SMS Survey

Step 1: Content

In this step, you have an option to send out a welcome or introduction message to your contacts prior to sending out the first question of your SMS survey. In every messages or questions that you add, you can personalize the content by using the personalization feature that grabs dynamic data from your contacts page. So you can say “Hi [first name]” or any other dynamic information you want to include in your message (e.g., account balance, due date, address, etc).

You can keep track of your message character length on the lower right of every message or question. You can add as many questions as you want – there is no limit.

Types of SMS Survey Responses

There are 2 ways you can gather responses in your SMS survey campaign:

1. Specific Response

This type of survey response allows you to set specific allowable responses to your questions. For example, if your question is answerable by only either 1 or 2, then you specify that in the choices that those are the only responses you expect. However, the engageSPARK system allows you to add as many possible answers per choice as you want (e.g., your contacts can reply with either 1, yes, okay, satisfied, etc – and they will all fall under possible answers for choice 1). Not only that, but you can also add as many choices as you want (e.g., 1, 2, 3, 4, etc) depending on your question.

For each choice, you can add multiple actions. Actions are a powerful set of requests you want the system to do depending on a contact’s response to your question.

2. Open Response

This type of response allows your contacts to reply to your question in free-form, which means the engageSPARK system will accept any responses to your questions. Open response allows you to set multiple actions you want the system to do right after any reply you receive for your question:

Additional Survey Settings

After you have set what type of response you expect for your survey question (specific response or open response), you can start setting up the additional survey settings.

1. Invalid reply – This setting is only available to specific response type of response. You can enable this by ticking the checkbox if you want the system to do an action or multiple actions if a contact replies with an invalid response or replied with anything other than what you have specified in the answer choices.

You can set how many allowable chances (e.g., 2 – meaning after the question is asked and the contact sent an invalid response, they have 2 more chances to reply to your question correctly) you want to give to your contacts for them to reply to your question correctly.

2. Timeout / no reply – This setting is available in both specific response and open response. This allows you to trigger an action or multiple actions if a contact does not reply within X amount of time.

The same with invalid response, you can also set how many allowable chances (e.g., 2 – meaning after the question is asked and the contact did not reply, they have 2 more chances to reply to your question correctly) you want to give to your contacts for them to reply to your question correctly.

3. Failure – This setting is available in both specific response and open response. This allows you to do an action or multiple actions after a contact has exhausted all the allowable chances and still did not reply correctly or did not reply at all to the question.

Note: If you choose to not trigger any action and just want to proceed to the next question when a contact does not reply to a question or replies incorrectly after all allowable chances have been exhausted, you can leave Failure setting as unchecked.

Step 2: Contact

The contact step is where you can select who your recipients or group of recipients are going to be.

You can find 3 tabs in here:

1. Contacts – where you can manually select individual contacts as recipients.

2. Groups – where you can select group of contacts as recipients. You can group together contacts in the contacts page so it is easier to select them later on in your campaigns.

3. Segments – this is an advanced version of groups where you can select segmented group of contacts as recipients. You can segment your contacts in the contacts page based on clauses/conditions using the custom fields in your contacts page.

Note: You can combine all 3 by selecting some numbers individually, selecting group of contacts, and also selecting segmented contacts.

Step 3: Confirm

This is the last step in creating your campaign. This allows you to do a quick review of your campaign and setting up additional settings before eventually launching it or scheduling it for later.

1. Contacts – this is where you can see the contacts counter to let you know how many contacts, groups, or segments you have selected in step 2- contacts.

2. Sender ID / Caller ID – SMS Survey campaigns require a virtual number that you use to send and receive messages – so your contacts will have a number they can reply to or send their responses to your questions. If you dont have a virtual number yet, please contact our support team at helpteam@engageSPARK.com

3. Schedule this Campaign – You can set your campaign to go out immediately or schedule it to go out at a later point in time.

Additional Features

1. Message Conditions

Do more with your SMS survey questions by taking advantage of the powerful conditions which allow you to tell the system to only ask certain questions in your SMS survey if conditions are met. By default, this is set to “always” which means the system will always ask the question in your survey. Learn more here >>

2. Skip Logic / Jump Logic / Conditional Logic

You can use actions to skip over questions in the survey. For example, if someone answers YES to question 1, they can jump to question 3 (skipping question 2). For more information, see the Jump to Question Action.

3. Send the survey to additional contacts/groups/segments after you launch the SMS survey campaign

You can send the survey to additional contacts/groups/segments that you didn’t select in step 2 (when creating the SMS Survey Campaign) by going into Manage Subscriptions of the campaign. You can add contacts/groups/segments at any time even after you have launched your campaign.

4. Allow contacts to text in a keyword to automatically opt-in and start the survey

You can allow anyone from your contacts or target audience to voluntarily opt-in and start your SMS Survey Campaign by setting up a keyword that they need to text into the virtual number in your account to get started. For example, when someone texts JOIN to your virtual number, the system then automatically subscribes them into your survey and they will start receiving the first question of the SMS Survey and so on. Learn more here.

5. Actions Only

You can switch between content types for your SMS Survey:

• SMS Question – this is the content type that allows you to type in your questions and set choices
• Actions Only – this is the content type that allows you to trigger multiple actions within the survey without asking a question and/or expecting a reply.