ExactTarget Integration Webinar

Good morning, everyone. My name is Mario Lurig with SurveyGizmo and today’s webinar is on ExactTarget Integration. ExactTarget is one of SurveyGizmo’s partners – we offer robust integration that allows you to do things with ExactTarget data within your SurveyGizmo surveys. So you actually get to pull in data and work with it.

What is ExactTarget? If you’re not familiar, ExactTarget is an email service provider. They’re a really robust system for sending out emails - whether it be newsletters or whether it be points of contact. You can store a lot of data about each of your subscribers within ExactTarget itself.

ExactTarget allows you to do email communication between you and your customers. SurveyGizmo, of course, is the expert in surveys. They do emails, we do surveys. We’ve brought those two together. What does the integration do? Basically, two simple things: we can pull subscriber data from ExactTarget and we can push Survey Data into ExactTarget.

So those are the two things that we can accomplish within this integration. SurveyGizmo offers a full tutorial that walks you through the process. If you go to SurveyGizmo.com > Help/Support > Tutorials, you’ll find our third party integration tutorials. One of those is, of course, our ExactTarget integration. It walks you through many of the steps, pointing out step-by-step what you need to do to accomplish this integration – everything from creating the link to going ahead and setting it up within your survey.

So feel free to review the tutorial at any point in time if you have any questions or you’d like to follow and read along rather than watch a video.

SurveyGizmo ExactTarget Integration Walkthrough

The very first thing you need to know is that when you’re looking at SurveyGizmo and you’re in your account, you need to enable the ExactTarget integration. To do that, you have to be an administrator on your account and click on account settings on the top right. Now, if you don’t know if you’re an administrator, it will be very clear once you click account settings. If you come to the account settings page and you see just the option to change your password, you’re a non-administrator - you’ll need to speak to somebody else on your account to gain access. However, if you have all of these tabs available to you, you are an administrator.

From here you want to head to the API tab and set your third party integration to 'ExactTarget.' As you can see it goes by user name, password and you can even give it an account label. You can have multiple ExactTarget accounts linked within SurveyGizmo and you can choose when you’re creating it which ExactTarget account you’d like to interact with when you’re adding your integrations.

So you enter in your information and hit 'Save 3rd-Party Settings.' It will go ahead and verify that the settings are correct with ExactTarget and then save. If there’s a problem (for example, you messed up your password), it will let you know that there was a problem so you can fix it before moving away from this page.

Once that’s all set up, you actually are going to be doing everything from within a survey. Now, I have a simple survey up here. This survey is straightforward in that it has a main contact group, asking for the company name and email address and just a thank you page. It’s a little one-page survey. If you were to see this just by itself in the preview without any of the integration, you would just see this, company name and email address - that’s all that’s provided.

But what we’re doing is something extra special. Let’s take a look inside ExactTarget first and foremost. Now, here I have a list. And on this particular list, which is a contest promotion list, I have one subscriber (myself). If I click on myself as a subscriber, I have different attributes assigned to me that I’ve created previously. Now you’ll notice in this account, I have my full name, the subscriber is free, there is no organization currently listed and there’s a few other details associated with this particular subscriber.

Now, I wanted to point out the organization, because we’re actually going to be updating this and demonstrating how it functions before we dive in to actually see how to make that change. So we have no organization currently set. I could manually set it here, but, instead, we’re going to make use of our SurveyGizmo online survey. Remember, in our preview, we were asking people for two things: company name and email address. So, I’ve set up an email through ExactTarget and sent it to myself, and in that email we’re getting a link that looks somewhat similar to this. So I’m going to reload the survey from the ExactTarget email.

Now you’ll notice that when I was previewing it, these two fields were empty. But now I’ve come to this survey slightly differently and it’s already pre-populated the email address. That’s because it’s actually communicating to ExactTarget and pulling in the subscriber information about mario@sgizmo.com. But there is no company name, so I’m going to go ahead and put in SurveyGizmo as my company name and I’m going to go ahead and submit this survey.

So in the first portion, it pulled information in from ExactTarget and in the second half, it’s now going to push that information back to ExactTarget. Now you can see it says “Thank you for taking our survey, your response if very important to us,” well, that’s fantastic.

