What is a custom field, anyway?

To understand custom fields, you first need to know a little more about how our survey software handles email invitations. When you send someone an email invitation to take your survey, SurveyGizmo’s built-in contact management system keeps track of them on a global scale (meaning “across all surveys” rather than “just linked to one survey”). We keep track of a number of different standard fields – like email address, first & last names, phone number, etc. – and keep them up-to-date over time.

But let’s say someone decides they’re tired of receiving your survey invitations. In order to keep our survey invitation deliverability high, we need to make sure that when a user unsubscribes from a survey creator, they don’t accidentally get added to the list again when the survey creator uploads a new list.

So why would I want to use a custom field?

Rather than having everything be global, there are times when you want certain respondent information to stick with that particular survey. For instance, let’s say your survey uses merge codes to pass in the respondent’s current workplace (either as a part of a question, or as a hidden value). If you were to use the globally-updated standard field in the email invitation to pass along the respondent’s workplace info, that information might be overwritten in the future, should it change.

By using a custom field, you can make sure that information associated with a particular respondent remains relevant to that particular survey, rather than being globally updated any time you update your list.

After hearing from our customers that you needed more, we now offer you 10 custom fields to use in your email invitations. And we’ve also made those fields available via our survey API, so developers can extend the capability of custom fields even further.

Happy surveying!

Image courtesy of Tim Morgan – Flickr, Creative Commons (Attribution)

But as anyone who’s ever worked in the email world knows, actually getting to the inbox is always a concern. How can you make sure your email invites aren’t going to be routed into the dreaded spam folder?

While we previously outlined some survey email invitation best practices, today we want to talk about a few tools we use to help your survey invitations avoid the spam filter.

SurveyGizmo’s Spam Score Tool

To help with deliverability, SurveyGizmo offers a built-in Spam Score tool that will look for key spam indicators within your email invitation content. Every time you create a new email campaign by clicking the “Email Campaign” campaign button and entering your body copy, your Spam Score will show up on the Campaign Info screen.

We can’t stress this enough: Pay close attention to the recommendations of this tool!!

Our Spam Score tool uses the same algorithms as the most widely-used enterprise spam filtering programs, so it gives a very good indication of whether or not your survey invitations will make it to the inboxes of your respondents. If your email scores high, changes are it’s going to get filtered.

You can click on your Spam Score in the Campaign Info screen to get an idea of which parts of your email are tripping the filters, then revise your email invitation and send away.

Message Pre-Approval

The first few times you send a survey invitation via email, we require that your message be validated by a live person at SurveyGizmo. While this may seem inconvenient, we have good reason for it: it risks the deliverability of all of our customers if one customer uses our survey software to send a spam email campaign.

We validate survey invitations within two business days – but it usually take a lot less time! And if you need to send your invitation immediately, you can let us know and we’ll fast-track it.

By validating email invitations, we’re able to ensure that we offer the highest level of deliverability to our customers. But what if one of our previously-validated customers suddenly starts sending spam email? That’s where the third line of defense comes in…

Email Feedback Loops

In addition to our spam score tool and email validation process, SurveyGizmo subscribes to feedback loops from all of the major internet and email service providers. If any of their customers mark an email as spam, we hear about it and take appropriate action.

Now, this doesn’t mean we’re going to necessarily cut off a customer for getting a single spam complaint. In this day and age, a lot of people hit the ‘Spam’ button on their web-based email account rather than hitting the ‘unsubscribe’ link. But if we receive a considerable number of complaints about a certain campaign, we’re going to look further into it. And if we find someone is abusing our email system, we’ll put an end to it.

As we continue to grow, we continue to revise our spam-fighting techniques – from front-end changes like the spam score system to backend changes on the server side. By keeping one step ahead of the game, we make sure that all our users can continue to effectively send survey invitations via email. And that being said, it’s largely because of you (our customers) that we’re in the position that we’re in. Thanks for helping to keep our system spam-free!

Image courtesy of Dani Armengol Garreta – Flickr, Creative Commons (Attribution)

We here at SurveyGizmo want your survey experience to be the most productive that it can be so in addition to providing you with a remarkable online survey tool along with how-to articles and video tutorials, we are posting daily survey tips on twitter and collecting them for a blog post each week.

