Picking a Random Contest or Survey Winner in SurveyGizmo

I saw a great thread in our survey forum this morning and thought I’d share a couple ideas brought out by our users “Leibiniz” and “donna d.” Donna wanted an anonymous survey to collect data but with a free offer contest to increase the submission rate.

Obviously you need to keep the survey results anonymous, but still collect the personal info to be able to send the winner of the contest their prize. She used a tried and true method of redirecting users who want to enter the contest to separate non-anonymous survey after they complete the first anonymous survey. You can send everyone via a redirect or you could use a question to ask if they’d like to continue on to the second survey. With a little logic thrown in on the respondents who wish to be redirected will. But then she had a problem… how to randomly pick the winner.

That’s when user Leibiniz suggested using http://www.random.org/integers/ to get a random number. What a nice simple little site. You get to set the number of random numbers you want (1 or more winners) and the range of possible values (number of entrants).

Leibiniz and Donna were discussing using a query string variable, but I think a simpler way is to just export your survey data when your survey is complete. Take the number of rows in your survey spreadsheet (minus 1 for the header row) and use this as the maximum value at the Random.org site. Voila! a random user selected by row number.

If you have more questions about surveys, survey contests, or random winners feel free to post here or the forums! Happy surveying.

Online help improvements on SurveyGizmo

For the amount of help-related content we have on SurveyGizmo.com, we’ve been hearing from you now that it can be difficult to find the particular help you need to answer questions about how to make your online surveys smarter. So, as a first step to helping you find that content better, we’ve changed the internal search on SurveyGizmo.com, and are now using Google’s engine to power search within the site.

How the new search works

Right now, the search function works from the public site — if you want to search for something while you’re building a survey, open a new browser window and go to www.SurveyGizmo.com (our public site). The search box is visible on every page, and looks like this:

My search example is on piping, something that’s pretty useful if you know how to use it right. So, a little help might be in order, right?

After clicking the search button, my results come back. The cool thing about the results that Google returns is that they are broken up into tabs so you can choose what kind of help you want, as seen below. These are:

Tutorials: Help documentation that the staff of SurveyGizmo has put together that has step-by-step instructions on doing specific tasks.

Forums: Questions asked by SurveyGizmo account holders that are answered mostly by SurveyGizmo staff and sometimes by other SurveyGizmo users.

General: More helpful probably to people who are interested in finding out more about SurveyGizmo, this section will include FAQs, events, features and account pages.

We hope this change will help you better access the information that’s currently on the SurveyGizmo site while we spend more time building out other documentation improvements.

SalesForce integration documentation

FYI, this is just a quick note to let you know we’ve added a new section about SalesForce integration to our tutorials.

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.

New! Online Survey Software Training by SurveyGizmo

• All webinars are free and open to everyone
• All webinars are live and not recorded, so you can ask questions
• Space is limited in each webinar, so register early!

View the schedule and Register online here.

Google + SurveyGizmo, Part 2: Integration

Two weeks ago we wrote a post describing how to pass information into SurveyGizmo from Google Adwords. Very nifty! *This week* we are going to pass information from SurveyGizmo into Google Analytics. Even niftier, huh?

Why would we want to do this? Well, Google Analytics is a very powerful (and free) web analytics suite. With it you can track survey conversions, path analysis, sources of surveys traffic and even various versions of your forms and surveys. It’s the best of both worlds.

So let’s get the ball rolling:

Introduction to Google Integration Code

When you create a Google Analytics account you are given code snippets and instructed to place them at the bottom of each page on your website. For use in surveys, you will need to add them to the HTML Template of your Survey’s Theme.

There are two parts of the code you are asked to embed: 1) A javascript library that Google provides and 2) a little snippet of javascript code that actually triggers the analytics record.

The first part looks like this:

You should place this bit of code at the top of your survey’s HTML template (the very top).

The second part looks like:

So, where does this part go? Well, first we are going to modify this bit just a little. Why? Because we want to track individual survey pages, and make them a bit easier to understand in Google Analytics.

