Customer surveys are a powerful way to collect feedback from your audience to improve marketing campaigns, customer loyalty, satisfaction, and support product development. Sending a survey by text makes gathering customer feedback quick and easy.
But why should ecommerce brands even send text message surveys? And what kinds of surveys should you send your customers? Let's get into it.
Why use text surveys
Sending SMS surveys is a quick and easy way to gather feedback from your customers.
High engagement rates
Because text messages have a higher open rate than emails -- 3.8x higher, in fact --
they are more likely to see your survey. That means more responses, too!
Easy to complete
A text survey can also feel easier to engage with. Email surveys are often long and can take several minutes to complete. With that association, surveys received by email can feel daunting.
But customers expect text communications to be quick. So whether you're sending surveys right in the text thread or linking out to a short web form, it'll feel more accessible to complete than an email survey.
Know your customers better
Surveys can also improve the impact of your marketing activities by gathering customer data.
Then, you can segment them based on common interests, habits, or traits. And you can personalize your marketing messages more effectively based on what you know about each customer.
Improve customer satisfaction
Surveys can also surface shoppers' positive and negative experiences with your brand. Then you can pinpoint ways to increase customer happiness, whether related to your store policies, customer service team, or website.
Aid product development
SMS surveys can also help you understand how your customers think and what they want and need.
This qualitative information can validate assumptions you've made based on the engagement data and shopping habits you've witnessed.
Then you can improve your product offerings and better meet their needs.
What kinds of surveys can you send by text?
There are many different types of text surveys you can send your customers. Are you looking to improve customer satisfaction? Or perhaps get feedback on your product or website? Or maybe you want to learn more about your customers' preferences. Whatever your business goals are, you can use a customer survey to support them.
Customer satisfaction
Customer satisfaction surveys are an important way to gauge customer experience. They can help you identify areas of your business that need improvement, track customer satisfaction over time, and understand how your brand is doing compared to other companies in your industry.
There are several standard customer satisfaction surveys in this category, including:
Net Promotor Score (NPS): NPS surveys ask customers how likely they are to recommend your brand to a friend or family member. It can help you understand how happy and loyal your customers are to your brand.
Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT): CSAT surveys ask shoppers how happy they are with a product, website experience, or customer service interaction.
Each of these surveys is well-suited to text because you start by asking customers to choose a numbered rating like so:
On a scale of 1-10, how likely are you to recommend [Brand Name] to a friend?
It's so easy for a customer to reply to that text with a single digit.
Then, you can follow up by asking for more details about why they chose their score.
Website experience
A website experience survey is a great way to collect customer feedback about their experience on your site. This can help you identify site issues, uncover reasons for low conversion rates, and gather feedback about the user experience.
Website surveys are well suited to a conversion rate optimization (CRO) audit process. After identifying low-converting pages, you can send shoppers who have not taken action on these pages an SMS survey when they leave your site.
You can also include a survey as part of an abandoned cart flow. This way, you can see if there's anything about the website experience that prevented a customer from buying.
It's also worth sending website surveys to customers who did successfully complete a purchase so you can identify what's working.
Prioritize sending these surveys to mobile website visitors since they're already on the phone. For desktop browsers, consider a popup survey instead.
Customer support surveys
Customer support surveys can help you identify areas of your customer support process that need improvement. It can give you insight into what your customers like and don't like about how your customer support team responds to issues. And it can help you identify underperforming support agents that may need more training.
If you use SMS as a support channel, send a text message survey after a resolution has been reached. It'll flow naturally from the conversation by staying in the same communication channel.
Product review surveys
Product review surveys have two benefits. First, they can help you gather social proof for your website. Since emails have a low open rate, sending these by text can increase your customers' likelihood of responding.
Second, product review surveys can help identify areas where products need improvement. For example, if you sell backpacks, your customers might tell you that your zippers are difficult to open or that the pockets don't have enough organization. Then you can improve the current design or create new products to suit different customer needs.
Personalization surveys
Personalization surveys are a great way to collect information to cater to each customer's experience.
For example, consider asking SMS subscribers about their communication preferences. Ask how frequently they want to hear from you (e.g., daily, once a week, once a month). And what they want to be texted about (e.g., new products, sales, order updates). Then you can send customers the kind of content they want without pestering them about things they're not interested in.
You can also ask customers about their interests and habits to improve product recommendations. For example, if you sell pet products, it's helpful to know what pets they have.
Or if you sell home decor, it might be helpful to get insight into their reason for buying. Whether it's for a gift or a home remodeling project can impact how you market to them in the future.
Voting surveys
Asking your customers to vote is an engagement tactic that can help shoppers feel involved in your business.
Maybe you'll ask customers to vote on a new color for your fall product release.
Sending these by text alongside a photo or GIF of the options is an easy way to get responses.
Product-market fit surveys
As an ecommerce business, it's essential to ensure that your products are a good fit for your target audience. Otherwise, you'll likely waste time and money on products no one wants to buy. One way to ensure that your products are a good fit for your market is to send out product-market fit surveys. These surveys help you understand how well your products meet the needs of your target customers.
Product-market fit surveys tend to be long, but they can be adapted for text by slimming them down to a few easy-to-answer survey questions. Consider asking just these four questions adapted to your brand. Pair each multiple-choice option with a number for customers to respond with.
For example, for product discovery, you can ask:
How did you first hear about [Product Name]?
1 - Friend/family
2 - Search engine
3 - Social media
4 - Browsing a store in-person
5 - Billboard
6 - Postcard mailing
7 - Other
Then customers can complete the survey in just a couple of minutes.
Survey your customers with the right SMS marketing platform
These are several of the most common surveys to send ecommerce customers. It can be tempting to launch all your surveys at once, but that can be overwhelming to customers. So choose the most important ones based on your goals.
Ready to get started? You'll need SMS survey software to send surveys and collect data. Instead of a specific text survey tool, consider a fully-featured SMS marketing platform like Emotive to support your surveys and marketing efforts. You can quickly create surveys through automated two-way conversations. Incorporate your surveys into marketing or customer service flows. And target the users you want to hear from with segmentation. We can even help you create your surveys. It's all part of a suite of SMS marketing tools you can use to engage your audience and boost sales.
Book a demo to discover how Emotive can help you launch text surveys as part of a full-funnel text message marketing program.