly operations. Obviously costs can vary based on the size and scale of the campaign, but McMalcolm helps illuminate the fact that this – or any other – SMS program gives your brand some serious bang for its buck.
Building a Lasting Connection
So now that you know what SMS surveying is and why it matters to your brand, it’s time to talk about the best ways to pull off this practice and create a lasting connection with your audience. According to the team of experts at Marketing Sherpa, there’s several crucial steps that lead to the completion of this kind of campaign. Once you decide that this is the best route for your brand in terms of mobile marketing, it’s important to lay out your objectives. What do you hope to learn? Can this information change how you approach SMS marketing? These and many other questions need to serve as the cornerstone of your initial planning.From here, creating the survey content and potentially exploring supporting channels comes next. Some members of your contact list won’t want to respond by text, but that doesn’t mean you have to leave them out of the loop. Directing this portion of your audience to social media accounts or web pages not only provides them with more options, it ensures that you have a higher response rate and a more accurate data set representing these shoppers.Before you fire off this mobile survey, make sure you test it with a portion of your audience, as well as in-house. Just like marketed emails, getting this content right before handing it over to the public is vital to its success and helps keep your brand persona in tip-top shape. If you really want to go the extra mile, setting up a customer panel comprised of some of your most valuable audience members can help provide real-time analysis regarding your survey and any other SMS content.Finally, and most importantly, incorporate all of the legal fine print regarding unsubscribe options and a generous reward for participation into the finished product. Both running afoul of the various SMS governing bodies and turning off your customer base with lackluster offerings can quickly lead to a campaign that falls flat on its face. However, if you’re able to put this breakdown of the survey process to good use, there’s nothing stopping your brand from making a lasting impression with these valued customers and learning a little more about them at the same time.
