Email Invitations – Building an Email Campaign

Good morning, everybody. My name is Mario Lurig. I’m the Technical Training Manager here at SurveyGizmo and this is the SurveyGizmo webinar Email Invitations: Building an Email Campaign.

In the bottom right of the screen that I have up, we have our Twitter account at SurveyGizmo. If you do have any thoughts and you want to share them out on Twitter, please use @SurveyGizmo somewhere in your tweet so our team can go ahead and see those and if it happens to be some comment they can address, they’d be happy to do it. We love getting feedback on our webinars.

Let me give you a little bit of background about myself before we talk about the goals here. I’ve been with SurveyGizmo for a little over two years, starting in Customer Support, became a Sales Engineer and now I’m part of Training. My translation of my current job title is I help everybody become survey rock stars, so hopefully, by the end of this, everyone will be a rock star. A matter of fact, I’m sure of it - at least in regards to survey email invitations.

That being said, let’s talk about today’s webinar. Here are the goals and what we’re going to be covering. We’re going to talk about creating an email campaign and what that entails. We’re going to talk about editing email content and the different options; adding contacts and options that are related to those contacts; and then using reminder emails and thank you emails.

We will also have a general Q&A. If you all look on your control panel, go to webinar control panel, there’s a question section. At any point in time, if a question strikes you, feel free to enter it in there. We’ll be taking all the questions through that panel and I’ll be answering as many as possible with the time allotted near the end of the webinar before we wrap up.

Creating an Email Campaign

All right, we’re going to talk about creating an email campaign. Now, I’ve created a quick survey within SurveyGizmo here with a few generic questions and I’m going to head over to the Publish tab. The Publish tab is where you control all outgoing connections to the survey. Whether there’s going to be a web link posting it to Twitter, putting through an iPhone, pushing it to MailChimp or, in our case, sending out an email campaign.

Once your survey’s been launched, you’ll be able to see the following icons. At the bottom right here is the Email Campaign icon. Now, this has a few different campaigns, so I’m going to be hopping between some that I’ve already created and a new one that we’re going to create. So, let’s see what it looks like when you first create an email campaign.

Well, what is an email campaign compared to the other links? An email campaign is meant for you to send out to particular individuals where you provide the email address, at the very least, an email that invites them to take the survey. It also offers tracking of those individuals and those contacts, so you can see what status they’re in. Have they completed the responses? Have they received the email, but they haven’t actually completed it yet? You can do other things with it related to those. So that’s how an email campaign compares.

When we’ve created a new email campaign, we’re presented with a main campaign screen. It’s separated into multiple steps that kind of drive you through it. We’ll be following these steps along. The first step, of course, is campaign info, then we’re going to talk about writing your emails, adding email recipients or contacts, testing it and sending it out and then monitoring your progress.

So, first and foremost, you can, of course, name your campaign anything you like. You can have multiple email campaigns for a single survey. Maybe you have an email campaign for one subset of individuals that you want to track separately from a different group that you’re sending it out to. So, you’re not required to put everything into a single campaign. So, I’m going to go ahead and call this one “Webinar.”

Now, if I just wanted to stop there, I could hit Save, it’ll return you back to the main publishing window. You’re going to see the webinar here as having an existing link in the campaign that we’ve created labeled Webinar. It’s going to be listed here as part of your Save Links. So you can always go back and access it by clicking either the link for the title or on the Edit icon, which is the pencil.

Before we get into the other steps, let’s talk about the tabs on the left. We’re in the main Campaign tab. The next one down is called Link Settings. Link Settings offers a few different options that are available for our Enterprise customers that are going to allow you to change how the link looks in your email, to offer some branding options. So, there’s two top items here. One is the Link Protocol. You can change it from a normal link to a secure HTTPS link, if you’d like - and this is, once again, an Enterprise feature - and the Sub-Type can also be changed. You can set it to Default, which has an sgizmo.com URL, or if you happen to have a private domain (something like surveys.acme.com), you can switch it to that. And, of course, we have surveys@sgizmo.com. But in your case, you’d be surveys.YourCompanysURL.com. And so it has that branding in the link for you.

