This year we introduced several features that empower you to keep track on how you use Nfield. Features that are meant to give you an idea of your footprint on the Nfield servers. In this series of NIPO Academy sessions we will showcase the features we have introduced, like the domain usage report and the survey metrics, and give you tips on how to use these to your advantage.

NIPO is delighted to announce that its Nfield Online and CAPI software solutions have earned the 7th position in Capterra’s newly released Top 20 Most Popular Survey Software report.

Capterra

Capterra evaluates software based on product data, validated user reviews and independent research and testing. It also analyses online search activity to generate a list of market leaders who offer the most popular solutions. The resulting assessments therefore represent a solid all-round appraisal. 

Nfield’s inclusion in the 2018-19 Top 20 is testimony to years of hard work developing solutions which truly satisfy user needs. This has been achieved through working closely with the Market Research industry to establish these needs, complemented with dedication to formulating the most robust, user-friendly and cost-effective solutions.    

See the full Capterra Top 20 Survey Software report

About NIPO

NIPO develops Online, CAPI and CATI survey solutions specifically to serve the needs of professional market researchers. For over 20 years, we have been working closely alongside market research organizations to continually deepen and freshen our insights into their challenges, in order to create truly purposeful solutions.

This unique bond means we have robust practical knowledge of how to efficiently organize survey distribution of any scale. Which enables us to serve our customers with exceptionally well-thought-through products, particularly when it comes to tackling large scale national and global projects. Our unrivalled combination of deep industry understanding and high-level IT expertise means our customers benefit from survey software which is genuinely designed with their success in mind.

With more than 200,000 users around the world, NIPO supports many thousands market research projects every year.

There are probably many occasions when you want to follow through after a customer interaction by sending them a survey. But even though their details are all neatly logged in your CRM, getting the invitation out takes a lot of effort.

First you’ll need to export the data from your CRM and import it into your data collection system. With a few more clicks, you’ll finally manage to send the email. It’s a manual process which is too laborious to be done in real-time, so ends up happening in daily or even weekly batches. Which means you lose the benefit of acting immediately.

Wouldn’t it be better if all this was automated? So your survey invitation email gets sent at the very moment your CRM is updated with the latest status. No waiting. No time-consuming clicks.  

The good news is you can make this happen. The even better news is you won’t have to write a single line of code! Zero programming knowledge required.

Integration without coding

It all comes down to integrating your CRM with Nfield. When this is done, updating a customer case record triggers your CRM to send the relevant information to Nfield, from where the instruction to send an appropriate survey invitation is automatically issued. 

So how do you achieve this integration? You’ll need a good tool, a bit of curiosity and a clear mind. Maybe some coffee too?

The following guide shows you how to integrate Microsoft Dynamics CRM with Nfield. If you have a different CRM, you will need a different method. That shouldn’t be a problem – just contact us to ask how! 

Flow

To keep things really simple, we’re using Microsoft Flow. This has a large set of components (known as Connectors) which you use to connect systems together, e.g. your CRM + Nfield. Each connector allows you to set triggers, which alert the relevant connected system when changes occur for which you want actions to be taken. The functionality is pretty powerful. And what’s more, it’s FREE!!

Dynamics CRM Connector

Let’s look at an example of a Dynamics CRM Connector which has 3 triggers and 5 actions. 

Trigger – this monitors your CRM for specified events, such as when a record is created/deleted/updated. You just have to associate these with the way you use your CRM. For example, when a new customer is added, you know a new record gets created. So if you want the adding of a new customer to trigger an action (see below), you select “When a record is created” to be the CRM trigger. Or in the scenario of a customer case being resolved, you’d select “When a record is updated” to be the trigger. In this instance, the instruction will also need to be modified with an IF condition to limit the trigger to resolved cases only. 

Action – this is a change to be made in the Dynamics CRM, such as create/delete/update/filter/retrieve one or more records. 

In the following example, we’re using the scenario of a customer case being resolved. 

The flow begins with setting a trigger to look for case entities which have been updated. This sets off an action to read specific details of any relevant entities. These details (email address, name, reasons for contact…etc) can be used further on in the Flow.

HTTP Connector to reach Nfield

Now you need to make the connection with Nfield. You won’t find an Nfield Connector listed in Microsoft Flow, but Nfield has an API which can be reached by setting up an HTTP connector. HTTP will be offered as an action.

The first step is to log into Nfield by filling in a form, as shown on the screen below. The formats and values you need to enter are all described in Nfield API documentation. 

Once this is done, you can then continue to add more steps. In this scenario, we have added respondent data and created an email batch to send an email. As a bonus, we’re also triggering an SMS which will be sent using TextMagic.

Following-up with survey respondents by thanking them for their time, maybe with a gift or special offer, is a good way to build favorable relationships. Similarly, alerting relevant people on the commissioning side about any individual rating extremes enables them to take beneficial action. In both cases, speed is essential for positive impact. 