So, here is what we are going to do. We are going to pass an argument (a bit of data) to the urchinTracker function that will identify individual pages of the survey. We are also going to create a ‘fake’ folder for our survey. So change this second bit of code to:

You should replace ’surveyname’ for every survey you integrate. Make it distinct and understandable. The merge code [%%:Survey_Page%%] will merge in the current page number. Tip: If you want to get fancier you can merge in the value of a hidden question on the page, or even question data from previous pages this way.

Place this modified code at the very bottom of the HTML Template.

Congratulations. When you launch your survey, it will store the navigation and traffic information to your Google Analytics account!

From here you can treat your “surveys” folder like it was just another part of your website. You can run your favorite reports, build charts graphs, etc. Enjoy!

Next week we will look into test variations of your surveys and landing pages and doing analysis in Google Analytics.

Google + SurveyGizmo, Part 1: Adwords

In the past two months we have received a huge number of questions concerning Google and SurveyGizmo integration. We’ve gotten so many, in fact, that we decided to write a three-part article that shows everyone how to do just that.

This week: Part 1 - Tracking Keywords and Ad Type from Adwords
Next week: Part 2 - Using the A/B/C Splitter to Test Landing Page Variations
Finally: Part 3 - Hooking Your Survey up with Google Analytics & Conversion Funnels

This week we are going to show you how to link a landing page in SurveyGizmo to a Google Adword’s campaign and how to pass valuable information from Google into SurveyGizmo. The two pieces of information we are going to track are: 1) the keyword that triggered your Ad’s clickthrough and 2) whether your ad was shown on a search results page or on the content network.

Let’s leap right in:

Step 1 - Create your Offer Landing Page

Naturally, before we can go into Adwords and set up our campaign, we need to create a Landing Page for the offer. So, what exactly is a “landing page”?

Definition of a Landing Page

The destination web Page for people responding to an advertisement, designed specifically for that campaign and audience. The key difference between a home page and a landing page is that the former must be all things to all visitors, while the landing page should be narrowly designed to optimize conversion for a specific campaign.

The easiest way to create a landing page in SurveyGizmo is to create a new survey with our landing page template and then add your own text and images. Remember, with SurveyGizmo you can brand your landing page any way you want; our templates are just starting points.

Here are some tips for your landing page:

• Don’t ask for more information than you need. Each ‘extra’ field you ask for might cost you valuable leads.
• If you have a complicated qualification process, break it up into a few pages.
• Remember, you have all of SurveyGizmo’s features at your disposal. You can ask qualification questions or make your landing page interactive with Show/Hide logic!

Step 2 - Linking Google to your Landing Page

After you create your landing page, you need to setup your AdWord’s campaign to link to it. So, from your Adword’s control panel, copy the Survey Link that we provide you and paste it into the Adwords destination URL box.

Now here is the cool trick!

We want to track which keywords are generating conversions. To do that, we tag a little extra line after our survey url, like this:

http://survey.12342-21.sgizmo.com/?keyword={keyword}&from={ifsearch:search}{ifcontent:content}

This works becuase SurveyGizmo will automatically track data sent through the URL!

Now that we have keyword and ad type tied to every response, we can look at conversion as a whole, as in the report below. Just make sure to check off “Include URL Tokens in Summary report” for your report options:

Or, to get a more in-depth look, we can create a report that filters based on keyword and ad type.

If you are a Free user, you’ll have to export your data into Excel to see these keywords, but at the Pro level you get access to filtering so you can create reports right in SurveyGizmo.

That’s it for this week. If you have questions feel free to post them in the comments for this blog post. I’ll answer them as soon as I can.

Next week: We will show you how to perform A/B split tests on your landing page to see which version and offer text work best!

What is a Successful Survey Project? (Hint: It’s not just the data)

Very few people create surveys out of boredom or simply for fun. Those few that do (such as myself) should seek professional help (I recommend my therapist).

No, when we create surveys, it is for a specific reason – to gain knowledge about a topic or issue so that we can make important decisions, publish reports or gain new customer leads.

