Growing opportunities for mobile surveys

The market conditions are increasingly attractive for undertaking surveys by mobile phones. Internet-capable handsets and flat rate data tariffs have generated more widespread use of mobile internet services with nearly 30% of UK consumers accessing mobile internet on their handsets in the last 3 months.

As the market has evolved from basic SMS surveys through to much more elaborate mobile internet based surveys, GfK Technology has been exploring ways in which best use can be made of this data collection technique.

GfK Technology has a long history of researching innovative data collection methods, including conducting interviews by mobile phone. Previous work in this area has included understanding the relationship between brands and consumers using SMS based advertising and SMS based data collection (papers on these are available on request).

The incidence of mobile phones that are capable of handling a greater range of applications has increased substantially over the last couple of years, meaning that we are now in a position where we can conduct high quality online surveys by mobile phone. This is a real step change to using SMS which, although useful for niche applications, we considered to be of limited value due to a range of issues including questionnaire length and fairly poor user experience.

GfK Technology have partnered with M-Send, a specialist mobile applications company that has developed an excellent platform for mobile surveys and undertook a pilot study, in order to explore the new platform and demonstrate its capabilities to our clients.

Why mobile based surveys?

We consider that mobile based surveys are useful for a number of applications including:

• Where the mobile number is the only contact information – this can be helpful for ‘event-based’ surveys where mobile phone owners have called a service centre for example
• When we want time sensitive information – so this could, for example, be used for media research to obtain feedback immediately after a TV programme
• When we want to obtain the views of mobile consumers – young, highly mobile consumers who can be hard to obtain via other research medium

The jury is currently out on the way in which consumers will choose to access the Internet in the future, but there is little doubt that there is a trend towards access via mobile devices and, as such, we need to be mindful that we reflect this in on-line surveys generally. Indeed, a recent study by GfK Technology found that about 30% of consumers had accessed the Internet using their mobile phone in the last 3 months.

Our approach

To demonstrate the value of mobile based surveys we decided to explore the usage and attitudes towards mobile music among consumers. The appeal of this is that we wanted to undertake time critical research (establish what they had been doing in the last two hours) and understand the context of their usage which we felt was more easily achieved by using the very same medium (potentially whilst they are still in that environment).

We recruited over 800 mobile music users from our online panel in the UK to participate in a mobile survey on the topic. All these consumers were then sent an SMS asking them to complete the survey, with a link to the survey embedded in the text.

The outcome

Of the 838 SMS sent, we achieved 237 interviews, a 28% response rate. Whilst this is better than some other research approaches, we felt it could be improved by:

• Improving incentives – for pragmatic reasons we offered a prize draw rather than providing ‘points’ individually, which is the typical incentive offered on a panel
• Reduce the lag between recruitment and the mobile survey – we consider that the more quickly the survey is undertaken from the initial recruitment, the better the response rate, as this helps respondents make the link when they see the SMS

The surveys were sent out at three different time points during the day (9.30am, 12.30pm and 7.30pm), in order to assess whether response rate was affected by time of day. There was a slight increase in response rates for the 12.30pm survey, but, interestingly, we found significant variations in usage of mobile music by time of day, with peaks in usage at the beginning and end of the day (associated with going to and from work / study etc). This indicates the value of a time-slicing approach, getting closer to the users’ actual experience at that specific moment.

A large proportion of the consumers gave a very fast response to the SMS with 41 per cent responding within an hour and 24 per cent even responding within 5 minutes (the chart below shows the speed of response). Considering we had not incentivised speed of response, or even asked for consumers to respond quickly, we consider this to be a particularly valuable finding.

The quality of response received was also typically very good, with consumers able to give a lot of details concerning the environment in which they were listening to music.

Our conclusions

This project demonstrates that mobile surveys can be very effective and have an important role to play for data collection. There are, however, some challenges for mobile surveys:

• The interview length is limited to a relatively small number of questions, particularly for SMS, which means they are likely to supplement, rather than replace, other forms of data collection
• Online based mobile surveys are undoubtedly better in terms of the user experience, interview length, opportunity to show stimulus materials etc but the user’s ability to complete these depends on the capability / set-up of their individual handset
• Whilst SMS surveys can be reverse-billed (so the respondent incurs no charges), this is not possible with mobile internet surveys; whilst the costs are very low, there will undoubtedly be some concerns amongst potential respondents, and the incentives offered will have to reflect this

Whilst more needs to be done to understand even more about the way in which these data collection techniques can best be deployed, we consider the immediate opportunities will focus around:

• researching mobile applications: consumers who use services on their handsets are typically comfortable about using this as the research medium
• researching within mobile based panels: recruiting consumers specifically for mobile based panels where a fast response is required will lift response rates and provide access to time sensitive data
• advertising related research: the nature of this medium means we can show stimulus materials, so we can, for example, ask consumers if they have seen specific advertising at that point in time