Creating a text-message or SMS survey lets you gather surveys directly from customers who can communicate using their phone and text messaging. It's very straightforward to setup using SightMill: follow these simple steps and you'll have a tailored SMS campaign ready to be sent to your contact list and to your schedule.

Before you start

1. You need to either enable SMS surveys on an existing Project or create a new Project just to send out SMS surveys. If you are on a trial account and just testing, your first Project has SMS enabled, so you can move ahead to step 3.

2. To enable SMS surveys on an existing Project, open the Settings menu (click the wrench icon, far right of the Project name) and in General Settings toggle on SMS Surveys and click Save. If you need to create a new Project, follow these steps.

3. Open the Project settings menu (click on the blue button to the far right of the Project row, with a wrench icon).

4. Select the SMS Data List menu option. Upload a CSV file with your list of contacts and their mobile phone number. Make sure that the phone number is in standard international format with the country code first, eg for a UK mobile number 0774-123456 enter 44774123456 and for a USA mobile number 312-123-45678 enter 131212345678.

1. The simplest way to prepare the CSV file is use Excel. In the first row, enter the headings for at least the first three fields, each in a different column of FirstName, Surname, Phone.
   
2. In the next rows enter the data for your contacts (you don't need to enter information in all the cells, just the phone number). Now Save As a CSV file.
   
3. Note: you can add meta data for each contact record by adding extra fields (or, in Excel, extra columns). The full field list supported is:
   
1. Firstname
   
2. Lastname
   
3. Phone number
   
4. Segment
   
5. Spend
   
6. Product
   
7. Tag
   
8. Owner
   
4. An example CSV file for a contact of John Smith with a UK mobile of 0774-123456, who is in your Legal segment and buys your Gold product, with Sue as his  account manager, would be: "john","smith","44774123456","legal","","Gold","","Sue"

5. In SightMill, click Select File and select your CSV data file.

6. Import your CSV in to the Default contact list on SightMill - you can create new contact lists if you need to send surveys on different schedules.

7. Check your contact data is displayed correctly in the preview panel. Click the Upload button to import your data file into SightMill.

Set the schedule to send the surveys

8. Next, set the schedule to send out your surveys. Click on the SMS Schedule menu option to set a schedule to send out SMS surveys to your contact list. To create the new schedule, enter a name for the schedule (eg 'Daily User Group A') and select the contact list you uploaded from the drop-down list (in this case, Default).

9. You have a number of options to give you flexibility to send regular SMS surveys. Some examples include:

1. A one-off SMS survey: click on the Run Date field and enter the time and date at which to send your one-off survey. Click the Add button and this scheduled event is set.
   
2. A repeating daily SMS survey: choose 'Daily' from the Preset Frequency option and in Run At enter a time to send out the SMS surveys. Click the Add button and this repeating scheduled daily survey is saved to send at the same time every day.
   

Edit the SMS text message text

11. Click on SMS Survey Design to edit the SMS text message question text and the responses sent out to your contact list.

You have now created an SMS survey that will be sent out on your schedule and to your contact list.