From that perspective the success of a survey campaign should be measured not in terms of the data collected, but what you are able to *do* with the knowledge you gain.

The most important factor in a successful survey project is having a plan (and the intent) to follow through with the data.

Here is a guide to help you create a better survey and an effective, efficient post-survey action plan:

A PARTING NOTE: after your project, mark a time in your calendar (not too distant) to begin analyzing the changes made based on your proposal and planning a follow-up project to ascertain if it had the intended effect.

Good luck with your survey projects — let us know if we can help you.

Pay your pals (us!) via PayPal

We’re happy to announce that you now have the ability to use PayPal to pay for an upgrade to your SurveyGizmo account. A few of you, especially our non-US customers, have had difficulty with credit card transactions not being accepted by our system, and we invite you to take advantage of this quick and easy alternative method for upgrading your SurveyGizmo account. Simply go to your account page and click the button “Change Plan (Using PayPal)”.

And, if you’re already paying via credit card but would like to switch to PayPal, you can do that, too. Wait until a couple of days before your billing anniversary (we don’t want to double bill you!), and downgrade yourself to Free. Then, upgrade via PayPal. Rest assured, this will not affect your data in any way.

Ed Halteman: Incentives? Wrong Motivation, Wrong Outcome

Why do people do surveys?

I don’t like the use of extrinsic incentives (bribes) for doing surveys. Wrong motivation, wrong expectations, wrong outcome!

Experiment in the Woods

I recently hired a dozen workers. I divided them at random into two groups of six. I took them out to the woods and took group A to a clearing with several fallen pine trees. I gave them tools and asked them to clean, cut and stack the wood from the fallen trees. We agreed on $15 per hour and they went to work.

I took group B to another clearing and asked them to strike the fallen trees with the blunt end of an axe repeatedly. For their “work,” I agreed to pay them $15 per hour, as well.

Twenty minutes later, group A was happily working but group B had stopped. It was no longer worth $15 per hour, so I doubled their wages and they went back to work.

Twenty minutes later group A was happily working but group B had stopped.

You get the picture. There is more to motivation than extrinsic rewards!

Surveys are about communication and relationships. In most cases the respondent has a connection with the surveyor: customer-supplier, consumer-vendor, shared interest in a topic, the desire to listen and be heard. These relationships should be leveraged to provide the motivation to do a survey. Research has shown the main reason people do surveys is because they think their input is going to affect something they care about.

You can tap into this motivation by:
- carefully designing your survey with the respondent in mind
- committing yourself to USE the information provided
- offering to share the information obtained with those participating
- communicating back to your audience on how the information they provided was used
- connecting to the respondent in any way you can, including responding to comments they make

Okay, hold on . . . before you start on the long list of examples of how well incentives have worked for you, let me emphasize that I said I don’t like them, but I do admit I have used them. We are all creatures of habit. If respondents have been trained to receive something for doing a survey (as is the case with most opt-in email lists available), the incentive becomes a requirement.

Do yourself and your respondents a favor. Provide proper motivation for doing your survey!

I’ll give you five bucks to comment on this article!! ☺

New Report Options — Updated Tutorial

One of the ways in which SurveyGizmo stands out is its reporting capabilities, with eye-catching graphs, valuable filtering tools, and numerous exporting options. (And that’s just for starters.) In addition, reports now offer new options, including the ability to remove duplicate responses by IP address and rounding percentages to whole numbers.

These options are outlined in an updated tutorial, Creating A Report: The Basics.  We invite you to take a look!

New Tutorial Now Online: Duplicate Protection

“How can I stop a respondent from submitting more than one survey?” is one of the most common questions we get. The answer is now posted in a new tutorial.

Duplicate Protection (Limiting One User to One Response) covers the options available in SurveyGizmo. Keep in mind that you’ll want to use this tool before you launch a survey, not after; it won’t go back and delete responses once they’ve been submitted.

New tutorials now online

Want to know the first mistake many companies make when designing surveys? Are you looking for a nifty trick when testing a survey? Confused about how SurveyGizmo’s new filter tool works when you’re creating a report?

