Mailchimp Integration (webinar)

Mario Lurig: Good morning, everybody. Welcome to the SurveyGizmo and our MailChimp integration webinar. My name is Mario Lurig. I’m the Technical Training Manager here at SurveyGizmo. On the line, we also have Dan Kurzius from MailChimp - he’s one of the support team who is presenting the MailChimp side of this integration. Dan, would you like to introduce yourself?

Dan Kurzius: Yeah, good morning, everyone. My name’s Dan Kurzius and thank you, everybody, for joining us today.

Mario: Excellent, today’s webinar is going to be approximately 30 minutes and we’re covering a few different topics dealing with the integration between SurveyGizmo and MailChimp.

Now there are assumptions we are making: if you do not yet have a SurveyGizmo account or a MailChimp account and you have not actually gone into either of the services, we are going to give you an overview of the services as we step through things. At the same time, we’re going to assume that you’re somewhat familiar with creating a campaign in MailChimp and also creating a survey in SurveyGizmo. So we’re not going to spend time on training you how to use the basics of the tools themselves, but we’re going to really concentrate on the strengths that are happening because of the integration.

So the topics we’re going to cover are Setting Up Your MailChimp Credentials in SurveyGizmo to allow the integration to be triggered from the SurveyGizmo side. On the flip side, we also have the ability to Set the SurveyGizmo API key within MailChimp. Then we’ll move back into SurveyGizmo, Create a Quick Online Survey, show you how to Publish Your Online Survey to a MailChimp Campaign, and that’s when Dan will again take over and show you how to create that MailChimp campaign and show you a little bit about MailChimp’s Subscriber Statistics Reporting and very new and very cool social stuff we will be working on.

We’ll switch finally back to SurveyGizmo for Reviewing Survey Results and seeing how that information is getting passed back, and then we’ll recap about the strengths of both services and why they’re such a great pairing and why both of them will complement what you use and how you’re going to interact with your customers or clients and those who are following you and whom you’re communicating with.

We will end with a Q&A session for questions and answers. You’ll see in the image there, we have a go-to webinar control panel. In there, if you have any questions at any point during the webinar, feel free to enter your questions into that box. At the end of the webinar presentation portion, we go into Q&A, we’ll start addressing those questions aloud and either myself or Dan will be addressing them, depending on which service you’re referring to. But you can enter them at any time, we’ll just be holding them until that portion of the webinar.

Setting your MailChimp Credentials in SurveyGizmo

All right, with that being said, I’m going to go ahead and take off this screen and we’re going jump right into the very first section which is setting up your MailChimp credentials in SurveyGizmo. Now all you need when you’re in SurveyGizmo to set up your MailChimp credentials is, of course, a MailChimp account. Every MailChimp account has a user name and password assigned to it to log into the account. That’s who you’ll be using to set it up on this side. So you first want to log into your SurveyGizmo account, here’s the main log in screen. And you click on account settings. Now I’m actually going to open this up in a new tab here.

Here’s your Main Accounts setting tab that has all your appropriate information as the account info. We’re going to head over to the API tab. Now, once we’re into the API tab, you’ll notice at the very top, it asks you about a SurveyGizmo account API key. Now if you don’t yet have this enabled - so this is unchecked at the time - there won’t be a key displayed. You simply want to check this box and it will pull up a new box and provide you with your SurveyGizmo API key. We’re going to be copying and using this here momentarily. You want to make sure this is enabled for our next step.

You’re then going to go ahead and scroll down to the third party integrations or plug ins. And the MailChimp logo’s seen here, it’s the second item down. This is where you’re going to enter in your MailChimp log in, the user name and the password for MailChimp. Finally, you want to make sure you check the box on the far left side to have this enabled. Once all three of those items are entered or checked, scroll to the very bottom and click save third party settings.

Once everything’s been saved, you’ll be brought back up to the top of the screen, it will let you know everything’s been saved and the next step is to actually copy your API key so we can get this all set up on the MailChimp side. So you’re going to right click, choose copy or if you like to do keyboard shortcuts, control c (or command c, for those on a Mac), and copy that in your clipboard so you can use it on the MailChimp side.

That being said, let me pass it over to Dan and he’ll show you where to do that.

Setting Your SurveyGizmo API Key in MailChimp

Dan: All righty, folks, so just to step in here where Mario just left off, I’m on the API tab, I’m looking specifically at my API key. As he suggested, we’re going to highlight and copy this information.

Once we have our API key, I’m going to jump to a new tab here to my MailChimp account, we’ll end up here at our MailChimp dashboard. We now want to go in the upper left hand corner of our account, mouse over the tab noted to the account, that will expose your account management options and we’re going to go to the very bottom of the list that appears and just almost, to the very bottom under extras, we’ll want to click on Integrations. That will then expose us to all the integrations that we support through MailChimp, and we’re specifically, of course, looking for the SurveyGizmo option and that’s the fifth option down on here. So let’s go to click on that to expose the controls for this connection.