Nfield Online users therefore often ask us if there’s an easy way to do this. Is it possible to automatically generate the sending of different emails, so appropriate messages instantly get delivered? Without doing any coding? We’re pleased to say the answer is “yes”! 

You just need to set everything up via a simple external application. Let’s show you how.

An instantly smooth experience via a simple solution

Before we start, try our demo to experience how it works from the email recipient point-of-view. This example asks you to complete a one-question survey and then enter your email address. After you submit the survey, you’ll receive a thank-you email.

How easy was that?! Of course, if your survey is based on a pre-existing sample, the respondent will not need to enter their email address, as it will already be known.

There are a number of different ways to automatically generate these emails. We’re going to show you how to do it via an online platform called Zapier.

For those of you who are interested in the technicalities, this method uses an external API call in ODIN script. It’s a process which passes certain variables to an external web hook (a web address that receives data), and then sends an email.

So your first job is to build a webhook. Let’s go!

Build your webhook

Before building your webhook, you might like to understand what a webhook is and how it works.

A webhook is a URL which is called from your server, when the conditions you have set to execute an instruction are met. The webhook then instructs the next application in your workflow to do its stuff. The webhook thereby acts as a connector between different systems to automate workflow. For our purposes, when your email triggering conditions are met, the Nfield Online server will call the webhook, which then instructs your email client to send the relevant communication.

Here’s how to set up your webhook via Zapier:

1) Create a new Zap and select “Webhooks by Zapier” as your Trigger App.

2)    Select “Catch Hook” as the function

3)    Save the URL provided. This will be your webhook to be called from Nfield.

4)    Let the Zap know what information you are going to pass to it by setting the parameters. For example, these are likely to be Email, RespondentKey, Score and Name. Pay attention to the symbols which connect them. The first one has to be a question mark, then ampersands. Take a look at this example by opening it in your browser. 

{URL copied}?email=xxx@nipo.com&respondentkey=12345&score=5&name=Doris

5)    Test your Zap. Click “See more samples”. It will grab test results, which you can expand to check if they’re delivering the results you expect. If all is working as expected, select it and continue.

That’s it! Your webhook is ready.

Sending email

The next thing you need to do is connect the webhook to your email client. We’ll use Gmail for this example. You also do this in Zapier, using the Gmail Zap.

1)    When setting up the email Zap, you can insert the parameters passed via the webhook into the various email fields (To, Subject and Body). Take care to compose and format your message nicely. Note that HTML is supported in the Body field. 

This is how it will look in your Zap.

Add an external API call in Nfield

In Nfield Online, you’ll need to add an “API Endpoints” (APIS) entry. Don’t let this technical term scare you! We’ve made it all really easy. 

1)    In default settings, go to APIS tab. Add a new Endpoint. Give it a name and enter the webhook URL you were given by Zapier. Add a description and save. 

2)    In the ODIN Script, we have the following to trigger this API call. Please download the complete script with this link.

*GETDATA result pair,ask "SendMail0927:email=*? Email;respondentkey=*? RespondentKey;score=*? Score;name=*? Name"

Now you can get a live link and try it out. Good luck!

Contact us

Contact us to find out more about automating work processes using Nfield. Similarly do share your own examples that may benefit other Nfield users! 

Understanding employee engagement is invaluable for improving a company’s productivity, quality and profitability. In recognition of this, many companies conduct annual employee satisfaction surveys, the results of which can be used for anything from obtaining employee engagement scores to delving deep into underlying details for guiding future strategy.

However, because these important surveys are often outside of the realm of the marketing department, companies don’t always think of turning to professional market research companies to conduct them. Which means a big opportunity is often being missed.

The value of professional market research expertise

Employee satisfaction surveys carried out in-house, by a department without specialist market research capabilities, are likely to be very limited in terms of the level and quality of insights they produce. This is partly due to use of less complex, non-professional survey solutions and partly due to a lower level of knowledge and expertise when it comes to designing surveys and interpreting the results.

A dedicated external market research company using Nfield Online can deliver insights of far greater depth, quality and tangibility. This is achieved thanks to aspects such as:

• Anonymity: a third party is better trusted by employees to keep their input confidential.
• Better quality, tailored surveys: Nfield’s complex online surveys can be tailored, customized and scaled to meet the exact needs of the company, unlike standard non-professional off-the-shelf solutions.
• Benchmarking: Nfield enables survey data to be compared against other research, so the client can obtain valuable understanding of their strengths and weaknesses.
• Interpretation: professional market researchers can make sense of the outcomes and translate them into tangible insights.

Expand your offering

If you’re already using Nfield Online, you already have all you need to offer superior quality employee satisfaction surveys alongside everything else you do.