We’ve added a couple new tutorials this week: The “Sweet Sixteen” Tips For Building Online Surveys and Creating a Report: The Filtering Tool. We invite you to check them out for answers to the above questions — and plenty of additional tips and tactics for creating effective online surveys.

Case Study: Generating better lead qualification and more newsletter sign-ups

A SurveyGizmo user dramatically boosts conversion: A whopping 69% of those viewing a newsletter sign-up page join, and of this group, an enormous 81% complete a pre-qualification sale form.

This simple but highly effective case study builds on our previous articles on using SurveyGizmo for Contact forms. You can go back and catch up on those if you need to: Part One and Part Two.

Jeff Nelson of Loan Office Marketing had what seemed like a straightforward request for his email service provider. He wanted to ask a few prequalification questions right after the Loan Office Marketing newsletter signup page. Those questions would help him follow up with qualified leads more effectively.

Most newsletter services let you redirect your signups to a ‘thank you’ page. So it would have been really simple to redirect the subscriber to a survey after submitting their newsletter request. But here’s the kicker: he didn’t want the user to leave his web site, and most certainly he didn’t want to ask for name and email twice. After having just collected this information, it’s a poor practice to ask for it again a second later… Oh yeah — and he wanted to have conversion rates of visitors -> sign-ups -> survey question takers preferably all in one report.

Jeff asked his email service provider, but they couldn’t help. Thankfully he, being the clever guy he is, solved these problems by managing the entire process in SurveyGizmo. Here is how he did it:

Step 1: Build the first page of the contact form

We helped Jeff create a contact form using SurveyGizmo. The first page contained only a newsletter sign-up and some sales text describing the newsletter. The web form was embedded in a page on his web site (just like Google AdWords, using javascript). The user is never aware that the content being shown is being dynamically generated.

Step 2: The follow-up questions

Jeff then created a second page to the survey/signup form that contained follow-up questions. As an incentive, he used a discount on his services to help boost conversion. Note: respondents who stop here are already subscribed to the newsletter because SurveyGizmo pushed it to his email service provider automatically. So if they continue, great, but if they don’t, he can at least continue to market to them through his newsletter.

What happened (i.e. the conversion statistics)

A whopping 69% of the people viewing the newsletter sign-up page completed the form and joined. And, of those who joined the newsletter, an enormous 81% completed the pre-qualification sale form to receive the discount on services.

This case study reiterates last week’s lesson on Contact Forms: Increase conversions with multi-step web forms. Multipart staged conversions can produce dramatically better results than longer single step forms.

Part 2. Contact Forms: Increase conversions with multi-step web forms

In Part 1 Contact Forms & Lead Generation with SurveyGizmo, we showed how you can use SurveyGizmo not just for surveys but also as a powerful web form creator. We use it right here on SurveyGizmo.com with our Contact Form. In this article we will show you how SurveyGizmo can help you increase the percentage of people who fill out your forms.

It doesn’t matter if you’re running a survey, contact form, sales lead generation, or newsletter sign-up — everyone wants to maximize conversion rates for their data collection projects. And one thing is quite clear: the more people who fill out your form, the better.

A great technique, useful for both lead-generation forms and surveys, is to use a staged approach. In other words, ask the same number of questions, but break them up onto multiple pages.

This helps reduce abandonment common with long data entry forms. This method increases overall conversion and the amount of data collected by showing the lowest number of fields on the first page and then following-up with optional, customized or more detailed questions on a second page. To make this technique work, it is vital that you keep the first page short, quick and uncomplicated.

Tip for SurveyGizmo Users: try to target the second page of questions to each lead by asking them a ‘qualification’ question on the first page. Use question hiding or page jumping to show only relevant questions on the second page. This will boost your conversion even more!

