We have recently made some major enhancements to our existing survey campaign to take advantage of the data collection capabilities described in the previous two blog posts.  Previously, the survey campaign was only capable of collecting a single piece of information, and there was no validation performed on the data submitted by the customer.

The newly-enhanced survey campaign addresses these shortcomings, and provides you with additional capabilities to manage the data that is collected.  Let’s quickly walk through the creation of a survey campaign to see how easy it is to setup.

The first step in creating a survey campaign is to select the start and end dates and times for your campaign.

Next, you simply need to provide a description for your campaign, and the keyword that you would like to use (what your participants will text to initiate the survey).

The third step is where the magic happens.  In the initial message to your participants, you ask them for the first piece of information.  Below the message box, you will see a check box with the description “This message requests data from the participant”, which is checked by default.  In the section below that check box, you specify the data attribute that you are collecting from the initial message, the message to send the participant if they reply with data that is invalid for the specified data attribute, and the message to send to the participant when they send a valid response.  The valid response message could be another question.  If it is, simply check the box below the message to expand another area asking you for the data attribute, invalid data response, and valid data response (which could be yet another question) to handle the reply from that message.  You can configure the survey to ask as many questions as you wish.  There is no limit.

Finally, review the details of your survey campaign, and click “Activate Campaign” to finish.

After creating your survey, you will be brought to the campaign details page.  The survey campaign details page has been enhanced to provide a simple rundown of the questions you are asking your survey participants, and the data the respective questions are collecting.

After your survey starts, and your customers begin participating, you will begin to see up-to-the-minute stats on the participation.  These stats include the number of participants who initiated the survey, the number of participants who completed the survey, and the number of participants who have answered each of the questions.

In addition to the completion statistics, you are also able to see a complete timeline of participants interacting with your survey, which can be exported as a comma separated value (CSV) file.

Also new is the ability to export all of the data you have collected via the survey.  On the side navigation menu, you will see a new option to export the survey data.  Clicking this will bring you to a form asking you for your name and email address.  Filling out the form and clicking “Submit” starts a process on our server that will export all of your survey data.  When the export is complete, you will receive an email containing a link you can use to download a CSV file containing all of the data collected from your survey participants.  You can then import that CSV file into your favorite spreadsheet program for some good, old-fashioned number crunching.

The survey campaign was the first to get these capabilities, but it is not the last.  We are hard at work integrating data collection into our other campaigns as well.  We are also working on exciting ways for you to analyze and act on the data you have collected from your participants.  Stay tuned for more details!

In the previous post, I showed how you can manage your contacts via the Contact List.  The Contact List makes it easy to display and update information for a contact who has participated in one or more of your mobile marketing campaigns.  While a customer’s name, mailing address, email address, gender, and home phone can be very valuable to have, it is extremely likely that you will need to collect information that is more specific to your business.  We understand this need, which is why we have added the capability to define custom attributes to meet the specific needs of your business.

The User Data tab, available under the Contacts tab, lists the data attributes that you can collect from your contacts.  Out of the box, TextMe users are able to collect common data attributes such as name, address, and home phone.  These attributes are listed in the Default Attributes section of the User Data page.

But, the real power of this feature is the ability for you to define your own set of attributes, and doing so couldn’t be easier.  Clicking the “Add data attribute” button will reveal a small form asking you for information about the data you would like to collect.  Simply provide a name, description, and data type for your attribute, and click Save.  Your attribute is now ready to be used!

If we navigate back to the page where we can edit the details for a contact, we will see that we can now specify a customer number of each of our contacts.

After entering a customer number and clicking “Update”, we will now see the customer number listed in the details for that contact.

The data type of your attribute has an important role.  It is responsible for validating data submitted for that attribute.  For example, numeric attributes will only accept numbers, zip code attributes will only accept data that looks like a valid zip code, state attributes will only accept valid state names or abbreviations, etc.  If you attempt to enter invalid data for a given attribute, you will receive an error.  This data validation is also performed on data submitted via a SMS message (again, more on this in future blog posts).

There is no limit to the number of user data attributes you can define.  And, the following data types are supported: Text, Numeric, Date, Time, Date and Time, Currency, Email Address, Phone Number, Zip Code, Gender, Boolean (true/false, yes/no), and State.

Using the User Data tab, you can lay the foundation to start collecting data that matters to you and your business.  In the next post, we’ll see how we can collect data via SMS messages using the new, Multi-question Survey campaign.

Mobile marketing is special.  It provides the rare capability of putting you in direct contact with your target audience.

We’ve been very busy the past several weeks adding new features to TextMe to help you collect and manage data about your customers.  The first of these new features I’d like to introduce is the Contact List.

The Contact List, accessible under the all new Contacts tab, provides you with the list of everyone who has participated in any of your mobile marketing campaigns.  In addition to simply listing your contacts by their mobile number, you can also search for a contact by whole or partial mobile number.

Clicking on the mobile number will bring you to a screen where you can see all sorts of interesting data about that contact.  This information includes data you have collected about the contact via web forms or SMS (more on this in future blog posts), messages the contact has sent in the past 48 hours, subscription lists the contact is subscribed to, and campaigns the contact has participated in.  This information can be extremely valuable in determining which contacts are your most loyal, and which contacts you should be trying to engage more.

From this screen (and also from the Contact List screen), you can edit the contact’s data by clicking the Edit button by the contact details or Edit Attributes item in the side navigation bar.  Changes will be saved to the database for use at a later time.

This is just the beginning.  In future blog posts, I will discuss how to collect data from your contacts, what types of data you can collect, and what you can do with this data.