If you haven’t yet discovered Nfield Online, here are a few of the powerful capabilities it offers, for every type of survey:

• Stunning survey design, with a wide choice of appropriate templates. Templates can be updated from survey to survey, without losing the ability to compare their data.
• Fully mobile responsive, perfectly presented on every smartphone, tablet and desktop monitor.
• Full respondent anonymity, while you, as the researcher, can still keep track of participation and issue appropriate reminder to those who are yet to complete.
• Continual live reporting through Power BI.
• Maintaining respondent attention through complex routing and emphasis on gamification.
• Ability to deep dive into the survey data, possibly comparing with previous research waves or external benchmarks.
• Unrivalled security and compliance. Trust is critical in market research, especially with regard to data. Respondents entrust market researchers with all kinds of sensitive data about their lives. So you need to know you can trust your solution provider to keep that data safe. It’s for this reason that NIPO, the company behind Nfield, is committed to offering the most secure survey solutions possible to the professional market research industry. Our ISO 27001:2013 certification is strong and independent proof of how we’re taking the lead when it comes to data security. Nfield also includes features that assist your compliance with GDPR while carrying out your work, including the ability to conduct cross-survey searches for respondents, to delete or pseudomize interviews and to anonymize data in surveys.

And these are just the start, because our family of survey software also includes CATI and CAPI, so you can offer the very best service through every survey channel.

Ready to increase your repertoire by offering employee satisfaction surveys?

Find out more about Nfield Online’s capabilities or contact us for further information.

In an age where off-the-shelf online survey (CAWI) solutions mean, in theory, that any company can conduct online market research in-house, professional market research companies have to offer a notably superior service in order to win business.

The specific knowledge and expertise possessed by dedicated market research professionals is, of course, a primary sales point. But making the most of that expertise calls for the right technical online questionnaire tools. It means working with an online survey platform which aids every aspect of the market researcher’s craft, from device-aware survey design to fast response processing, while making optimal use of online technology.

Professional online survey necessities

There are a number of basics that every professional online market research survey solution should provide. Here at NIPO, however, we don’t settle for the basics. Having spent over 20 years working closely alongside market research organizations to establish the industry’s needs and explore its desires and possibilities, this is how we deliver Nfield Online market research surveys.

Investing in a new solution. Is it worth it?

Switching to a new, unfamiliar survey solution may feel daunting, but the rewards are well worth the investment. In the same way as we are acutely aware of market researchers’ needs, here at NIPO we appreciate the challenges that upgrading to a new solution might present.

For a start, you’ll want to see how Nfield Online performs for your specific needs, so you can tangibly evaluate its benefits over your current solution. No problem. We can work with you to set up custom demonstration projects.

You’re probably also wondering how your people are going to learn the new skillsets and ways of working they’ll need to take advantage of Nfield Online’s numerous capabilities. We’ve thought of that too. We can arrange all the training that’s necessary to get everybody up to speed, including when new people come on board, and even provide scripting services if that’s not one of your in-house skills.

Whatever your question might be, we’ll be happy to answer. So you can take your first steps to having a more user and respondent-friendly, secure, scalable and versatile solution that means you can always say “yes!” to even the most challenging of customer requests.

Customer satisfaction surveys, made immediately after purchase, account for 8% of all market research spending ^[1] and are the 4th most commonly conducted type of survey in the market research industry.

Much more than a way of keeping tabs on the customer experience, customer satisfaction surveys are an invaluable tool in the quest for customer retention and loyalty, as well as an aid for capitalizing on happy customers’ positivity. Taking appropriate action on the results can have a very tangible impact on future sales. Especially when it is applied to customers at extreme ends of the spectrum:

• Dissatisfied customers: 33% of Americans say they’ll consider switching companies after just a single instance of poor service ^[2]. Averting this requires immediate action. If survey feedback from dissatisfied customers is automatically shared with the relevant key account manager (or post-sales customer care department), they can take appropriate immediate action to prevent the customer from switching to a competitor.
• Highly satisfied customers: Americans are more likely to post about good experiences (53%) than poor experiences (35%) on social media ^[3]. If you know who’s thinking of you positively and more likely to recommend your business to others, you have an opportunity to target them with appropriate future campaigns that make the most of this.

Capturing and capitalizing on the moment

Acting fast
Obtaining insights into a customer’s purchasing experience, and feeding ‘urgent action cases’ back to customer service, needs to be done as quickly as possible after the purchase. Both for capturing the customer’s raw emotive feelings and to enable appropriate action to be taken within the most impactful timeframe.

Communication choice
Different customers prefer different methods of communication. Some are happy to respond online after contact via SMS / text or email. Others are more comfortable with speaking on the phone. And some prefer face-to-face interview.

In the case of negative experiences, such as payment disputes or complaints, which can become complex to resolve, customer preference is likely to sway more towards talking to a human on the phone (40%) or face-to-face interaction (23%) ^[4].

