Send surveys via SMS and other messaging platforms

How to send a shareable link survey via WhatsApp, SMS, and other messaging services

Agnieszka avatar
Written by Agnieszka
Updated over a week ago

With Survicate, you can:

  • Send surveys to a WhatsApp group chat or to your contacts separately;

  • Include a survey link in your SMS message;

In this article, you'll learn how to create a survey that can be shared via a link in a private message or in a group conversation with platforms such as WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger.

Create and Configure a shareable link survey

If you'd like to share your survey via a messaging service, first you'll need to create a shareable link/email type of survey.

Pick an Email or shareable link survey from the menu. You can either set up a survey of your own (start from scratch), select a survey from our templates library (start from template), create a survey with AI, or import questions you prepared before:

To guide you through the survey creation process, we will create a survey from scratch.

Click Add new question and choose which question type you would like to add.

You can make a question mandatory under the Settings tab:

To avoid duplicate responses, decide how many times each person can answer the survey in its Configure tab:

You can also set the date or the number of responses on which you'd like to stop the survey.

More features of the Configure tab are described in our article here.

πŸ”§ In case of using unsupported providers, such as SMS or WhatsApp, you can leave the Identify respondents with: box in the Configure tab empty. By default, responses collected via a survey shared on messaging platforms will be anonymous.

The link you'll find in the Share tab can later be used to distribute your survey:

You can also click on one of the social media platforms to share your survey directly on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, or get your survey's QR code:

πŸ’‘ You can download the QR code and distribute it online or print it out if you'd like to use it offline, for example, on a poster.

Adjust your survey's preview, description, and the name the respondents will see when the survey is opened in a browser tab:

πŸ“Œ Customizing your link preview is available on some of ourΒ plans.

Identify respondents

As mentioned in the Create and Configure a shareable link survey paragraph, messaging platforms are not supported providers, which means the survey link created in the Share tab will not automatically capture respondents.

If you don't want to collect anonymous responses and you'd like to assign respondents to their answers, you can add a Contact form type of question to your survey with First Name, Last Name, or E-mail fields.

To avoid using a Contact form, you can use merge tags to identify the respondents of a survey sent in a private message. This requires sending a separate link to each person while adding their name or email address to the link.

Shorten your survey link

If you don't want to include a long survey link in your WhatsApp or SMS message, you can use external tools, such as Bitly to shorten the link. The setup is very fast and easy. You can customize the second part of the link if you wish and you're ready to send it out!

You can use any link-shortening service you wish.

Share your survey in a direct text message or in a group chat

If you'd like to send the survey to individual contacts, it's best to paste the survey link in a direct message than in a group conversation. You can do this on messaging platforms such as WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger:

This way, you can make sure that only your chosen contacts will be able to fill out the survey.

You can also send the survey link in a private message to identify your respondents. Please take a look at this paragraph to learn more about how to achieve this.

Best practices

Use survey logic to target the correct audience

When adding your survey link to a public social media post, it's important to make sure you're collecting responses from the right audience. To achieve this, you can use survey logic, to show different questions to different contacts.

Customize your questions
You can use HTML tags to add pictures to your survey or to modify the text style.

Host your survey under your domain and change its design

For a more personal and branded experience, you can choose to host your link surveys on a custom domain. You can also remove Survicate's branding and add your logo or design.

Activate your survey's integrations

In the Connect tab, you can choose to activate Email Notifications to receive an email whenever your survey receives a new response, or connect with tools, such as Slack or Google Sheets, to receive survey responses outside of Survicate as well.

πŸ“ž If you have any questions about sending surveys via messaging services - feel free to reach out to our team via chat or email: support@survicate.com

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