Now, the other items, the Advanced Link Controls here are available, of course, to any account has email campaign options (so any of our paid accounts that offer email campaigns). You can go ahead and set the link to work, start and stop and be available for only a certain amount of time.

You can also fix it to a particular language. If you have multiple translations of your survey, maybe you have a Spanish translation, you want to run this campaign to your audience that you know are all Spanish speakers, all the individuals that are in Spain. So you upload that list to this campaign and you force the link that they receive to always go to the Spanish one. In this case, I’ve chosen English. So, you can force the language, which is automatically selected for that group. And that’s going to be for this particular email campaign. If you then had a group going to France, then maybe you’d have a separate email campaign that you set the language and force it to send them to the French translation.

The last item is Save and Continue. Now, there’s two types of Save and Continue within SurveyGizmo. There’s the one within the email campaigns and there’s the one within the survey itself. Within the survey itself, you can turn on Save and Continue and allow your respondents to, on any page but the first one, click a link at the top of the screen that will allow them to put in their email address and be sent to a custom link to return and come back later (a way to get back to their response).

Now, you can have that in your survey if you’d like, but if you’re sending out an email campaign, you can actually set the link that they receive in the email campaign to be a Save and Continue link. How does this work?

Well, every link that is received by a contact is unique, so each person who receives an email is going to get a very unique link just to them. That’s how we’re able to track what status they’re in and know where they’re at if they’ve completed the survey or not.

Now, if you by default, the status of Save and Continue is off. That means that when they click that link that they received (the unique link that’s sent to them), they’re going to go ahead and start a new response to the survey. If they get halfway through - say it’s a ten-page survey and they get through page 5 and they decide I don’t want to do this anymore and they just close the window - they go back to their email the next day and they click that link again, they’ll actually be starting a brand new response because the default is off. There’s no Save and Continue. The benefit here is if they’d like, they can forward that email to other individuals and when the other individuals click that link, they will go ahead and also receive a brand new response. So it’s great for sharing surveys with friends and colleagues.

However, if you switch Save and Continue to “On,” we also give you that warning to tell your respondents NOT to forward the link, because when Save and Continue is on and you click that link the first time, you’re brought to a brand new response. When you click that link again, you’re brought back to your original response, back where you left off. So if you stopped on page 5, you’re brought back to page number 5 and you’re continuing your response. So that means that one email equals one response. It’s our strongest form of duplicate protection.

So, this is optional. And for those of you who have used SurveyGizmo 2.0 previously, the default in version 2.0 was that it was saving to the new by default, that is different here in SurveyGizmo 3.0. In our current version of the tool, Save and Continue is off by default.

Let’s recap here. So, the Link Settings tab allows Enterprise customers to brand the invitation URL with their private domain. You can make use of the Language setting to force the email campaign to pass to a particular language, so it’s great for passing to a different list of clients that are international. And, finally, Save and Continue is not enabled by default.

Editing Email Content

All right, so let’s talk about actually writing your emails. So, in the second portion here, we have Step 2: Write Your Emails. Now, here’s where you set up both the invitation message itself, as well as Reminders and Thank Yous. And we’ll talk about Reminders and Thank Yous here shortly.

First, let’s talk about the main invitation. This top icon here is the main invitation. If you’d like, you can edit this message by clicking on the Edit pencil icon or just clicking right in on the bar. There’s also a little magnifying glass. If you click that, it’ll go ahead and give you a preview. Now, this isn’t an exact preview, but it will let you know roughly what your invitation would like to somebody who’s receiving other than the text version or the HTML version. So, you can preview it. For now, we’re going to go and click in and edit it.

Now, when we create a brand new survey email invitation message, we assumed some default text - you’re welcome to change anything you like in here. The From Name is the name that’s going to be displayed when somebody receives the email. It’s going to say “From:” and a particular name. Now, most email clients receive an email and they display the From Name, rather than the From Email Address. So this is what they’re going to see.