Nfield puts customer satisfaction first

Over 20 years of working closely alongside market research companies all over the world has given us deep insight into this industry’s complex needs. We’ve made it our business to turn this into solutions which truly help market research professionals do their jobs better and deliver more satisfying results.

When it comes to customer satisfaction surveys, we’ve thought right through the process so everybody gets what they need.

Multi-channel flexibility
Availability of Nfield Online, CAPI, and CATI, with the ability to switch between them and synchronize results, means all respondent contact preferences can be met via a single integrated system.

Direct feedback
Any defined ‘trigger responses’ from the survey can automatically be forwarded to specified individuals on the end-client side. This automation means action-requiring alerts go immediately and directly to those who need to know.

External integration
Using the API, Nfield solutions can easily be integrated with external applications such as CRM systems for automatic loading of respondent profiles into surveys. And integration with social media enables fast, automated and holistic capture of customer feedback.

Appealing to use
The stunning, responsive, mobile first design provided via Nfield Online encourages respondents to complete surveys and voice their (dis)satisfaction more easily. After all, there is nothing more frustrating to an already frustrated customer than a satisfaction survey that’s an effort to navigate through, especially on a mobile device! With Nfield, that doesn’t have to happen.

Every requirement met

Nfield’s broad and highly customizable capabilities mean no demand, requirement or scenario is out of reach. No matter how niche, how large or how complex it may be. We are proud to bring you the future of customer satisfaction surveys!

Feel free to contact us to find out more about what we can do for you.

[1] Global Market Research 2018 – An ESOMAR study
[2] American Express 2017 Customer Service Barometer
[3] American Express 2017 Customer Service Barometer
[4] Live Chat Benchmark Report 2017

Since 23 April 2019, users of Nfield have been able to benefit from integration of Power BI for generating shareable Fieldwork Overview reports.

Fieldwork Overview reports

These standard reports enable you to monitor your Nfield Online and CAPI projects and easily share results with relevant parties. They can be found in the Reports section of every Nfield survey.

The new Power BI Fieldwork Overview report provides:

• An overview of the numbers of completes, drop outs and screen outs, per survey including their progress through the day.
• The median survey time and distribution across the respondents.
• Question-by-question statistics for how often each has been answered, so you can easily identify if any of them coincide with big drop offs.
• A cross tabulation page where you can compare survey questions against specific samples or questionnaire fields.
• A page where you can see all verbatim, per question.
• The ability to share the report with any stakeholder (e.g. customer or colleague) via a temporary link, without them needing access to Nfield.

Custom reports

Nfield has been developed to produce data in a format that makes it easy to generate state-of-the-art reports via Business Intelligence tools. This means that, in addition to making use of the standard Power BI Fieldwork Overview report, you can create your own custom reports using either Power BI or alternative BI tools, without the need for additional data processing.

Here at NIPO, we’re very excited about the opportunities Microsoft Power BI presents for the market research industry and see huge potential in how it can benefit our customers. Via both standard and custom reports. Although we are not yet at the stage where Power BI can completely replace your own data processing, it can already assist you in effectively monitoring and steering your fieldwork and creating custom dashboards, with very little investment. The ability to easy share reports with any relevant stakeholders, as needed, eliminates the time-consuming task of arranging access to fieldwork progress while also boosting transparency.

About Microsoft Power BI: Power BI is a suite of business analytics tools that deliver insights throughout your organization. It connects to hundreds of data sources, simplifies data prep, and drives ad hoc analysis. https://powerbi.microsoft.com

If you want to conduct an online survey that refers to frequently changing information, or needs to extract relevant information from a large database, you’ll need to connect your survey to an external source via an API. This is easily achievable with Nfield Online.

There is a wide range of scenarios which might call for this. To give just a few examples, you might want to show:

• Today’s TV programs
• A product list filtered by previously selected answers
• Respondent information from your CRM
• The respondent’s latest purchase history

Or you might need to utilize real-time information to route your survey according to current stock status.

How to connect to your external source

The connection to your external source consists of one or two components:

1. A URL (always necessary) and
2. Parameters (optional)

To illustrate how it works, let’s take a look at the Cryptocurrency demo we’ve set up. This demo survey connects to https://cex.io/api/tickers/USD/EUR to retrieve the latest cryptocurrency prices. As you can see, this URL takes you some JSON code. Copying this code into a JSON editor will present it as shown in the illustration below. Note that Nfield will only load the content from the “data” section and will ignore other information.

Step 1 is therefore to identify the URL to connect to your survey. However, every survey has its own unique requirements and ready-made API URLs are rarely available. Your IT team will actually need to create the URL(s) that return the relevant JSON format data results. Of course, NIPO can provide any support you need for doing this.

