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)