There have been tons of case studies and best practice guides that explain this trick. In fact, it seems that every month marketing research firms like MarketingSherpa and MarketingProfs come out with an article or event that reminds us of the golden rule of web based information gathering:

A concise form + fewer questions = more respondents

So why do we keep seeing “lead-gen forms from hell” on the web? It’s because very few of us can launch a campaign without layers of approval and buy-in. It seems every stakeholder in a project (sales, marketing, customer service, managers, etc) has different sets of questions they want answered. Naturally, when you let everyone add questions, the length of your contact forms, sales inquiries, and newsletter sign-ups became so long that users will avoid them.

So before you launch your project — in fact, before you begin your project – write down the one top-level goal. What is the reason you are collecting this information? Keep that goal handy; it will help you decide which questions really belong and which ones do not.

It goes without saying (but we’ll mention it anyway) that SurveyGizmo has all the tools you need to create multiple page lead generation forms. Here are some real-life tips from our customers that show how people are using our software for their lead generation and qualification needs:

• Ask qualification questions

  When running a sales inquiry/lead generation campaign, choose a few qualification and bucketing questions to help your sales team distinguish which part of the sales cycle the lead is from. The best place for really detailed qualification questions is on the second page. If just one out of five prospects fills out the additional questions, then wonderful, raise them to the top of the stack. But if you had asked those questions on the first page, you might have sacrificed those 4 other leads. In short: use the additional questions to bolster your lead generation efforts, not shoot them in the foot.

• ‘Up sell’ your newsletter sign-up form

  Obviously many businesses have the same goal of building their email lists and want to provide a very quick and easy way for readers to join their lists. Just look at the success of companies like Constant Contact and Aweber, which offer simple forms that can be embedded on a web site to process newsletter signups.
  Great as these services are, SurveyGizmo can solve a problem that these services cannot: how to ask follow-up questions or suggest other newsletters after accomplishing the first newsletter conversion.
  SurveyGizmo can be used in place of the standard newsletter signup form. Collect the name and email in the first page of the form and have SurveyGizmo send the subscription information to your email service provider (all in real time). Then, show a second SurveyGizmo page with additional questions or more newsletters to subscribe to.

• Support Forms

  If a customer has a problem, you need to know about it. You should encourage the customer to contact you through a fast, painless, and trackable system. And while you are at it… it might be wise to follow up with a few questions about the user’s computer setup or how they use your service. These answers can be valuable from both a troubleshooting prospective and a marketing one.

Tracking Conversion of Web Forms

There is another benefit to using SurveyGizmo to build your web forms: tracking. With SurveyGizmo, you can quickly see how many people are hitting your web page with the form, how many folks convert through your first step, and how many complete the entire process. It’s easy to make tweaks to your forms and compare your conversion rates over different time periods. Web site owner rarely measure conversion of web contact forms, but this is a valuable touch point for customers — so why not make the most of it?

How to Build Your Own Web Form

To get started, log into your SurveyGizmo account and click ‘Create Survey.’ Then, from the template list, choose ‘Contact Form - Extended with Lead Qualification’. This template is an excellent starting point for any multi-page form. You might want to look at ‘Newsletter Signup - Second page with optional Lead Gen’. You can preview these templates before you make a choice by clicking the preview link next to the list.

For this example, you’ll use the ‘JavaScript Embed’ method for publishing your survey. This is a really high-tech way of saying “you’ll cut and paste a line of html into your website.” If you want to play with the layout or design, choose “Look & Feel” from the menu. Otherwise, we suggest you use our standard design for your form so it doesn’t clash with your web site. The only other thing you might want to do is adjust the width or font size.

Once your form is live, you should see data begin to flow in shortly. Any visit to the page with no form filled out is considered an Abandoned. A certain percentage of these is normal. Some people are just looking, but you could experiment with your form to see if you can increase this first important conversion step.

Any user who completes the first page but not the second is seen in SurveyGizmo as a Partial. Partial means someone has completed part of your survey/form but did not reach the end. Keep in mind these are likely the people you would have lost entirely had you asked all the questions upfront.

In order to include your Partials in overall reporting, you need to convert them to a completed status. This tells SurveyGizmo you understand some questions are missing, but want them in the final report anyways. Completed is someone who has filled all pages of the form.