You can change the Subject and you can also set the Reply to email. Now, when the email’s delivered, if they say, “You know what, I see this invitation, but I have a question,” and they hit Reply, it’s going to go whatever email address you’ve set in this field. It allows your administrators to address any concerns or problems somebody might have.

The next option is for Email Format. We have Text Only and HTML & Text. Text Only is going to be compatible with most people. If you do choose to do HTML and Text, it switches and adds both an HTML version and a text version.

If you do use an HTML version of your email campaign, it’s imperative that you also add a text version of your email campaign. Some email clients won’t actually be able to read an HTML email or they’ve set their preference to only receive text. So, if you don’t have a representative text version, they might not actually see the invite and then you’re going to end up getting a reply email going, “What’s this, I don’t understand, what am I getting?”

So, I just did a quick copy and paste here to show you a quick difference here. Here’s the text version and here’s the HTML version. In both cases, there’s a preview in the top right. If I click Preview Text Version, I pull back up and we see the same thing we saw when we clicked the previous Preview. Now, if I go over to the HTML version, you’ll notice it’s all scrunched together. Why? Because there’s not HTML, I just pasted some text into the HTML box, so there’s no breaks, no other items. So, it does take a bit more effort and knowledge for you to set up that HTML email. But if you do, you can really add some branding, some other styling.

Now, to give you an idea what things look like, I actually have a preview here of what an invitation looks like in HTML and text, actually received from two random clients. Now, the one at the bottom here is the text version and the one at the top is an HTML version. You can see it’s added some styling, some coloring, some highlighting, all of these effects are added in into this email. Now, there’s also one notable difference. You see here in the HTML, this email client has decided to display “Survey Research” - the name that we had in as the From Name.

And in this client, which is pure text, it actually decided to show - instead of the From Name - the actual From Email Address. All emails are delivered from invite@ and then something, “[a number].mail” or “.SurveyGizmo.com.” This is to improve the deliverability of your emails. We want to ensure that we get as many delivered as possible, so the From Email Address is set as a SurveyGizmo.com email address. However, you set the Reply To and the From Name.

So, that being said, let me show you a little more here. I’m going to go ahead and cancel out of this particular campaign and go into another one I created to show you a bit more. Here’s a campaign I created a little bit earlier, it’s going to be very similar. But what I’ve done is I’ve actually added in not only the text in the plain text version, but an HTML one that’s fully styled. And you can see that’s the preview I was showing off before, this preview gives you another sample of it and we let you know that this is just a simple preview.

Let’s talk about these Merge Codes: the section that’s on the left side. I’m going to go scroll down to the text version and you’ll see there’s a few of them actually in here: [invite(“survey link”)] and [contact(“first name”)]. The first one and the most important one is [invite(“survey link”)]. This special merge code is placed by our system automatically with that unique URL that is for that contact. If this merge code is not in your email, something is wrong - you really should use this in every email invitation and email reminder. It’s important because our system automatically provides and manages that unique tracking. So, it’s imperative for this to be here. It is automatically included in the default text that we provide, but if you do happen to remove it, you can just head over to the left side, and copy and paste a new one in.

Now, the other item here is [contact(“first name”)]. This represents some of the other contact information. This is all data related to your particular contact. Right? The unique person. It’s going to be replaced dynamically with the contact information. So, if you have a contact named John Doe, and you said his first name is John, last name is Doe, and his email address is john@doe.com, the Contact First Name will actually be replaced with his first name. So, it’ll say, “Hi John, I’m currently running a study,” and so on and so forth. It’s just a great way to personalize your email campaign with that information.

All right, so let’s review a little bit about working with the content. So, as I mentioned, the Merge Code [invite(“survey link”)] must be in the body of your email - it’s critical. So make sure if you move it, you put it back. Then, of course, when you’re sending an HTML email it requires extra formatting and knowledge, but does offer you some branding opportunities. You can really style that up.

