ExactTarget Integration Tutorial

Available to SurveyGizmo, Enterprise, and Dedicated Accounts

IMPORTANT: Make sure API access is enabled in your ExactTarget account first. If you don't know if it's enabled, it probably isn't. Call ExactTarget at 866-558-9823 and ask the fine folks there to please enable it.

From the Account-->Plugins, you just need to supply SurveyGizmo with an ExactTarget username and password to access your account. Here's a screen shot:

Once you add that username/password, a new actions will appear for use in your surveys when you click Add action in the survey editor. Once you select the ExactTarget action's radio button, there will be two action modes available:

The Pull action let you pull contacts out of ExactTarget and populate survey questions from attributes in your ExactTarget account. The Push action lets you add and/or update subscribers to any list (including unsub) and set custom attributes.

Example 1: Format an ExactTarget email to pass information to SurveyGizmo

In order to tell SurveyGizmo how to get information from ExactTarget, you need to pass the ExactTarget subscriber's email address. Specifically, we need to create a link to the SurveyGizmo survey that includes a URL parameter, then merge in the personalization code from ExactTarget.

The screen shot below comes from the ExactTarget email editor. Notice the yellow highlight? That's where we've

1. created a URL parameter called etemail and
2. specified that the ExactTarget Email Address should be merged in using the merge code %%emailaddr%%

When the recipient clicks on this url, s/he is essentially telling SurveyGizmo "I received this message from ExactTarget and my email address is _________." You can use any parameter name, but they must match in both ExactTarget and SurveyGizmo, which we'll show you next).

Example 2: Lookup information in your ExactTarget email list

Next, now that we've passed the email address via a link, we can turn to SurveyGizmo's ExactTarget Pull action to fill in survey data from the ExactTarget database. We reached this screen by clicking Add Action at the top of survey editor, selecting the ExactTarget action, selecting the ExactTarget Pull Action Mode, then naming it "ExactTarget subscriber lookup" and clicking the "Add Action" button at the bottom.

As you can see, it's very simple to pull data from ExactTarget and map it to questions in your survey. You simply select the URL Variable option from the dropdown menu under Get ExactTarget Subscriber (by Email) (3), input the URL parameter that contains the ExactTarget Email Address, which we specified in the example above. We named the parameter etemail. You can use any parameter name, but they must match in both ExactTarget and SurveyGizmo.

NOTE: Make sure you put the lookup before any survey questions that will use the data. Otherwise the ExactTarget data will not be available when rendering the questions.

Example 3: Push information from SurveyGizmo to ExactTarget

This example shows how to push information into ExactTarget. As above, we got here by clicking Add Action in the survey editor, but instead use the ExactTarget Push Action Mode.

NOTE: Because a form submission is necessary to initiate the call to ExactTarget's API, ExactTarget Triggers only work on the second page or later.

Since our goal here is to add a survey responder to an ExactTarget list, we simply need to specify which question captures the email address (3), then specify which list (4). You can also trigger an email within ExactTarget-->Triggered Sends using this External Key option (5). To learn more about the ExactTarget Triggered Sends, please visit ExactTarget Triggered Email

Optionally, you can populate that subscriber's profile with other data collected in the survey by matching questions in SurveyGizmo to ExactTarget Attributes:

For a webinar on ExactTarget, please visit:  http://surveygizmo.zendesk.com/entries/454912-exacttarget

Have questions? Want to comment on this? Join the discussion on our SurveyGizmo Support site.