First thing we need then to provide is our API key, so while we have that, we’re just going to simply click and then I’m going to do a right paste here. Once I’ve got my API key in place here, I simply want to click Connect. Now as we connect here, please note to the right hand side of the screen there, there’s a connection status box and note that there’s a test connection running for me, so if I had successfully provided my API key and connected to SurveyGizmo, within this box, I’ll be able to view some of the online surveys that I can walk down through my SurveyGizmo account. And so that’s all there simply is to get MailChimp talking to SurveyGizmo.

So back to you, Mario.

Mario: Thanks so much. All right, so we’ve got it set up on both sides, which gives us functionality on both sides, one from the SurveyGizmo side to send over a new email campaign and one from the MailChimp side to actually pull in from SurveyGizmo an online survey and start up from there.

So what we’re going to concentrate on now is you building your online survey. Now, of course, if you have your main SurveyGizmo account, your presented with a dashboard, you don’t have any sample surveys yet - you might be presented with our Getting Started tab. Well, you can create a new online survey, clicking Create a Survey on the left side. You can give your survey a title, choose if you’d like to make it a blank survey, copy from an existing SurveyGizmo web survey, or use a pre-built template. So maybe you want to do a customer service survey, excuse me, customer satisfaction survey. So you use this customer satisfaction survey template. Finally, you get to choose one of the survey themes - maybe you have custom themes that you’ve set up or you can use some of our standard survey themes and work through those.

Now, we’ve actually created a simple online survey already, and I’m going to go ahead and click into here, so I’m going to go straight into the web survey editor. So here we have a simple online survey we’ve set up - it’s actually a customer service questionnaire. It covers a few basic topics. You see the web survey’s interface, so we have a few things - we have some star ratings, we have the drag and drop ranking survey question and to actually preview this, you can see what this looks like for somebody who’d be taking this survey that you’re going to be sending to your MailChimp list. As you hop into the preview, you can see we have all these different options. This is what they’re going to be presented with, so they can go and select all their answers, drag and drop in what they think are the areas that need to be most improved, so on and so forth.

Now, that’s the preview for it. Now you can, of course, do even more advanced items if you’d like, because this integration is actually available at all plan levels. You can have a free account with SurveyGizmo, a free account with MailChimp or paid accounts with either service or both services and use this integration. But each service offers some extra benefits as you get into some of the paid plan levels. One of those here is on the ability of SurveyGizmo to add an email auto responder in a paid account. Or you could send an email at the completion of the online survey to automatically send someone the results of the survey.

That being said, let’s move into actually publishing this online survey. Now the Publishing tab is where you’re going to send this out to everyone, right? This is where you distribute your survey through various online methods, send out through a web link, send it out to Twitter, Facebook - a few different places you want to distribute it. SurveyGizmo creates a bunch of different campaigns.

What we’re interested in here is the MailChimp campaign, the icon down here in the bottom right of the box. When you click that, you’re going to be brought to a tab that looks very similar to this - it’s actually going to look exactly like this, with one difference, it’s not going to be custom-named.

When you first create your email campaign, this checkbox on here - which I want to pay close attention to - is called Subscriber Info. By default, it’s set to “Anonymous.” That means when someone goes ahead and takes the online survey from a link in the email they received from MailChimp - so they proceed to the email, it has a link in it, they click on it - when they take the survey, you will not know who that individual is, right? You’re looking for anonymous results. However, with a simple switchover to display MailChimp subscriber info, MailChimp will automatically be sending over the email address of that subscriber with the response. So you’re going actually to capture that data and relate the response within SurveyGizmo back to a particular subscriber by their email address. We’ll show you what that looks like a little bit later, but for now, let’s talk about what you do to go ahead and get that email campaign going.

You’ll see here, we have a link - click here to manage what’s in your MailChimp survey invite. Once you’ve set it up exactly as needed - for instance, set this subscriber info - now that’s all set, you’re going to save it, come back in, edit it one more time, then you’ll see that everything’s all set. You’ve got all your settings correct, you maybe even set your language. Now what you’re going to do is click here to manage what’s in your MailChimp survey invite, sending you over to MailChimp to do the rest.

This is where Dan’s going to pick it up and talk about the MailChimp side of things. Let me send it back over.

Dan: All righty, folks, so as Mario just mentioned, you would click the link to send your online survey link to MailChimp, and what that basically does is it initiates a campaign within our system. Now I know I’m in the campaign building process, if you will, because noting at the top of the screen here we’ve got a status bar that orients us as to where we are in the campaign building steps. And it basically guides us through the steps, as well as gives us an opportunity to jump between the steps if we wish to do so.

So to begin with here we’re at recipient step one of five, and so MailChimp basically needs you to select the list you’d like to send the online survey link to. We’ve only got one list at this time, so it’s preselected for us, so right side of the screen, we can simply click next.

That then takes us to step two of five. This is our paperwork step, I like to call it. So, we’ve got to do the administrative set up to this campaign and I’m going to scroll this page just slightly here so that we can all see it. And to begin with, you need to name this campaign. Now, this is an internal name - your subscribers won’t see this, so you can call this anything you like and I’m simply going to call it “Survey Test.” Beyond naming the campaign, we do pull in some defaults that have been pre-populated through your lists. So, if you set up a list through MailChimp, then we would have provided the exact defaults for subjects some may reply to.