Adding Contacts

So, let’s go ahead and talk about adding contacts. I’m going to cancel out of here and move back to our test one here, the webinar one. Adding contacts is Step 3. There’s a link on the right side to Manage/Add Contacts. Now, when you first enter it in, you have no contacts, so there’s going to be nothing listed here. This is where we list your current contact list.

The next tab on the left is Add/Import contacts. You can do it in a variety of ways. The first method is to add a single contact. Here you get all the fields that are available and you can enter in something manually. We mentioned john@doe.com, so we enter him in, John Doe and we have a few other fields. You don’t have to fill every field out, the only one that’s required is Email Address. But if you want them for extra tracking, this information is passed through the survey and is available for you when you’re exporting and can all be related and helpful. You can even pull at this information inside the survey itself.

For instance, in the survey if you want to refer to John by his first name, and you invited everybody via an email campaign, you could do so using the same Merge Code you used in the email invitation itself.

Now, you have all these fields, including these Custom Fields, and we’ll talk about the Custom Fields here in just a moment. But let’s say I want to add a single contact, so I’m going to click Add Contact Now, which brings us back to view contacts in here. We can see johndoe.com and the status is he hasn’t received it. You can, of course, click the Edit icon and go ahead and make any changes you’d like.

Now, there are two other methods for getting everything you need. The next one is Paste from Spreadsheet. If you wanted to manually enter it in, you could do that. You could enter “john@doe.com,” which we’ve done before, and I could say, “John Doe,” and so on and so forth until I get him on the list and the next could be “jane@doe.com,” “Jane,” and so on and so forth. However, if you have a spreadsheet open and you’re having some issues with uploading or whatever you’d like, you can actually copy and paste your worksheet in here. So, give me one second, I’m going to pull up my spreadsheet and I’m going to do a copy and paste.

All right, here we have a very, very simple spreadsheet, I can actually go and zoom this in here a little bit. Let’s go ahead and zoom that up, 200%, make things a little easier. Okay, here we have a simple spreadsheet, right? I’m going to take this data, I’m going to go ahead and say copy, flip over, paste that in. Now, this is a little bit different. You’re going to see that there’s these tabs spaced in between here. This is how the copy and paste happens.

SurveyGizmo is smart enough to understand the differences between tabs as a delimiter and commas as a delimiter. (Delimiters are what’s going to separate the different points of data on each row. Each row is a different contact and then either the tabs or the commas are what’s separating it).

So, if I want to add these in, I go here to Map Fields - this automatically detects the tabs and knows the differences and asks you to play a matching game. So, it gives you a sample of that first column of data and it says, “Well, what goes in the email field?” Well, I’m going to choose “Mario@sgizmo.com.” For the first name, I choose my first name, last name, I choose my last name and organization, I’m going to choose “SurveyGizmo.” Now, if you leave it blank, it’s not going to match a particular column. But you’re absolutely welcome to match up as much data as you want.

When you’re done, you click Import Contacts. It takes a second, during which it says “Import is in progress,” so while that’s getting added in, we’ll go ahead and switch over to Add/Import and we’ll choose the last option, which is Import from CSV/Excel file. And we have an entire tutorial on how to get a CSV file out. If you’re using Excel, or you’re using Open Office, or you’re using Microsoft Works, or you’re using some of the tools that are on the Mac, we cover the bases on how to get a CSV file out with all the different versions. There’s a tutorial available, so by all means, if you don’t know how to do that, please refer to our tutorial page and grab that.

So, you can select a contact - I’m going to select that contacts.csv file that I have and I can say, “All right, I’m going to upload the file.” When I choose to upload the file, I’m going to get the exact same prompts that I did it in bulk. I’m going to be able to match up the columns with the actual fields that I want to map to in the contact fields.