We hope this aids your online marketing and communication and gives you yet another valuable way to use your SurveyGizmo account.

Update: You might also like to read this case study Case Study: Generating better lead qualification and more newsletter sign-ups

You asked for it: MySpace Surveys

We couldn’t help but notice all the searches for myspace survey functionality. So here it is — surveys you can embed in MySpace (or other difficult CMS systems)!

Want to see it in action? Here is an example of our contact form embedded into a MySpace profile: http://www.myspace.com/SurveyGizmo. You can create contact forms, surveys, newsletter signups, fun quizzes — anything. We’d love to know what you do with this feature, so get a survey up and post your results to this blog!

Instructions: To use this feature, design a survey in SurveyGizmo (some myspace design tips are listed below). Then, just like normal, click on the “Launch” link (or promote if your survey is already launched). A new option has been added to the bottom of this screen called “Option 3 - MySpace, yada yada yada”. This will give you the css and html to paste into your MySpace profile.

Some helpful tips:

• Don’t use complicated survey questions on the first page — good news, subsequent pages are totally fair game! This is because anything powered (or enhanced) by javascript won’t work on myspace — go figure.
• Here are the ‘Safe’ questions: Instructions, Images, Radio buttons, Checkboxes, Text fields, Essays, File upload forms, Contact questions and tables of the aforementioned.
• If you want, redirect them back to your blog or profile when they are done. You can do this by placing a URL redirect action on the thank you page.
• Lastly, this survey-publishing option doesn’t track abandons the way our other surveys do (a quirk of bypassing our initial page). So, don’t expect that data for myspace surveys.

Taking this feature to the next step: Before you ask, yes, it has occured to us that this feature might lend itself to embedding surveys in HTML emails, too. We suggest you don’t jump the gun on *that one* unless you can afford some time for testing. In the next few weeks we will do our own testing of email-embedded surveys and let everyone know how it turns out.

Good luck with your surveys!

Part 1. Contact Forms & Lead Generation with SurveyGizmo

SurveyGizmo - not just for surveys anymore.

This is the first of two how-to articles on using SurveyGizmo to create Contact Forms, Lead Gen Forms, Support Requests, Newsletter Signups, or any kind of custom form. SurveyGizmo makes a great all-purpose web form tool for embedding data-collection forms on your website. We use the term “survey” frequently around here (duh!) but take it to mean any kind of data collection. The word “survey’ here can easily stand in for web form, and vice versa.

No need to get the IT department involved or set up custom processing code. Just add your questions and drop a small snippet of code on your website - done! Plus, you get some special features that you can’t get from a regular web form.

• Track complete vs. abandon stats
• Send email auto-responders (as with many forms), but also have a downloadable text file with contact info.
• Send your data to more than one place - i.e. accept newsletter subscriptions as part of a contact form and post the subscription back to your Email Service Provider’s API.

This week we have several new, related updates

• New Tutorial: Creating Contact, Lead Generation, Newsletter, and Support Forms
• New Question Templates: 4 new templates for quick form setup
  1. Contact Form - Simple
  2. Contact Form - Extended
  3. Support Form
  4. Newsletter Signup - Extended
• New Look & Feel Template: a Contact Form/Embedded design template with clean simplicity for embedding surveys into your website smoothly

You can see examples in use on our own SurveyGizmo contact form and Widgix contact form. We have reprinted the tutorial here for convenience, but you can find it and others on the SurveyGizmo Tutorial pages.

Creating a Single Step Contact Form

A single-step contact form means that users fill out a single page, and then they see a thank you after submitting.

Step 1: Create a new survey using one of our contact form templates

Create a new survey and choose one of the contact form templates that seems closest to your need.

• Contact Form - Simple
• Contact Form - Extended
• Support Form
• Newsletter Signup - Extended

You can and should edit the questions and layout, so just pick something similar. Read more about the basics of creating a new survey.

The templates all have examples of forms and email auto-responders.

Step 2: Edit the questions

Modify the questions to suit your needs. Clicking the notepad icon will allow you to modify many options. You can also add or reorder questions.