So without any further ado, here are the most recent tips:

1. You can use the ‘Send Email’ feature to send yourself an email every time someone completes your survey

2. Negative words used in survey questions are often missed and can lead to misinterpretation of your results

3. Use Auto-Complete for open-text questions to make responding quicker & easier for your respondents & reporting easier for you 

4. Include a ‘please specify’ text field when using ‘other’ as an answer option

5. To help improve the open rate of your survey invitation email, keep subject lines short (35 characters or less) 

If you can’t wait for the weekly update be sure to follow SurveyGizmo on twitter to get the new tip each day. You can find the compiled lists of the Survey Tip of the Day and additional online survey tips and suggestions here at the SurveyGizmo blog as well as links to helpful SurveyGizmo tutorials. If you have any survey tips you would like to share leave us a comment or send us an email, SurveyGizmo is all about feedback.

Now, making legal documentation interesting is an exercise in futility; or alternatively called “impossible”. However, I enjoy a challenge, so here is what I discovered:

I was surprised by how complicated it actually was, even though it seems like a relatively simple bill.

CAN SPAM act stands for “Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing Act of 2003.” This is administered by the Federal Trade Comission (FTC). It mostly says companies must include an unsubscribe button and honor the list of unsubscribers, no false pretenses or information in emails, and emails cannot be sent to “harvested” (read as “stolen”) email addresses.

However, it gets slightly more complicated, because while the FTC administers the law, the Federal Communications Commission enforces the law.

Buuuuuuut, depending on how the crime is discovered and whether the FCC was paying attention that day, the State also gets a say in what happens:

“State Anti-Spam Laws
The CAN-SPAM Act is intended to preempt – or replace – state anti-spam laws, but states are allowed to enforce the parts of the CAN-SPAM Act restricting non-wireless SPAM. Also state laws prohibiting fraudulent or deceptive acts and computer crimes remain in effect.”

SurveyGizmo is based out of Colorado, so I looked up specific Colorado law; which states that if a violator of CAN-SPAM is found in Colorado, even if not prosecuted at the Federal level, the state can prosecute them for Fraud.

So, what does this large legal quagmire mean for us as a company and for our customers?
It means we cannot get rid of the Unsubscribe button, because if we do, we get in buku trouble from the powers that be.

One final note before I end this. I found this when researching this act:

http://www.ftc.gov/spam/

The great irony on this page is that it allows you to “send a free e-card”. Now, I’m not positive on this, but I’m fairly sure e-cards are prime targets for lots and lots of spam filters. Oh the irony of the legal system…

Sources:
http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/pubs/business/ecommerce/bus61.shtm
http://www.fcc.gov/cgb/consumerfacts/canspam.html
http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=108_cong_public_laws&docid=f:publ187.108.pdf
http://usefularts.us/2008/05/06/new-colorado-spam-law-extends-federal-law-with-care

• Complete – They have gone through the entire survey and the response is marked as completed
• Partial – They have clicked the link, submitted at least one page of answers, but have not fully completed the survey
• Clicked – The have clicked the link, but have not submitted any answers
• Unsubscribed – They clicked the unsubscribe link in the email and cannot be contacted further
• Bounced – The email could not be delivered
• Blank – They have not clicked on the link in the email, but it was delivered
• Unsent – They have not been sent any invitation

The above statuses are key to understanding the different options for your Reminder and Thank You emails.

Reminder Emails

• Send to people who have NOT completed the survey yet
  • This will be sent to contacts with the status of: Partial, Clicked, and Blank
• Send to people who have NOT RESPONDED
  • This will be sent to contacts with the status of: Blank
• Send to people who have STARTED, BUT NOT COMPLETED a survey
  • This will be sent to contacts with the status of: Partial

Thank You Emails

• Send to everyone who COMPLETED the survey
  • This will be sent to contacts with the status of: Complete
• Send to everyone who was invited
  • This will be sent to contacts with the status of: Complete, Partial, Clicked, and Blank

If you have any further questions, please use our community forums.