Now, you’ll notice one special thing I’ve done here with the spreadsheet that I’ve built. I’ve labeled the very first row as headers: “First Name,” “Last Name,” “Email Address,” “Company.” When you import these from a spreadsheet, 1) this will help you keep yourself organized when you create your spreadsheet of contacts or you have it, and 2) when you’re playing matching, it’s going to list it out as “First Name,” “Last Name” and “Email Address.” So, if I went ahead and clicked Upload File, we’ll see that in the matching, it’s going to give us those headings, “First Name,” “Last Name,” “Email Address.” So, it makes it very easy for you to match up what those things are. Really, really simple to work with.

Now, when you import it, it’s actually going to ignore this first row, it knows that this isn’t an actual email address and that you’re just using it for labeling. So, you don’t have to worry that you’re now going to have this weird contact imported, we’ll just ignore that. So, I’m going to head back to View Contacts here and cancel the import. Back to the big campaign, so let me recap this really quickly.

So, when you’re pasting from a spreadsheet, it treats each line as a new contact and the system will automatically work with comma- or tab-separated data. In effect, when uploading a CSV file, you can match the sample data from each column with contact invite fields, that same thing happens with pace in bulk and make sure you use a header to keep things easier and organized, just for yourself.

So, let’s talk about the different fields related to a contact. Now, if I was to go in - I’m going to go ahead and go into Manage Current Contacts here and go in and edit John Doe and talk about the differences here between the different contact data.

The first set of contact information here is general information about this person, right? It’s all related to their email address, their first name, their last name, their home number, their address, the company they work for, their website - this is all data that’s not going to change.

This top set of data (that’s all this main contact information) is going to be globally across your entire account. That means if you use John Doe and you add him into multiple surveys and you use him over and over in your multiple surveys, multiple campaigns, it’s all going to be related to the same data. That’s beneficial if John Doe gets married, he decides to marry Jane Smith and decides to take her name, so you would go in here and you switch his last name to Smith, and it would be now John Smith.

Because this is global across your entire account, when you save this, it’ll actually update across every survey and email campaign that you have. So, it’s a very quick way for this contact data to be updated. You don’t have to go through and change it everywhere you need it. The first time you say, “Upload this contact again” and you have it with a different last name, it will update globally.

Custom Contact Fields

Now, sometimes there’s bits of data you want related to a particular campaign only. That’s why we have these Custom Fields at the bottom. These following fields are for this invitation only, right? This campaign. It’s not even just survey-specific - it’s just for this campaign. For instance, if you’re sending out contacts and you’re asking them to rate a show they’ve seen and so maybe John here went to see Jersey Boys, you wanted to insert this and make it visible within the survey, as well as in the email invitation, because they’re going to be rating how they felt about their experience when they went to see Jersey Boys, maybe you’re running a tour company. So, this custom field is going to go in this campaign and say, “Jersey Boys.” Now, if you add John Smith to a different email campaign and in the same survey, because they went to see a second show, so in a new email campaign, you change it up and you decided they also went to see Wicked, so you want to get them to review Wicked.

By using these Custom Fields, it’s not going to overwrite like it did with the last name. It’s actually going to be unique to this particular campaign. So, when they see the survey and they get the email invitation and it’s going to say, “Tell us about your experience when you watched Wicked.” So this is unique data for this particular campaign and it makes it very easy to work with. That’s what the Invite Custom Fields are all about.

We display a few of the additional Custom Fields here for you. We display some basic data and here’s that custom field, “Wicked.” Remember, this is just for this particular campaign.

So, as I mentioned, the contact fields stay with that email address across the entire account and the invite fields - those Custom 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 - are unique for the campaign.

Using Reminder Emails

So, we saw this little flow chart here, and you’ll see that when you first create it, you’ve created an invitation. The next one is a Reminder Message and a Thank You Message. You don’t have to create a Reminder and, of course, you don’t have to create a Thank You. But if you’d like, they’re available to you.

I’m actually going to close out of this and go back to one that I created earlier that has some additional information. Here we’ve created a quick Reminder. We set up another Reminder Message and it’s been created. Now, there’s an extra icon available for Reminders - you can actually copy the Reminder and replicate it. So, maybe you created a Reminder and it’s a first set. You’re going to maybe send out a second Reminder and those individuals are going to see the same text, you just want to be able to send another email - copy allows you to make that very quick and easy.