We’ve completed the survey so I’m going to go back into ExactTarget, click mario@sgizmo.com again, go to 'View Attributes,' and you’ll now notice the organization has SurveyGizmo listed. I’ve just updated that information within ExactTarget through a SurveyGizmo survey. That’s one of the key benefits: pull information from and then add information to ExactTarget.

So, let’s take a look at how that was all built. Now, first and foremost, is building within ExactTarget. Now, in your normal email program you can just put in any sort of text or messaging you’d like. Within ExactTarget, they of course allow you to customize the entire email and here we have a collection of HTML, lots of break tags, and at the bottom we have the ability to track email opens, and we have all the other options they provide at the top here that you need to include, such as the physical mailing address.

So this is a pretty standard ExactTarget email. The key area here is the section in the middle. This is where we’ve added a link to SurveyGizmo into this particular email. Now, I’m going to preview it to make it a little easier to view. I’ve done something extra special here, I’ve also highlighted it in yellow. Because we’ve created a URL for SurveyGizmo for our survey and added that directly in here and done something to the end, the highlighted portion is added on.

Where do we get that URL? Well, if you go under your projects tab in your SurveyGizmo project and then go to the publish tab, you’re presented with the different publishing options for your survey that you’ve created. Now, we’ll go through adding the ExactTarget action items in a second, but when you go to publish and you launch it, you’ll have a list of campaigns available to you and you can create new ones. I created one called the ET Email Branded Sub-Domain and here is the link that we’re using. So this is where you get the link to send people to your survey. So, I’m creating that and I’ve added that directly to the HTML message.

The second portion here is what I’ve added in. Now, you see I have a question mark, then etemail= and then this special code. Now this is a code provided by ExactTarget. This code will get replaced by ExactTarget automatically with the email address for that particular subscriber, so the code will be unique. Remember, if I head over here, you can see it’s replaced it with mario@sgizmo.com because that’s who it was being sent to.

So ExactTarget is going to go ahead and replace that code automatically for you. But first you have to add it in. To do that, you’re going to go in, create your link, you can highlight the section where etemail=. So let’s say this is blank and you go, “All right, I want to personalize this.” Okay, that means I want a personalization email address. So you click insert, and it will now insert that code for you. If you don’t remember how to click through for it, it is also in the tutorial on what the code is and how to make use of that.

All right, so we’ve added in the email address. And why do we use this ?etemail=? Well, this is special code to pass the value over to SurveyGizmo. Now, it’s important to note that we’re doing this as a suggestion - etemail can really be anything. But to keep things simple, the tutorial and this webinar, we’ll teach you to use etemail as the code to be consistent. Which brings me to tip number one: use the variable name etemail to be consistent. When you do things over and over the same way, you’re less likely to make an error and have some confusion on why it might not be working. So that’s my first tip for you.

So now you’ve created a test link and you’ve updated it with the email address - excellent. Everything’s set on the ExactTarget side. Now it’s time to build on the SurveyGizmo side and add in your ExactTarget actions. So heading back to the SurveyGizmo editor, to add an ExactTarget action to your survey, you’re going to using the add action button. We have a toolbar on the left where you can drag in the action bar, so you can left click on this gear and drop it in place or you can click Add Action in the bottom right of any page to add in an action.

So we’re doing two things with the ExactTarget action. Remember, you can either pull information or push information. In this case, at the very beginning of the survey, you want to pull in the subscriber data and do something with it. So we’re going to click Add Action. We’re then presented with all the different action types - you’re going to choose ExactTarget. You give it a name and when you give this name, you’re going to call it “This is a new ExactTarget action,” and you’re going to choose what you can do.

Now I’ve created this on the first page of the survey. You can have the ExactTarget Pull on the first page, but you can’t push data because you haven’t collected anything yet. So we’re going to choose Pull, right? We want to get information from ExactTarget. When I click Add and Edit Action, it creates a new action in for us, which you can see the title here.

The very next section is asking Get ExactTarget Subscriber (by Email). This is asking, “Where do I get the email address of the subscriber I want to deal with?” Now as you know, we’ve built it to pass that over using a variable called etemail. So, we’re going to choose URL Variable from the drop down and we’re going to use – remember, be consistent – etemail. This lets SurveyGizmo know what to look for.