Step 2 is to set this up in Nfield Online. Under Survey Default Settings, simply add the URL as an API end point and give it a name. Doing this tells Nfield that calling “CryptoCurrency” from the survey script refers to a call to this particular URL.

Step 3 is to call the API from your survey setup.

The call status is stored in “result” and the answers are stored in the arrays of var1 and var2. In our example var1 is filled with the ‘pair’ info and var2 with ‘ask’ (asking price) information, so our *GETDATA command looks like this:

*GETDATA result pair,ask "CryptoCurrency:"

Note that our demo example doesn’t utilize the second component option for parameters.

Always here to help

We hope this article inspires you to explore the possibilities opened up by the use of API endpoints. If you have any questions or require any assistance, please feel free to contact us.

In these Academy sessions we introduce a new document on paradata, tell you how to get to the paradata and give you a few practical examples on how you can use this data.

In an exciting development for researchers who survey respondents in China, NIPO is proud to announce the release of a new Nfield deployment from Chinese mainland. This makes Nfield the only international market research platform approved as an Internet Content Provider (ICP) by the Chinese authorities. Researchers and respondents alike can now enjoy a uniquely superior experience with Nfield, as data no longer needs to pass through the Great Firewall of China.

Why Chinese mainland deployment matters: The performance of outbound internet traffic in China is impacted by what is known as the Great Firewall of China. This firewall actively checks all connections to the outside world, including cloud-based online interviewing platforms. For Nfield Online users in Chinese mainland connected to the Nfield deployment in the Azure data center in Hong Kong SAR, this previously meant unpredictable delays in load times for new questions and thus a poor respondent experience, with high drop-outs as a result. This was not only the case for NIPO’s Nfield, but for all CAWI interview systems hosted from outside Chinese mainland.

The new Nfield China deployment has both its primary and backup locations hosted in Chinese mainland. This has been made possible through the Chinese Government’s full approval of the deployment and granting of an Internet Content Provider (ICP) filing. This gives Nfield a unique status within the international market research industry and enables us to provide an unrivalled level of service.

As well as the obvious benefits for online surveys, the China deployment also means improved interface responsiveness when setting up survey projects and managing fieldwork. And Nfield CAPI interviewers will benefit from faster synchronization with tablets.

Final stress tests were carried out in January 2019 with a group of pilot users. Following the successful completion of those first projects, the domain is now available for use and we are delighted to have already welcomed our first new customers on board. Existing customers operating in China will be invited to switch to the local deployment.

The Nfield China deployment is running the latest Nfield version and will remain in sync with updates applied to other regions.

Integrating Nfield Online with panel providers is simple and easy via common market research industry practices. When you have sample information from a sample source (your own panel database, or sample database from your panel provider or client), Nfield can facilitate the sharing of this information and the interview status between Nfield and the source(s) concerned. The following Q&A has been compiled to help you understand how it’s done.

What are the benefits of integration?

Integration automates the sharing of information between sample sources and Nfield. It keeps both systems up-to-date in real time, without human intervention. The following examples illustrate how this is of benefit to all involved.

1. The panel provider (anyone providing the sample source) can pass sample information (e.g. respondent name / product used) to Nfield. The sample information can be used directly in the questionnaire.
2. When an interview is paused / ended / completed, Nfield updates the panel provider on the survey status via a result code. For example, it might be reported as successful, screen-out, quota full or another custom exit code of your choice. The panel provider can follow up by sending a thank-you message, adding credits or sending a reminder to the panel member.
3. Because the panel provider receives status updates (as described in the previous item), they have a clear overview of how the fieldwork is progressing and can be proactive in taking any necessary action, such as adding a new sample to the survey.

Who should distribute the invitation and what’s the best way to do it?

That’s entirely up to you and how creative you want to be (see Creative Online Survey Distribution). Nfield has an email management module for managing, sending and tracking email templates. To find out which options are available to you, please check with your own organization and your panel providers. They probably have their own member portal or app to facilitate management of invitations and rewards. 

Should I upload sample information to Nfield?

This depends on your needs. 

Nfield provides a sample management module to facilitate your fieldwork operation. You can upload / download sample information in Microsoft Excel format or using our API (see API – What you need to know). You can modify or delete information as necessary. To comply with GDPR, you can also partially clear confidential information and/or delete interview data (see GDPR and Nfield Toolkit).

How can I link a sample to both systems?

Nfield allows you to define your own RespondentKey for each sample. So you can use an ID provided by your panel provider (such as SampleID or PanelMemberID) as the RespondentKey.
 
When you upload the sample information to Nfield, simply include this RespondentKey as a field in the Excel sheet. Note that there is no requirement to upload sample information if you don’t want to. The panel provider can also distribute the invitation link directly themselves using the following format: 

I would like to show the respondent name and purchased product in the questionnaire text. How can this be done?

There are two options for this. You can either upload these details to Nfield or incorporate the information in the survey URL.