Step 3: Handling the submitted data

You have to decide what happens after the user clicks the submit button. Every data form or survey in SurveyGizmo always has at least two pages. The second page acts as a Thank You page, but it can also hold actions to act on the data collected. Use these actions to send email or push data.

Email auto-responders

All of the Contact forms contain examples of email auto-responders. You can modify these or add additional ones. You can read more about setting up Email Auto-responders here.

Pushing information out of SurveyGizmo

SurveyGizmo Pro and Enterprise accounts have access to an Action type called HTTP Post. This is used to push data to outside services like Email lists, newsletter signups, customer databases, etc. You can transmit information to other outside services such as SalesForce.com, Constant Contact, Campaign Monitor, etc.

Step 4: Modify your look and feel

When you are finished with your questions, it’s time to move on to modify your look and feel. If you used one of our Contact Form Templates, it already comes with a look and feel template that is well-suited to being embedded on a website.

You may, however, want to tweak the width of the form, the font size or font family, text color, the background color, or Submit Button text. You can change all those things on the Look & Feel tab. You can also select different templates or modify the HTML or CSS if desired.

You can click “Preview” to view the included Look & Feel or modifications. For you designers out there - it is also possible to modify the look of a survey by adding CSS to your site that acts on the survey form’s ID and Class names.

Step 5: Embed the form on your site

When you are happy with your preview, it’s time to “Launch” (publish) the Contact Form. Clicking Launch will take you to the Publishing tab. You’ll most likely want the Embed Option 2 - the Javascript Option. You can cut and paste this small snippet of Javascript code and place it on the page in your website where you want the form.

Usually you’ll create a blank Contact Us page on your own site using your own template/design. When the page is viewed, the form will fill in dynamically and be wrapped in your site’s design.

A Special note to WordPress or other CMS users like Drupal, etc.

You can create a page or a post and paste in the Javascript snippet. You need to make sure you paste the Javascript code into the HTML, so if you are using the Rich Text Editor click on the HTML button and paste the code in there. If you paste it in the Rich Text Editor directly it won’t work, because the code will be interpreted as copy text.

You’re done - go visit the page and test your form!

Email auto-responders will run immediately (unless you set a time delay). Stats will begin to show up in 10 - 20 minutes. It’s useful to think of the “Abandoned” data as “views” on your form where someone didn’t fill it in. This is natural on most web sites, but if you feel more people should be filling out the form, you might make changes and compare the data over time to achieve a more useful form.

If you create some forms, feel free to post links here to show them off.

Read Part 2 . Contact Forms: Increase conversions with multi-step web forms

Merge Helper for Survey Auto-responders and Survey Starter Templates

We have added new tools and tutorials to make it easier to build better email auto-responders for your surveys. With the Merge Helper and Email Merge Helper, you can incorporate values from your survey automatically into a survey triggered email auto-responder.

What can you use the Email Auto-responders for?

• Notifying you of each survey taken and providing you a copy of the results
• Sending a name-customized confirmation to survey takers to thank them
• Providing a copy of answers back to respondents - good for tests or quizzes
• Confirming the opt-in to someone joining your newsletter list or submitting a customer service contact form
• Get fancy - Use our landing page template for a “Top Ten Tips on _______.” Then, send then one tip a day, automatically scheduled, over the next ten days.

Use the new Merge Helper to grab any value from a survey and insert it into your survey. You can read more about Auto-responders and the Merge Helper in this tutorial.

Survey Templates

Last week we released new survey templates, but this is the first chance we have had to blog about it. When creating a survey, now you can choose from blank, one of our templates, or a copy of one of your own surveys. Right now there are just three templates, but we’ll be bringing on more. We also encourage user-submitted templates as well!

Keep in mind the survey templates are sets of sample questions. They can be paired with any look & feel template. They can also easily be edited or adapted as you need. Remove, add or edit questions as desired.

You can also preview a template before choosing it.

You can check these survey templates out here

• Basic Questions template - Start here if you’re new to SurveyGizmo
• Customer Service Satisfaction Survey
• Landing Page Template