Well, what’s a Reminder and what’s a Thank You Message? Reminders are designed to only be sent out to individuals who receive the invitation but have not yet completed the survey. So, if you’ve received your invitation and diligently filled it out, completed it all the way through, the system knows that. And when the Reminders are sent out, it will not send that person a Reminder because they’ve already completed the survey.

The Reminder works much like an email invitation in that you can set the From: Name:, Subject:, Reply To: and send text and HTML. Once again, the [invite(“survey link”)] is important because this is a Reminder, and you want to always include the call to action, right? What you want them to do. So, you set that up, save that and you go back.

If you have multiple Reminders, you’ll see that there’s kind of a flow. As you see in this diagram, you can flow through the Reminders. If I set up another Reminder Message and sent that out, if someone had not received the first Reminder Message, then they would not be eligible to receive the second Reminder Message. This is sort of just like a little flow, right? If you don’t receive the first one, you’re not eligible to receive the second one or receive the third one.

Using Thank You Emails

Thank You Messages are just that. They’re meant to thank those who have completed your surveys. Unlike Reminders, Thank You Messages send to those who have completed the survey all the way through. And you can see there’s a little shortcut here, that if they receive the invitation, maybe they diligently completed immediately, they weren’t eligible to receive any of the Reminders, that’s okay, they’re still eligible to receive a Thank You Message because they completed it. Thank You Messages work just the same as Reminders in that you click in, you can change the text and alter it to however you prefer.

So talking once again about Reminders and Thank You emails. The contacts are only eligible to receive a Thank You or Reminder email if they receive the previous Reminder or Invitation message. And Reminders are only sent to those who have not yet completed the survey, but have received any previous messages.

So, the next step that we’re going to be facing here is testing and sending it. Of course, an email campaign isn’t any good unless you’re sending it out to individuals. There are two ways to go about that. One, you just want to do a test, we have a Test Invitation option. In Test Invitation, you set up an email address, maybe this is your own email address and invitation and the exact form you provided is sent to that email address. Now, it’s sent with some sample data. So, all these merge codes here will be replaced with some sample data. Here’s sample @sgizmo.com, John Smith, ABC Company, so on and so forth.

So, you can see that personalization occur. However, it’s a great way to make sure that the email looks correct. Let’s say almost veryone you’re going to send this to is using Outlook, so you want to see what it looks like in Outlook and make sure everything’s fine. So, you can go ahead and send out that test to yourself.

The link is actually a valid link to take the survey; however, when they click the link to take the survey, the data they submit will be marked as test data. Test data lives in your system for 24 hours, it’s available for you to look at in Reporting, you can even view the response, but it will disappear. So, don’t worry, just because you send out a test email invitation, it does not mean that you’re going to taint your results and have to clean it up afterwards.

Next option is the Send Options. When you head into Send Options, you’re presented with all the messages that are available. Messages or Invites, Reminders and Thank Yous. And there’s a checkbox next to each one, so you can decide which ones you’d like to send out. If you’d like to send out say, an Email Invitation and a Reminder at the same time, you’re welcome to do so.

Let me show you before we look at what that looks like and why it’s showing certain numbers. Let me show you the contacts I have in here. So, in this test, we’ve done a few Invitations and we’ve sent out a first one here to SurveyGizmo@mailinator.com and Mario@sgizmo.com. The SurveyGizmo@mailinator was sent, but didn’t complete it. Mario@sgizmo did complete it, so in this initial invitation, this Mario@sgizmo.com would not be eligible for a Reminder, but SurveyGizmo@mailinator.com would be.

This last person was added on after the initial Email Invitation was sent out. I added a new contact to the list and so they haven’t received the first Invitation yet. So, they’re unsent. So, now, we’re going to head back in and go to the Send Options and explain some of the columns.