If you choose to upload the information to Nfield, simply incorporate the RespondentKey in your invitation link to make it appear within the questionnaire. 

Or if you prefer, you can incorporate the sample information directly in the survey URL, as shown below, to get the same result. 

Can I encrypt the sample information in the survey URL?

Yes. This can be done using an encryption key which is provided in each survey. Please contact our helpdesk for details on how to implement this. The resulting URL will be presented as shown below:

How does my panel provider get updated on the interview status so they can give rewards as needed?

When an interview is completed, the redirection URL can be configured to a page published by your panel provider or to one of your own, which can be defined according to the result code in each case. You can include whatever parameters you choose in this result code (e.g. RespondentKey, additional products, duration spent). The panel provider should process these codes to update their database so rewards can be given accordingly. 

How can my panel provider stay up-to-date on the quota status?

Nfield constantly checks the quota status while interviews are being carried out. If you have access to Nfield, you can get a quick overview of the current status via Nfield manager. Third parties (e.g. your panel provider/client) have the following options for keeping up-to-date.

1. The panel provider/client keeps their own record of the number of successful interviews in each quota cell.
2. Supervisors using Nfield report the quota status to them (manually).
3. API automation is created to retrieve the latest quota status and share it with the panel provider.

Note that we are currently developing functionality for direct sharing of quota status with panel providers. Please check in with us on how this work is progressing!

Can I include multiple panel providers in one study?

Yes, with some modification to the questionnaire. Contact our helpdesk for details. 

More questions about panel integration?

We know that every customer has different needs. If your questions / requirements aren’t covered in this article, contact us and we’ll be delighted to provide answers. 

Do you read all your text messages? It seems you probably do! According to Esendex Research, in 2018 SMS messages have a 94% global average open rate. What’s more, 82% of messages are read within 5 minutes of receipt.

At NIPO, we believe SMS is a great channel for distributing invitations for online surveys. So we’re taking this opportunity to explain why, guide you through setting it up with Nfield Online and provide useful tips for making the most of it. 

Why SMS is a great channel for online survey invitations

Distributing online survey invitations via text means you can reach a wider audience, really fast. Plus your messages stand out and get attention. What’s not to like?

1. SMS reaches a phenomenally wide audience. In 2018, 5 out of 7.6 billion global population have the ability to send and receive text messages via SMS.
2. SMS messages get more attention than emails. SMS messages have a 94% global average open rate, but only 1 in 4 emails people receive are opened (not surprising when so many emails get directed to the spam folder). Sure, sending invitations via SMS comes at a cost, but the considerably higher effectiveness is well worth the investment. Especially if you are trying to reach a difficult target group. SMS lifts your message out of the daily deluge of (spam) emails.
3. Faster response rates. 82% of text messages are read within 5 minutes People usually give more priority to opening text messages as they are perceived as a time-dependent matter. This gives market research companies great opportunities for capturing in-the-moment responses. For example, you could send an SMS survey invitation to your panel members immediately after their team has won a trophy to capture the emotion of the moment. Or to a retail brand club member immediately after they’ve made a purchase.

SMS is a faster way to reach respondents at key moments, with a higher chance of getting noticed and triggering action.

Setting up SMS invitations with Nfield

The first thing you need to do is find out who your SMS gateway providers are. This is easily done via a Google search for “SMS gateway providers”.

What should you look for in an SMS gateway provider? That depends on the level of technical integration you want. This can be broken down into three levels:

• Basic option – ability to send text messages to mobile numbers.
• Better option – ability to upload your contacts to a portal where you can set up your SMS template according to your preference.
• Advanced option – ability to use their API for integration with your own workflows.

Email to SMS

This is the easiest way to implement text messaging with Nfield Online. The illustration below shows how you can manually create an email to a specific address. If you want to send multiple emails at once, just use mail merge. Your SMS gateway provider will tell you how to construct the email address, which usually comprises a combination of the recipient’s telephone number and the provider’s email domain. Then all you have to do is compose your SMS content and hit send.

Using the tools from your SMS gateway provider

To show you how this works, we’re using TextMagic’s solution as an example. The first thing you need to do is set up your contact list in a contact group by uploading an Excel file. Then compose your email and use the relevant Excel field (e.g. First name) for personalization. TextMagic also lets you configure the sender name to be your company/client name and schedule a distribution time.

Making it a success

We talked about the technical side, now let’s give you some recommendations to make your SMS campaign a success.

Content

• Remember to keep your message short! Think about how an SMS looks when you open it on your phone.
• Shorten your URL. See this post about how to batch send unique links
• Set up a sender ID which shows your brand name instead of a telephone number. The cost is worth the instant recognition it will generate.