The next section, is where you can set up, if you prefer, what you would like to pre-populate within SurveyGizmo (this is usually why you would do a pull). So, for instance, from this account, you have a collection of fields here and you might say, “I’d like to pre-populate the email address field and I’d like to put that into the email address question within SurveyGizmo.” The item on the left is the attribute within ExactTarget. The item on the right is the question within SurveyGizmo that you’ve already created.

I’m actually going to close this one off and show you one that’s actually been working to show you it in its finished form. So here we have Get Subscriber Data, etemail, and we’ve populated EmailAddress to the Email Address question and Organization to the Company Name question. Now at the very bottom, we have one extra detail that we’re not making use of at the moment. You can actually decide whether this ExactTarget pull will occur based off of a particular rule. You don’t always have to do it at the beginning of the survey. You could have a question that states, “Do you want us to use your current information or would you like to enter in new information?” and if they say, “Yes, use my current information,” you can set logic here that says, “If they said yes, then go ahead and run this action (aka, pull from the subscriber data).”

So, we’ve set up a pull from ExactTarget on our first page. In that case, that’s the first thing that’s happening: the survey taker has gotten this email and it is pulling down data from ExactTarget and pre-populating those two fields. That’s the first functionality.

The second functionality we’ve set up in this particular survey – and you don’t always have to use both, you can use one or the other. The second functionality, we add to the thank you page. The steps are very similar, we choose Add Action, I’d like to add ExactTarget action, we name it new ET action, and we’re going to go ahead and choose ExactTarget Push. So then we’re going to click Add and Edit Action, and the system is now communicating with ExactTarget to verify what fields are available for us. And now it asks you a slightly different variation. It says, “Well, where do I get the their email address?” And if you wanted to push it back to the exact same person, you can use the etemail variable or you can make use of an email address that they’ve provided within the survey.

In our case, we pre-populated the email address field, so we can select that. Because our goal with this survey is actually to pull in their information and allow survey takers to update that information, and then push the updated data back to ExactTarget.

So which list should this subscriber belong to? You want to choose this list – and in this case, we’re working with a contest promotion list, because remember, a subscriber can be part of multiple lists. If you’d like, imagine you had an ExactTarget survey that would pull in people from one list and ask, “Would you like to be part of another list?” So they’re giving permission to switch lists. If they say, “I’d like to be moved to that other list,” it can pre-populate that information and then push them to a completely different list and run that only if they said that was okay.

So let me close this and show you the finished product that we’ve built. Now one thing to note is that the list here in the drop down of the ExactTarget lists that are available is generated when you create this action. If you’ve created a survey a while ago and then a few months later you create new lists within ExactTarget, you need to update this. We don’t currently offer a quick refresh – that’s coming in the future. However, you can simply create a new ExactTarget action and remove the old one. And when you create the new one, it will pull the lists from ExactTarget. So if your list is not here, you probably created it after you created the item in the survey.

So here’s our finalized version. We’re taking the email address that we’ve pre-populated and now we’re updating back from SurveyGizmo questions (in this case, the email address field and the company name field). And we’re updating the email address and the organization within ExactTarget. And that’s how we push the data back in.

So you’ve got everything set up, it’s time to do some testing. So here comes tip number two: be diligent. Send yourself a test email. ExactTarget allows you to send out a test, so here’s our preview, and here's where you say “send”. I like to do a test send – it can send this out to somebody. It’s important to do so, so you can see the effect of ExactTarget pulling down subscriber information from SurveyGizmo.

All right. That’s the main part of the integration: pulling in data. But another way to think about it is what do you do with it? So here’s tip three: be amazing. If you usually pull data, think of ways to push new data. Why? Well, here’s a couple of use cases for people making use of ExactTarget and SurveyGizmo. In one, they’re pulling in ExactTarget information and they’re driving survey logic, so for instance, if you have subscriber data, in there you have maybe an account level bit of information. You might want to pull that in and then have pages of questions that are only shown to people, one page is only for those who are free, one page for paid customers, another one is for paid customers that are of high value. You can really customize your survey based off the information that you already store in ExactTarget.