Under the Send Options, you’ll notice that we have the Email Invite, the Subject Line (so you can help identify it), and specifically when you have multiple Reminders and the Number of Pending Contacts. These are the number of individuals who are eligible to receive this particular message. So, since there’s only one contact that was added that has not yet received the invitation, you can check this box and it will only be sent to that one individual.

The Reminders are only also eligible to one person - this is the person who had received the initial Invitation, but had not yet completed it. So, these are two actually different individuals we can see that count. If I was to go and click here to send the Invitation and then once that was sent out, probably in a few minutes, I was to come back into this screen, there would now be two people eligible for the Reminder, because now a new person has taken and received the Invitation. So, you can selectively send those through.

And once it’s all sent out, you want to see what those results look like. Here we have a few ways to monitor your progress. Here’s a general monitoring of each individual one, so here’s the Invitation, the Reminder, the number of pending contacts that are eligible to receive them, how many of them have been sent, etc. So we’ve sent out two Invitations - when was the last time we sent that? And the number of those contacts who’ve actually completed the survey. And you get some totals and running through.

There’s also Status Log link on the bottom left. The Status Log breaks it out by particular contact, so you can see the status of each individual here. You can also download, this is a spreadsheet and the spreadsheet comes out with not only the contact information as far as their status (unsent, sent and complete), but it also gives you the base link and gives you all the contact information related to that person, so you can pull that all out.

There’s also one last place to check statuses. So, if you want to look at the status of a particular message, you can click into the Invitation itself or a Reminder and go to Send History. Under Send History, it will give you a running log of each time this invitation was sent out. So, you’ll see when the log, when it’s been sent and the exact date and how many people received that.

So, that covers all the steps in sending out an email campaign. Once again, you can have multiple campaigns, and there’s also a quick link here to get right to the Status Log from the main screen.

Questions and Answers

Before we go into the last thing I’m going to cover and the last tip, let’s go into the Question and Answer section. And we have a few questions here that I’m going to go through, so give me one second as I pull these up.

Can you add contacts to SurveyGizmo 3.0 via API?

Now, we do have an API call for adding contacts, but unfortunately I don’t remember if that is already ready for version 3, or if adding contacts is still strictly available in version 2.2. They have upgraded that API call, so unfortunately I don’t have that answer. I will go ahead and grab that information and get you that answer directly via email, Marcy, thank you so much for asking.

And, of course, our API documentation online is kept very up-to-date, so please check that out - we try and label that as clearly as possible.

Save and Continue saves how many responses by percentage?

So, they’re asking if you can track how many people are using Save and Continue, it seems like. There is no percentage run down by that.

Can I use a URL shortener with my survey invitations?

You’re more than welcome to use a URL shortener like Bitly to include particular links. Now, we don’t use a built-in shortener with our invitation links because people are very untrusting a lot of times when they see the shorteners, especially if they’re getting it in an email, they don’t know where it’s going. So we try and be as upfront as possible that they’re receiving information, an invitation - we even include a note for that.

Can I import contacts from other systems?

If you do have a contact management system, in most cases, you can export those contacts out as a CSV file. We don’t actually pull in contacts automatically into our email campaign system; however, our integrations with tools like ExactTarget, Salesforce, and MailChimp allow you to use those systems to send out that contact information and include a link to a survey, so there’s other ways to send information out. Specifically, with MailChimp - we’ll talk about that in tomorrow’s webinar.

Can I see which contacts have unsubscribed?

If somebody unsubscribed, we’ll let you know when you export the Status Log. It will give you that information. So you can see that. We do have to add back in a previous feature where you can export just the unsubscribes and you can get a list - just that list - but it will give you that status. So, thanks for that question.

How would I set up a campaign where on day one I send a survey to a small polygroup and then on day two, I send to the rest of the group? Then later, I want to track all the respondents together.