Timing

• The best time is to send your SMS invitation is ‘in-the-moment’ (e.g. very soon after the recipient has visited a store / taken a flight / used a service / had another form of communication with the brand or organization).
• Beware of certain parts of the day when your text message is less likely to get the attention you want it to have. For example, avoid sending messages late in the evening, during rush hour and preferably not on Mondays.
• Don’t forget to consider the time-zone your respondents are in!

Get permission

• A mobile number is considered as a more private asset than an email address. Using it can be regarded as intrusive if the recipient has not specifically opted-in. It is therefore vital to get the respondent’s permission to use this channel and provide a way of unsubscribing if desired.

We hope you have found this information to be informative and inspiring. Please feel welcome to contact us if you’d like to explore your possibilities together. We love hearing about our customers’ individual challenges and seeing what solutions we can offer. And we love hearing about your successes too!

Open online surveys can be distributed via a whole range of methods. You’re not just limited to email! This means you have opportunities to be creative and try out different ways as you reach out to more interactive audiences. Take a look at our ideas and share yours with us.

Social media

Facebook

Facebook is the world’s most popular social media network with over 2 billion active users every month. That’s a huge collection of sociodemographic data for your surveys! However, the organic reach on Facebook is not what it used to be and won’t be sufficient for distributing your online surveys. These days, Facebook’s real potential lies in paid posts and ads. Facebook offers impressively extensive and detailed options for targeting, which enables you to pinpoint the exact audience you want to reach.

LinkedIn

Since its launch in 2003, LinkedIn has gathered over 547 million professional users and one million company profiles. These volumes are very interesting if your surveys research professionals and industries. Within LinkedIn you can share a survey as a company update, a personal post, banner, text ad or send it directly to selected individuals as a private message.

Twitter

Twitter’s audience comprises 310 million monthly active users. It is more diverse as engages consumers and professionals alike. Within Twitter you can use ads to target people based on their location, age, gender, device or keywords.

WeChat

In China, some market research organizations use a local social media network called WeChat to distribute online surveys. The WeChat messaging app is massively popular in China with 768 million active users every day.

Most popular messaging apps per country

Although WeChat’s network structure is often compared to WhatsApp or Facebook, it is, in fact, very different. The WeChat app has been evolving into a full-service platform as it strives to be everything at once: a place for chatting, shopping, gaming and banking. Alongside a wider range of services, WeChat’s users benefit from easy integration with other apps, including Facebook.

All this makes WeChat a fantastic opportunity for engaging different audiences across China. For example, if your organization has a company page on WeChat with followers, then it’s possible to display your survey link either on your page or send it directly to followers via a private WeChat message. To incentivize followers to respond the survey, you can redirect them from the WeChat app to the company’s website where a reward awaits.

Even though this idea is easy to implement, it still requires a bit of technological knowledge. You can take advantage of our experience with this solution by deploying your WeChat project through Nfield Online.

WATCH OUT

WhatsApp currently holds the status of being the most popular messaging app in the world.  The Facebook Corporation bought WhatsApp a few years ago and in 2016 partly integrated user accounts across the two apps. Even though this has happened, the Facebook Corporation remains very cautious about privacy and spammy user experiences and doesn’t allow third-party ads to be displayed in WhatsApp. Compared to WeChat, WhatsApp’s commercial usage is more restricted and it doesn’t allow for distribution of online surveys in the same way – at least for now.

Physical touchpoints

Offices, reception desks, shops and presence at trade shows, seminars and other industry events are all physical touchpoints between companies and potential survey respondents. Printed materials, interior décor, products and touch screens all provide opportunities for inviting survey participation. Which means you can turn any physical environment into a place for conducting everything from customer or employee satisfaction surveys to product research.  

QR codes

Quick Response (QR) codes are those digital squares you find in all kinds of places. The square contains a unique two-dimensional, usually black and white code, which can be read via dedicated QR barcode readers and smartphones. You can easily generate unique QR codes for your surveys with simple tools such as www.qr-code-generator.com. These can then be printed on business cards, product sheets, leaflets, posters, packaging and even products, and displayed in exhibition booths, reception areas, around premises, on vehicles and more.

It’s worth remembering that printed QR codes will remain in circulation for an indefinite period of time. This means they are only appropriate for surveys which will remain active for a long time, such as ongoing consumer satisfaction surveys.

Because people usually read QR codes from their smartphones, the surveys these link to must be optimized for completion via a smartphone.

Beacons

Beacons make it possible to invite passersby to take a short survey about their current experience of a precise location in real time. For example, you can instantly survey visitors to buildings and events about their opinions of their immediate environment. A great opportunity everywhere from airports to trade shows to ask people for improvement suggestions.

Each Beacon is effectively a cheap, small Bluetooth transmitter. The standard broadcast range spans from a couple of centimeters to 100 meters. While GPS is a great tool for locating bigger targets on a map such as streets and buildings, Beacon technology enables you to pinpoint exactly where an individual is standing, even inside a building, to a precision of one meter.

