If you've run a text-to-web survey recently, you already know the problem. You send a hundred thousand texts. Most people never tap the link. And you're paying for every unresponded message regardless.
The click is the bottleneck. So we removed it.
Surveys That Live in the Text Thread
MX8 Labs now supports interactive SMS surveys powered by Twilio. Instead of sending a link and hoping for a tap, the survey runs as a back-and-forth text conversation — right in the messaging app your respondents already have open.
Choice-based questions are automatically coded on the fly. Respondents answer naturally, and the platform handles the rest. There's no app to download, no browser to open, and no friction between the invitation and the first question.
The Economics of Fewer Ignored Texts
The intuition might be that SMS surveys cost more — after all, each question is its own message. But the dominant cost in any text-based outreach isn't the survey itself. It's the unresponded texts: the thousands of invitations you send to people who never engage.
When the survey lives in the text thread, the barrier to response drops. Even a modest improvement in response rates means fewer wasted messages per complete — and that can materially improve the cost per interview across the whole campaign.
How It Works
Setting up an SMS survey on MX8 is straightforward. You create a Twilio Text respondent source, configure your Twilio credentials, upload a contact file with phone numbers in E.164 format, and configure the webhook. The platform handles rate limiting, stop-message compliance, and status management — pause, restart, or complete fielding as needed.
You can send a safe test to a single number before going live, and test links now support phone number entry so your team can preview the full experience.
For the full setup guide, visit our documentation on setting up interactive Twilio text surveys.
Who This Is For
SMS surveys are a strong fit when you're working with populations that have low digital engagement, when you need higher response rates from a known contact list, or when the cost of unresponded text-to-web invitations is eating into your fieldwork budget. They're available now on MX8 Labs for teams using first-party contact lists with Twilio.