Looking for a fast, effective way to gather insights from your audience?
SMS polls offer a simple yet powerful solution.
With open rates as high as 98%, text message polls outperform traditional survey channels like email and social media - making them ideal for quick research, customer feedback, or measuring impact.
In this article, we explore three practical use cases and show you how to set up your own SMS poll using Telerivet.
An SMS poll is a way of using the Short Message Service that powers text messages on your phone to ask people simple questions and get their responses.
An SMS poll might be used for a question that has a relatively simple answer - normally a yes or no answer, but can be used to collect more detailed data as well.
Polling is an effective research method for simple questions with few answers, and without the need for complex qualitative responses.
An SMS poll, versus polls through other mediums or channels, means that the user receives a message on their mobile device, and - without needing any other rich features - the user can reply and either:
It’s important to be aware, when using SMS polling, that in the United States, SMS communication is covered by the TCPA.
This means you are required to have someone’s active opt-in consent in order to send them your SMS.
The TCPA also covers a range of other responsibilities and restrictions to ensure compliance - including only sending messages between the hours of 8 a.m. and 9 p.m. Best practice would be to focus that more narrowly on typical work hours. (Telerivet makes this part easy!)
An SMS poll is an effective way to contact your customers, employees, or other opted-in stakeholders - to rapidly gain their response to your question.
There are many reasons why you would turn to SMS polling to help you undertake some form of research for your organization.
The primary reason you would choose SMS polling ahead of creating an online survey - sent, for example, via email or posted onto social media - is the engagement rate of SMS relative to those other channels.
For example, the average email campaign - even when conducted via best practices - will see an aggregate open rate of around 20%.
This is considered a good open rate, and will help you get more eyes on your survey.
However, it pales in comparison to the normal open rates for text messages sent to mobile devices.
The open rates for SMS can be as high as 98%.
This makes using SMS as your channel of communication a superpower, compared to companies that only use email.
Using SMS means people get real-time notifications, and those notifications remain persistent - i.e., present within their notification system, on their home screen, and indicated by an icon over their messages app.
An alternative approach would be to create an online web form and include the URL to that survey or poll in a text message you send to your customer.
However, you're faced with a further challenge: the modern consumer is increasingly security conscious, and is repeatedly warned against clicking on URLs they don’t know or trust.
This is the most common vector for phishing attacks.
And if you text someone a URL out of the blue, they are likely to feel uncertain - and avoid clicking it, potentially lowering their trust in your company.
And it’s good for us, as communications professionals, to encourage people to take safe practices with their devices.
A text-based SMS poll keeps them in the app.
The range of polling use cases is beyond what we’d be capable of covering in a single article.
I often use polls at work to determine when a meeting should take place, assessing who is free on different dates and times.
I even use polling in my personal life, to see what restaurant or café someone would prefer when trying to organize a group activity.
Polling is a simple, yet open-world and flexible tool for understanding both feasibility and preferences.
In the following three examples, we’re going to look at use cases for SMS polling that we see organizations undertaking.
Some of these will be private businesses; others, perhaps, third-sector organizations - such as non-governmental organizations or charities.
The first use case is a very broad category, but it’s the general idea of conducting research.
There are many organizations that conduct research for various reasons - universities, private businesses, and charities, to name a few.
And many of the serious and grown-up organizations that complete real research studies have intense, detailed methodologies that are well supported by text message polls (and their 98% open rate).
One obvious application is to use SMS polling within the pilot study or preparatory stage of a research project - to gain the largest pool of responses available, and to potentially encourage people to opt in to undertaking further, more detailed research in the future.
Many studies are designed with an initial, simple, high-reach, high-volume survey, which then pulls its more intensively interrogated subjects from the pool of initial respondents.
An SMS poll is the ideal way to start a process of this kind.
This is particularly true for large organizations like universities or charities, who have significant numbers of people within their opted-in, consenting, marketable database.
The initial poll can engage people and work to qualify them - through the world’s most popular communication channel.
One of the most popular uses for SMS polling within the business community is for gathering customer feedback.
Anyone who has worked in marketing, customer service, support, or success roles knows how vital it is to be able to tap into your customers’ thoughts and feedback.
They’ll also know how difficult this is to achieve.
Customers often do not want to be inconvenienced or have their day interrupted by filling out your surveys or jumping on calls to discuss your product in interviews.
Often, your product is much more important to you than it is to them.
You can see the evidence of this in the vouchers and discounts that so many companies attach to providing feedback or jumping on a customer interview call.
This displays where the floor is set for the value of that interaction to the company.
If the company is willing to give you a $50 gift card to jump on a call with them, you can bet that the call is worth more than $50 to them.
As such, this is why the SMS poll is such a popular engagement channel for companies to interact with their customers.
Those high open rates, and the ease of replying - without the need to click external links or worry about security - make the process as obstacle-free as possible for the customer to give you a response.
And anyone who’s worked in consumer software will know: once someone has done one thing for you, they’re much more likely to be amenable to doing another.
By getting their response to a simple SMS poll, you open the door to further responses, further engagement, and begin building a relationship with that customer - one that can produce ongoing feedback in the future.
The incomparable open rates of the channel make SMS polling a vital - yet often underrated - channel for this kind of engagement.
The final use case is one we see all the time here at Telerivet.
Telerivet is a tool to help you connect different communications channels and provide telecommunication services automatically and programmatically all around the world.
Telerivet is connectivity completeness - both in how you can port all of your different channels into one central command center, and in how our geographic coverage is the highest you can find on the market.
Telerivet’s reliable and resilient service means we can facilitate communications where infrastructure is challenging - in remote areas, poverty-stricken regions, or even in war zones.
This makes Telerivet the connectivity platform of choice for the world’s top NGOs and charities.
They need a service they can rely on, even in the most difficult circumstances.
From the Red Cross to Médecins Sans Frontières and the Norwegian Refugee Council, charities around the world rely on Telerivet - both to interact with their audiences and to support field workers on the ground.
And it's because of this that we see tools like SMS polling prove invaluable for measuring impact and quantifying need.
Because after you, as an NGO, have tried to achieve something in an area - how can you measure whether it has been done? Whether people are feeling the benefit?
A simple avenue is to be able to inexpensively poll the people who were involved - and perhaps provide mobile rewards, such as airtime, as a thank-you for responding to the poll and to incentivize completion.
In return, all of this data gathering provides the quantitative evidence base for how effective your work has been - and why other stakeholders should continue to contribute to your NGO’s success and mission.
In the modern fundraising environment, this is a crucial part of the puzzle.
Telerivet makes it an incredibly easy process to create and conduct automated polls or surveys via SMS, or even by voice calls.
As people respond to your poll once you’ve sent it out, you can log in to Telerivet to view and export responses, all within the Telerivet web app.
Each text poll can contain one or more multiple choice or open-ended questions.
And this can be sent not just via SMS, but also through other messaging apps that might be popular in the regions in which you operate - such as WhatsApp or Viber.
On top of this, Telerivet also supports automated voice polls, which can contain one or more questions and can accept:
If you want to create an automated SMS poll, or even a voice poll using interactive voice response (IVR), go to your Services page on Telerivet and click “Add New Service.”
If you want to create an SMS poll, click “Poll” under the Features category, or under Polls and Feedback.
If instead you want to use IVR to create a voice poll, go to Polls and Feedback, and then in that tab, click “Voice Poll”.
If you want to learn more about setting up polls in Telerivet, check out the resources below:
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