Beacons don’t follow people, they search for devices within their range. When they detect nearby smartphones and tablets, they send out a message which has been designed and saved in the Beacon. However, this is a one-way transfer. Beacons don’t receive messages from the nearby devices. This means that the survey invitation you send from a Beacon has to redirect the recipient from the Beacon message to the first question of the survey, because the Beacon cannot receive and save the survey responses themselves.

Every smartphone or tablet is a potential receiver of Beacon messages, but they will only work is they have:

• the Bluetooth function activated
• a mobile app installed which receives and acts upon Beacon signals.

The two biggest players in the beacon market are Apple with iBeacon and Google with Eddystone. The latter is better suited for market researchers. Messages coming from Eddystone Beacons are automatically picked up by the ever-present Google Chrome app. So you don’t have to build your own app. In contrast, Apple’s iBeacon solution requires a specially designed app to interact with the Beacon’s messages.
https://developer.apple.com/ibeacon/
https://developers.google.com/beacons/

Share your ideas

Do you have other creative ways of distributing survey invitations? Maybe there’s more we can do to help you integrate these with Nfield Online? Tell us about them by emailing info@nipo.com

Distributing online surveys via email has become the most common way to reach an audience. While emailing itself is an easy method, professional survey systems provide more sophisticated options to help you achieve your desired results. Here’s what you need to know about the two most important ones.

<1/> Open survey distribution

Open survey distribution boosts the organic reach of your surveys.

A survey is shared with anybody through one identical URL link, which is universal, public, and therefore anonymous. In the Nfield Online survey system, you copy the URL of the survey and paste it as a link directly into the email you send out.

The simplicity and uniformity of this link allows you to:

• encourage recipients to invite friends and colleagues to participate in the survey, simply by sharing the original email invitation
• distribute the survey through channels other than email. Typically via social media and websites

However, these two opportunities also mean you lose the control of the survey’s distribution. You can’t send out a reminder because you don’t know all the recipients it’s reached, or who has already completed the survey. The absence of tracking has one other major implication: a recipient can do the survey more than once.

Please note that the open distribution method is best used for surveys with a limited email list.

<2/> Closed survey distribution

Closed survey distribution gives you more control.

A survey is shared though a set of URL links only with known recipients. Each URL link has a different unique ending which corresponds to a different individual recipient invited to take the same survey. In professional market research, these unique endings are known as respondent keys.

This system of unique links enables you to monitor the survey activity of every recipient. This means you also know what is happening throughout the entire recipient pool, so you can send out appropriate reminders at every stage to those who:

• haven’t opened the survey invitation
• opened the invitation but haven’t started doing the survey
• started doing the survey, but haven’t completed it

Nfield Online prevents recipients from responding more than once to the same survey’s questions. In the case of recipients who started but did not yet complete the survey, it also enables you to send them a reminder which takes them directly to the point where they stopped. All this results in clean and more credible survey data.

Because of these specifics, closed surveys cannot be distributed through any other channel. You always need an email list that is big enough to satisfy the survey’s requirements. In many cases, the company’s customer database is perfectly sufficient. But when it isn’t, the solution for professional market researchers is to use the services of sample providers.

Respondent keys

A respondent key is a random combination of characters and/or numbers added to the end of the survey link. It’s this combination which makes each survey link unique, even though it points to the same survey. This uniqueness enables Nfield Online to identify recipients and ensure that only those who were directly invited can participate in the survey.

domain.com/survey-about-pets/respondentkey1
domain.com/survey-about-pets/respondentkey2
domain.com/survey-about-pets/respondentkey3

Sample providers
 
Sample providers administer extensive databases of individuals who at some point agreed to participate in surveys. Their databases usually contain basic sociodemographic data by which email lists are filtered. Sample providers also perform more detailed and time-consuming pre-selection of individuals according to survey requirements.
 
Thanks to unique respondent keys, once a survey project is finished, market researchers can inform their sample providers about which recipients didn’t start the survey or unsubscribed from the email list. This information is very important for a good email reputation and the privacy rights of recipients.
 
In addition to the administration of contact databases, sample providers incentivize recipients to participate in surveys. Respondents are typically redirected by Nfield Online to the sample provider’s website after completing the survey.  

Don’t miss: Email reputation

Even when you use Nfield Online to send your survey invitations to a contact list, it doesn’t necessarily mean all your invitations will arrive in their intended inboxes. As with any other marketing and sales emailing activity, the distribution of surveys through email is inspected under a set of rules known as email reputation. These rules decide whether the email is successfully delivered to inboxes, diverted into spam folders or blocked.

Email reputation directly affects the success of your online research, so make sure you find out everything you need to know in our two articles:

• Why email reputation matters to market researchers 
• How to build a good email reputation