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SMS Surveys allow you to send your AskNicely survey via text message. We typically recommend implementing SMS once you have gotten up and running with a "Touch Base" emailed survey to all of your customers. However, if you don't capture email addresses for your contacts or if text is your primary method of communicating with your contacts, starting with SMS is definitely a viable option.

If you are interested in adding SMS to your account, please contact your Customer Success Manager or your Account Executive for SMS pricing. Plans vary based on location and survey limits, and several back-end changes must be enabled on your account in order to continue.

Know Before You Go

The number of SMS that you purchase is an estimate based on cost per message, not the number of surveys you can send. Initial message, SMS Workflow messages, and SMS Workflow responses all count towards the message limit. If an SMS is more than 153 characters including the survey URL, it will be split out and count as more than one SMS. The same goes for any reply you may receive or any workflows. (see FAQ's below for URL length)
You get $10/USD worth of free SMS messages when you initially sign up, allowing you the opportunity to test and check for validity.
If you are using the API to bring your contacts into AskNicely, SMS messages do not follow the "delayminutes" rule.
If SMS is your primary survey method, that's great! We can do that as the only way of delivering surveys, or we can set it up where SMS is the initial method and email is the fallback.
- What AskNicely cannot do:
  - 1. Send an email survey initially, then send a follow-up via SMS.
  - 2. We also cannot do Survey Reminders with SMS - this only works with email.

The SMS Survey Experience

The invitation to answer the survey will be sent from a US telephone number as a simple text message with a link. When the user clicks on the link, it will open their default web browser to start the survey.

After setting the score, Feedback Topics or Conversations will be displayed exactly how you have configured your Survey Tab.

And there you have it! That’s how it works - easy breezy for the survey recipient. Now, let's configure these surveys.

How to set up your Account to send SMS Surveys

As mentioned above, to enable SMS Surveys, the first step is to reach out to your Customer Success Manager or your Account Executive to have it turned on.

The second step is importing your contacts’ phone numbers.

SMS Number Formatting

When you are importing your contacts, the number must be formatted as follows:

Country code must be included
Area code must be included
All special characters need to be stripped from the number
- If you are importing your contacts via an Excel spreadsheet, it is possible to use an Excel formula to strip out the extra characters - this article explains one method.
- The US country code is +1, so if the number is (855) 867-5309, the number in its final form would have to be formatted as "18558675309"

API Number Formatting

Method 1

If you are using the same API call to bring in both Email and SMS Contact information, the phone number needs to be formatted as described above; in addition, "@sms.asknice.ly" needs to be appended to the end of the number as well.

For example:

If the phone number for a contact is "1 (855) 867-5309", it should look like this when it is sent over into AskNicely: "18558675309@sms.asknice.ly"

Method 2

If you are using a unique field for SMS, our Support Team can direct SMS sending based on that field. Formatting of the API call would therefore look like:

&mobile=18558675309

Please reach out to support@asknice.ly for assistance.

CSV Column Mapping

Once you are importing your SMS number in the right format, you have two options.

Option 1

(Recommended when using SMS to primarily survey your contacts)

When you are importing your contacts, either via Integration or our CSV Importer app, make sure that your SMS field is matched to "Mobile Number (Primary Survey Method)."

- Note: If you don’t see the “Mobile Number (Primary Survey Method)” option, ask support@asknice.ly to enable SMS for your account.
The integrations that have field matching (Salesforce, for example) allow the same as above: when you are bringing in your Salesforce fields, define the Salesforce "mobile" field as the "Mobile Number (Primary Survey Method)".

Option 2

(If you need to import both SMS and email for your contact)

For this option, AskNicely will send out SMS by default, and will switch to email if SMS fails. Reporting limitation from SMS sending does not allow AskNicely to perform the reverse operation.