So that’s one way you might normally pull data. Here’s another way you can push data. A lot of people will use it as a sign-up form. Because you can actually add new contacts to ExactTarget from the form. So imagine you have a sales contact form and you have a checkbox that says, “Would you like to be added to our mailing list?” If they check that and say, “Yes,” you can add an ExactTarget push to populate subscriber information in SurveyGizmo using the email address they provided and add them to a list for your newsletter. So if you’re using it in one way or you think of using it in one way, try and think of other ways to make use of it. You’ll find that it’s quite powerful.

SurveyGizmo-ExactTarget Integration Q&A's

All right, let’s go into some questions and answers.

There’s a question here that says, “Do attributes pulled into the survey have to be displayed there?” The answer: no, you don’t have to display attributes in your survey. Now, in our case, we decided to pre-populate fields that were visible to the respondent/survey taker.

However, you can create additional actions. So here we have hidden value actions – these are actions just like the ExactTarget actions. You click Add Action and then choose Hidden Value. Hidden values are like open text fields, just like the company name here. However, they’re not visible to the respondent. You can populate those fields and they’ll be part of your survey data, so you can have tracking of information about that subscriber without actually displaying that to the respondent.

That’s also very helpful if you wanted to do something like in this case, where we have one called Completed Survey Flag with a value of one (it’s a hidden value that’s set to one). That’s always going to be there. The purpose is that a particular client wanted to connect someone and when they complete the survey, wanted to update their subscriber account with a one for the survey attribute to let them know that they’ve completed the survey, so they can go ahead and re-filter that in ExactTarget for example to “Send reminders to please fill it out again.” So you can set different values and you can pass back anything that exists in the online survey, whether it’s visible to survey takers or not. The hidden value fields are a great way to go through that.

All right, let’s look at another question. So, Robert actually brings up a great point regarding the Test Send feature within ExactTarget. They actually just changed some of their testing. They used to offer a slightly different test method for testing emails and they just changed it on February 10th, but he wanted to point out that personalization does not render when you do simple test sends. So here’s what I recommend if you want to test your functionality. You can always manually build it, but you can also go ahead and just create a quick test list, put yourself on that list, and send yourself the invitation. You can just do essentially a copy of an existing list, so that’s a great point, Robert, thank you for bringing that up.

This is a follow-up question: If you have to have a database of subscribers ready, or not even just have a subscriber list. So, ExactTarget, you don’t have to have a pre-made list – you can have just contact form says, “Would you like to join our email newsletter?” And they provide their email address, they opt in and you push in to ExactTarget that subscriber information and that email address. So you’re generating your list using SurveyGizmo as the source to generate those individuals, so you don’t have to have a list, it’s just one of the features of the integration.

Now, we have a question here from Matthew: when SurveyGizmo sends emails, we provide the option of sending unique survey links to each recipient. What he’s referring to is that we have the ability to send one email equals one response. Is there a way to integrate those same unique links to ExactTarget when they send them out?

The two systems are not linked, so the general question is, the save and continue feature. We say, you get one email and that unique link is just for you – it will always go back to your response. By default, it’s not possible to link that up between SurveyGizmo and ExactTarget – however, we have a feature called SGUID that could be used to kind of mimic the effect. Instead of, using etemail as a field, we could actually use SGUID instead of etemail and it will actually have a secondary effect within SurveyGizmo. So, for that question, I would go ahead and search on SurveyGizmo for SGUID and get in touch with our support team and they can help you with setting something like that up. And we don’t have it in the tutorial yet, but it is possible to do it, it’s just not as straightforward as using our email invitation system.

All right, we have one last question here, then we’ll wrap up. Sorry, the last question was actually asking about a recording again, and, yes, absolutely, there’s a recording, will be available by the end of today and you’ll get an email to remind you where to grab that.

With all the questions covered, one last thing to say and that’s simply you’re now an ExactTarget-SurveyGizmo integration rock star. If you do have any other problems or questions, you can, of course, review the tutorial, review the video again or get in touch with our support team. Remember, as an enterprise or dedicated customer – which gives you access to the ExactTarget integration – it also allows you to give our team here in Boulder, Colorado, a call or shoot them an email, if you run into any problems.

My name, once again, is Mario Lurig and this has been a SurveyGizmo webinar on our ExactTarget integration. I hope everyone has a great day. Thank you, so much.