Well, you’re welcome to do that. All of the data’s collected in the same survey, so you can first set that up as an individual campaign - you set up and send it to the first group and you want to track how they’re doing, you’ll see all their results grouped together. You can also see that when you want to filter your results at the end, at the pro level and above, you can actually filter your reporting results and say, “You know what? I only want to see the people who use this particular email campaign and see those results.”

So, actually, let me see if I can pull that up really quickly for you. So we head under Reports and we’re going to see all the results together. But I want to create a quick Summary Report, you’re going to see a breakdown of the different campaigns you ran, so you can see all the data together or, if you’d like, you could say, “I want to see only the results for those individuals who used the first campaign.”

Save that filter and now your results will be limited to those who came through that particular campaign. So, it really allows you to look at that data individually, as well as in a group.

Of course, you could always add those contacts for the first batch first and then add the second batch later - to the exact same campaign if they’re receiving the same message, for instance. And then you can remind all of them in one blast. So, thanks for that, it’s a great question.

All right. The next question is,

If your invite is pretty much identical for all surveys that you send out, is it possible to save it in the Question Library or copy it?

So, the answer is not yet. We really love that idea, we have our Question Library that you can manage and re-use survey items, but we don’t yet have that for email campaigns where you can save that particular email campaign. So, unfortunately, no.

One trick we recommend is if you do want to do that, create a branding survey in your account temporarily, that just says, “For branding only, do not distribute.” Go ahead and just publish that - create an email campaign in that particular survey and do all your branding and set everything up. Once it’s all set, let those in your organization or those who are accessing SurveyGizmo know that if they’d like to send out an email campaign, they should go ahead and use that particular survey - go into it and copy and paste the content into their new Survey Email Invitation. So, you’re basically making a survey work as your library in the account.

Unfortunately, that’s the only method that’s available at the moment, but we love getting feature requests - that’s definitely one that we’ve heard a little bit by being talked to, but I don’t believe it’s in our feature request area, so you can always click Provide Feedback in the right side of your account and go ahead and add it to UserVoice and get it voted up - the higher the votes, the more likely we’re going to get that implemented over other features.

All right, so last question we’re going to cover before we go into the final tip:

If I set the language to Auto-Detect, which version do they display to the user? And does that also have the links that can swap to other languages?

So, Auto-Detect automatically detects what the browser is seeing and what their browser is going to see, so when they receive the link, you won’t actually be changing anything related to the email. The email’s going to have that same link because you don’t change the links based off of the languages. It also doesn’t have a translation for the email campaign in itself. But when they click to the survey and they arrive at the survey itself, the browser will say, “Oh, I’m French, I’d like to be French.” It’s a setting that some people use in their browsers. Then, the survey goes, “Okay, is there a translation for French?” If there is, it’ll display that, so Auto Detect will automatically work off what the browser has available to you.

Last Tip: HTML Email Templates

So, the last tip I want to leave you with is HTML Email Templates.

We mentioned one of our partners is MailChimp. MailChimp does email, that’s what they do - like we live and breathe surveys, polls, quizzes, and forms, they live and breathe email campaigns and email list management. So they’ve actually created a great resource of a free download of HTML email templates. They have a few of them available and they really set the baseline. They’ve done a lot of research on making sure that it’s compatible across multiple email clients and they give you a great jump off point, so you don’t have to be a previous expert - you can actually just go to this link or, since this might be a little longer to type in, simply just go to Google and type “MailChimp HTML Template.” Note that down, it’ll be the first result that comes up and it’s a great resource to get started, it’s actually what I used to build the first sample in here, the HTML sample.

So I recommend making use of that - if you want to do HTML templating, but you’re a little worried because you don’t know HTML, don’t worry: it’ll help guide you a little bit.

With that, thank you so much for attending this webinar. Once again, my name is Mario Lurig and I’m the Technical Training Manager here at SurveyGizmo. If you do have any last minute feedback you want to send through as a question, I’ll just read that feedback personally and we’ll be ending the webinar here shortly.

The video will be up probably by Friday and thanks so much, everybody. I hope you have a great day and thanks for being a survey rock star with SurveyGizmo.