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 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

Invitation and Reminder emails can be sent manually, automatically skipping over any users who have already completed the survey. Enterprise level customers have the ability to schedule the delivery date and time (in Eastern Time) for the Invitation or the Reminder to be delivered!

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.

Integration 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. This feature was not fully implemented and was removed from the API until further updates.

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

How many times have you wanted to quickly send out an invitation for a survey, then follow up with anyone who hasn’t finished it? How about emailing those who complete your survey to say ‘thank you’ or share final results with them?

Good news — we have just released a survey email invitation tool that lets anyone with a personal, professional or enterprise account do all of that!

With the Email Invites tool you can:

1. Upload email addresses. You can upload from Excel, text files or you can cut and paste into our text-entry.
2. Send an email. Seems basic, but we give you some extra oomph to make sending emails more exciting. You can that automatically merge in name, company, email, and of course the unique survey link.
3. Track Individuals – Survey invitations let you track survey responses back to the original contact — even if your survey doesn’t ask for contact information.
4. Track click-through’s, visits, abandoned surveys, and completed surveys.
5. Send followup emails as a reminder to complete the survey, a thank you, or to share the results with takers.

You can create as many email invites as you like for a survey (each invite is limited to 1000 contacts in one send). Sending to different groups lets you track the results separately.

Need to boost your result count? Send as many ‘followup’ emails for an invitation as you need to. Let’s face it, your first invitation might have arrived at a bad time, or been deleted accidentally with junk mail. Followups give your contacts another chance to complete thier survey.

All responses are tracked in real time, so you can see who is and isn’t completing their surveys.

One other little thing, all the emails we send are CAN-SPAM compliant and automatically attach your company details and an unsubscribe link to the bottom of each email. We take our anti-spam policy seriously at SurveyGizmo. We expect you do as well, after all, you’re the Good Guys not the spammers — right?

Invites are limited to 1,000 emails. If you need to do more than this call customer service about integrating SurveyGizmo with your own SMTP mail server or even your Email Service Provider.

The Email Invite tool isn’t limited to surveys either.

Here are some other ideas you can do with SurveyGizmo & the invite tool:

• Have your customers/members update their contact info (then let SurveyGizmo post it back to your own database.)
• Send an exam to your students and keep track of who has completed it.
• Have people RSVP for an Event, sign-up for a new product, or review a document.
• Have employees agree to a new policy, learn about new company info, or test on some subject of accountability

The invite tool is located between the “Publishing” and “Reporting” tabs on every survey! Enjoy!

So have at it! And, as always, please share your feedback with us.