Email Invitations 2.0

We are happy to announce the successful launch of SurveyGizmo’s New Email Invitation & Reminder Tool!

In 2007 we saw a huge interest in our old email invitation tool. Many marketers, researchers, educators and agencies all rely on email invitations as their primary technique for driving survey responses.

Well, they should love our new tool. It’s now easier to get complete surveys then ever before — and more reliable too!

Here’s a quick summary of this feature and instructions to get you started:

Click a thumbnail for a larger image:

It’s Easy to Understand & Use

The most important thing we have done is to streamline the invitation screens to make creating, monitoring and managing the invitation process easier.

The process of creating an invitation is simple. Click on the ‘Create Invite’ button and then Edit your invitation’s message. One other improvement here is the ability to create both text and html email content. HTML content allows you to brand your email invitations to look just like your other email communications. Having text content gives SurveyGizmo the ability to automatically fallback to the text version when it suspects some of your email recipients don’t support HTML emails.

Scheduling & Auto-Reminders

There have been a lot of marketing studies about the best times to send emails depending on your audience. Well, with our new email invite tool you can pre-schedule an invitation to be sent — and also define a series of auto-reminders to be sent out x-days after a person receives the first invite!

“Does adding contacts after the first send mess up the auto responders?”

No! SurveyGizmo treats each person as an individual subscriber — so they’ll get auto-reminders x-days out from the time they first got their personal invitation. Also, SurveyGizmo will automatically stops sending reminders after the person completes their survey.

Content Testing & Spam Scores

There is nothing quite like sending out an email invitation only to realize a misspelling or poorly worded phrase has triggered every spam filter on the planet.

Now SurveyGizmo tests your content during the test phase and gives you your SPAM Score and outlines any other problems you might have.

Optimized Deliverability

Our new email software automatically manages a number of deliverability issues to help get your message through. SurveyGizmo now reports on bounces, unsubscribes and throttles delivery to domains such as yahoo, gmail, hotmail, aol, etc.

Unsubscribe Handling

This was the *most* asked for feature in 2007. SurveyGizmo automatically manages unsubscribe requests and will honor requests by your subscribers to stop getting email invitations.

Furthermore, because we *are* a survey company, you can provide an unsubscribe survey on the ‘unsub’ page and get feedback as to why they left your list.

Single Sends

Need to send an email invite to one person at a time? Odd as that may seem — it’s a common real-world need. Sometimes you forget to send an invite to someone until after you main blast has gone.

Now it’s as easy adding a single contact and pressing ’send’. They will get all the personalized reminders and be included in the invite’s tracking and stats.

Intergation via API

That’s right, our new SOAP API is completely integrated with our invitation system. You can manage contacts, lists, invites, messages, trigger sends, check spam scores… everything our application does natively. The API is free for all account levels, but you do need to contact support to gain access to these features.

Suggestions & Comments?

We hope you all make good use of our email invitation tool and enjoy it. If you have any suggestions and comments please make them below or email our team at support@sgizmo.com. Your continued feedback and support is what drives our improvements to SurveyGizmo!

Cheers,

- The SurveyGizmo Team

SXSW Blogroll

Like last year and the year before that, I’m offering up the unofficial SXSW blogroll.

If you have a blog and want in on the fun, sign up for it here (scroll down to where it says “Join The SXSW Blogroll”).

Displaying the SXSW blogroll on your site

In the meantime, you can add the blogroll to your blog’s template right away. There are two versions, Javascript and PHP. Just pick which version you want, copy the code in the box below and paste it into your template:

(If you signed up, we also emailed you a copy of this.)

Javascript

<script src=”http://www.surveygizmo.com/sxsw-blogroll.php?js=1″></script>

PHP

<ul><?include('http://www.surveygizmo.com/sxsw-blogroll.php');?></ul>

ExactTarget Documentation

Lately we’ve been getting a lot of interest in our ExactTarget module, which is basically just an ExactTarget-specific implementation of our API.

So much interest, in fact, that we thought perhaps we should, you know, document how it works. So, without further ado, here’s our ExactTarget Integration Tutorial.