Four rules for attracting 26,000 users in Kenya in less than 4 months
Lessons learned growing an audience in a mobile-first market
Since our inception, mSurvey has made over 22 million connections with more than 8.7 million unique consumers in our quest to bring business in emerging markets closer to their consumers. A large part of our consumer understanding comes from the mSurvey audience, a group of real Kenyans who have opted in to answer mobile survey questions at random. This fall we embarked on an ambitious plan to get to know our audience better, starting with growing its membership.
Historically, we attracted these audience members entirely in-person. Kenneth Owade, our member recruitment guru, physically travelled to every region in Kenya and hired enumerators to spread the good word about mSurvey and complete a mobile recruitment survey. This way we recruited ~10,000 audience members a year for four years to make up our very reliable audience that boasts a consistent 65% response rate. While in-person recruitment helped to build trust, we were only attracting an estimated 30 new members a day while also providing extensive logistical support. We thought we could do better.
To this end, my colleague Samuel Kamande and I have been on a quest to attract more audience members without compromising the quality and high response rate of our audience. To date we’ve used different methods to recruit over 26,000 new audience members. What follows are the three biggest lessons we’ve learned growing a mobile survey audience in Kenya.
- Social media could take you the rest of your life
We knew we would need to focus on digital recruitment as opposed to recruiting in-person in order to reach scale. We thought this would be easily solved through social media: create a catchy ad asking Kenyans to opt-in to our audience, share it across platforms and watch the numbers roll in. Over the span of two weeks, our LinkedIn advertisement brought us 26 recruits. At this rate of roughly 1.8 recruits per day, it would take us 34,000 days or 93 years to reach our goal of 100,000 recruits. This is not to say social media is not a good way of attracting consumers in Kenya — our ad received 80,300 impressions and of those 1,140 clicked through to the ad. Rather, social media is a bad way of generating SMS survey participants: only 2% of those who clicked on the ad took the additional step to enter the join code from the ad as an SMS into their mobile phone and launch the recruitment survey.
2. Motivate existing members to refer friends through mobile
By and large, our most successful approach has been referrals. It should come as no surprise that a friend or family member telling you to enter a random code into your phone is more successful than this same request coming from a stranger (or social media ad). We decided to ask for referrals from our existing audience members who appear engaged and happy with our service and are likely to have other friends who, like them, are willing to answer mobile questions at random. Over the course of 6 weeks we managed to push referral requests to roughly 16,000 of our existing audience members, enabling our audience to grow by more than 26,000 members…a 160% return. We see the highest referrals on push days, with a steady decline throughout the week, revealing that referral requests work best in real-time.
3. Validate quality along with quantity
Throughout this process, we have been very cognizant of the quality of our recruitment surveys; we may have the numbers but without usable content, those numbers are worthless. To correct for this, we developed two checks to help us validate our recruitment strategy:
a.) Are people completing the recruitment survey? The recruitment survey completion rate (number of those who start the survey/ number who finish the survey) is an indicator of the quality of the recruitment survey; a low completion rate would suggest participants may have been interested enough to start the survey but over the course of questioning no longer felt it was worth their time. To date, we have a 90% completion rate among new recruits meaning 90% of those who start the recruitment survey follow through to the end.
b.) Are people entering real responses in the recruitment survey? Just completing a survey doesn’t mean the data is of high quality. We include a check within our recruitment surveys — those who answer with a nonsensical response to this are assumed to be either gaming the system or not providing honest feedback. To date, 92% of recruits who completed the enrollment survey entered a ‘sensical’ entry for their final response.
In summary, digitally attracting users in mobile-first markets is better done through direct referrals compared to social media advertisements. Either way, include checks to ensure an increase quantity is not at the expense of quality.
About mSurvey
mSurvey is an Integrated Customer Experience company that connects businesses with their consumers, in real-time, using mobile messaging technology.
We have enabled Africa’s leading brands to improve their customer experience and increase operational efficiency with strategic information on their customer brand journey and eventually grow their revenue by providing them access to real-time customer feedback.