- - When importing your contacts (whether via CSV, Salesforce, or your integration), bring in the contacts email field as the AskNicely field "Email."
  - You will then the contact's SMS number as its own "Custom Data" column, so if your field is "mobile_number", it would be "Custom Data > Import as: "mobile_number."
    - The phone number should be in that column & formatted correctly.
    - If you choose this option, please let support@asknice.ly know which field you used; we'll have to make a quick adjustment on the back end to ensure that anyone with an SMS number in that field will get an SMS survey and not an email survey.

Build Your SMS Template

On the Survey page, select your desired template from the list, and click the SMS tab.

Here’s where you’ll set the message that is sent out with the link to your survey. You’ll adjust this on each template that you plan to use with SMS.

Test your character limit by clicking here. Select the "auto" option below the text box when checking total message count. If you leave it on the default of "gsm" it will highlight in red the characters that would cause a message to break into two separate texts automatically. Using special characters can drastically change the total character count.

Hot Tip: Having a brief message with ensure the survey is not sent in multiple SMS messages

SMS Shortlinks

For accounts with multiple brands, you can opt to hide your domain name from the unique SMS Survey URL. By clicking on the Survey URL checkbox, your domain name is replaced by a simple "s".

Schedule & Send Your SMS Surveys

Once SMS is configured, you can send them with the same mechanism that you use to send normal emails.

The easiest way is to set up a Scheduler on your Send page (paper airplane icon); you can choose how many surveys are sent per day and when to send them.
You can send one-off, instantaneous "Survey Blasts" from the Send page to as many contacts as you'd like, or you can send one-off surveys by clicking the "Email" button on the right side of the Contacts page - doing so will instantaneously send an SMS survey.
If you have our API or an integration configured, most will allow you to trigger an instantaneous survey upon the completion of an event. Please contact your CSM or our Support Team for help with this.

Can I send surveys via either email or SMS on the same account?

Yes - you can have surveys going out separately via SMS and email, or you can do "Option 1" above where SMS goes out initially and email is the fallback.

If you want to have surveys going out separately, you just have to be very specific about which survey is sent; someone could exist with BOTH email as their primary identifier or SMS as their primary identifier. AskNicely will think these are two different contacts, and will survey them accordingly.

FAQ's

Why am I being asked to top off my SMS quantity when I haven’t sent my maximum number of surveys?

SMS is paid for not by number of surveys, but by number of messages sent. Your initial message, SMS Workflow messages, and SMS Workflow responses all count towards the message limit. Long messages may be split into more than one SMS.

OK, so how do I know if my messages will get split?

SMS messages split at 153 characters. When we're talking about your initial survey message, that includes both the text asking recipients to complete the survey and the link to the survey. The message includes a URL automatically.

Remember that Dynamic Fields are variable, too, so if your message contains {firstname}, you should plan for long names, which will increase the character count.

Remember, short messages are your friend in SMS!

Will someone be double-surveyed, once by SMS and once by email?

Not if you use a custom field with phone number instead of putting the phone number in place of the email address. Because we use email address as a unique ID, if you add the same user but put their phone number in place of their email address, it would be considered a new user that's unaffiliated with the first. If that happens, someone may get double-surveyed.

What if the phone number is incorrect and is actually a landline?

According to our sending service, US, UK, and Canadian landline numbers may be eligible to receive SMS (via automated voice recording).

For all other countries, we will get a "failure to deliver" notice and an email survey will be attempted only if you have an email address attached to the Contact Record.

To avoid this scenario at all, please double check the phone numbers you are importing.

What has the better response rate, email or SMS?

So far, we've noticed fairly similar response rates, but email surveys tend have a greater comment length.

Do SMS surveys count toward our overall monthly/annual survey limits with emailed surveys or inapp Web Surveys?

Yes, they do.

Are there workflows for SMS?

Yes, you can read the SMS Workflows and Alerts help document for more information on these.

Can I change the phone number the text comes from?

No. Sending numbers are prescribed by Twilio.

Is there a character limit for Responses in SMS?

We limit a single message to 160 characters. If a user responds with over 160 characters then it will split. We cap all SMS feedback at 320 characters, or 2 messages.