You can, at this time, revise these if you need to do so, so for example, if I didn’t want the Reply To: to addressed to “newsletter@,” we could change that to “survey@.” So we just want to go through and make sure that these settings are appropriate to this message. Bottom left, you can personalize the To: field to your message here. Personalization through MailChimp, basically, allows you to set what we call a Merge Tag, where any data field within your database can be merged into a message. So, here’s an example of how to apply to two fields. I can show you here in a moment in the campaign step how you can actually personalize the content.

Moving over to the right hand side of the screen, we now see our default Tracking/Authentication settings for this survey email delivery. So we’ve got our general Clicks/Open Tracking settings, we also have some Google Analytics tagging, if you guys want to take advantage of that. Auto authentication for messages enabled, as well as we have a TimeWarp delivery option. So, with TimeWarp, folks, if you guys scheduled a campaign to go at say 2:00 p.m. eastern time, the campaign’s going to send it 2:00 p.m., your account’s time zone. If you have TimeWarp enabled, it should just set a campaign and send it 2:00 p.m. What we’ll do then is send it at 2:00 p.m., the time zone to the subscriber and not your account setting, so it’s a pretty cool geo-location base scheduling opportunity if you want to take advantage of it. And you simply check the box to do so.

And then past that, we also see mentions of sending to Twitter and integrating with Facebook. So if you’re not familiar, Twitter’s a mini blogging application, it’s very popular with social media circles. Facebook is a yearbook type application. What we allow you to do, in this case, there are areas you can connect your MailChimp account to either service and then when you send your survey email, we basically take the subject lines to the online survey - with a shortened URL that points to the campaign that contains your server information - and then we auto post or tweet to either of those services for you.

Now, just to quickly comment, two advantages of allowing us to do this for you is, one, it’s automated - so you set up your online survey in SurveyGizmo, you set up your campaign in MailChimp, and the rest is handled for you as far as getting this to your Twitter and Facebook account if this was a survey you wanted to make public. The other advantage to allowing us to do this is there are some additional stats that we can collect for you, should you allow us to post to one of these public services for you. Just know at this point, you can do this and I will show you what some of the additional stats look like when we get to that point in the program today. But for now, my general set up looks great, so I’m going to go ahead and scroll this page back up to the top and click Next.

That then will take us to step three of five. Now, at this point, folks, we do have many opportunities for you to create an email campaign in that we provide a series of templates that you guys can go in and fully customize to best match your branding. We also give you an opportunity to hand code and hand design the template, if you wish to do that. But for right now, we are assuming since you came to us through the SurveyGizmo connection, that you want a simple survey template, so that’s what we’re going to work with today, but I just wanted to point out that if you wanted to do something more custom with your layout, clicking on this Change Template link will allow you to go back and do some more advanced template design production, etc.

For now, in the interest of time, we’re going to keep things very simple and we’re going to work with the default online survey template that MailChimp provides us. And so looking at this, we’ve populated a title to this message for you based on your survey name and then, of course, just clicking the survey button will take folks straight through to the survey. I do want to point out that in addition to the defaults we provide here, you can come into and click into this main message area here and that will expose a constant edit screen. So beyond the defaults, let’s say we wanted to put in an introductory paragraph - we can just come in here, hit enter, and we can just paste in some copy to our liking, So I’m simply going to throw some text in here in the upper right hand corner, click to save, and I just want to illustrate to you guys that you can revise this content, as well as use some of the HTML controls to change some of the formatting, if you need to do so.

But for the sake of example, I think this all looks great for right now, so in the upper right hand corner, let’s go ahead and click Next. That’s going to take us to the plain text step, step four of five. MailChimp’s going to auto-generate a plain text version of the email message for you, so no real action needed in this step, other than to quickly preview and click next.

And then that takes us to step five of five and this one, let’s scroll the page here slightly, is our pre-delivery checklist. Now what I did here, folks, is I quickly bypassed the plain text step just to show you what an error would possibly look like for a campaign at this point. So you do want to review this very quickly before you send and if you do see an issue noted - like for here, it’s suggesting I did not have a plain text message. We’re just going to click in to resolve that and now - basically I clicked a little bit too fast past this, but we’ll just go back to this page and we’ll click next again. Give this a quick moment to refresh, & now you can see what a clean checklist looks like. So, again, we’ll review this for any possible errors and fix them, should there be any.

And then, scrolling just a little bit further past the checklist, we also see two testing opportunities. So if you guys are worried about how well your content will fare with content filters, etc., we offer Delivery Doctor tests, which is a simple pass/fail test where we’ll randomly select two common ISPs, as well as two common spam filtering applications and report back a simple pass/fail to whether or not the email survey that you’re sending made it through to them.

If you get a fail grade, there’s obviously a content issue that needs attention. The Inbox Inspection tool then provides you some more detailed inside into what could possibly could be going on with a message it’s not successfully sent. There, again, it’s your content filter, I should say. And through that inspection tool, instead of just giving your pass/fail, we provide 30 plus screen shots of your content, so you’ll see how it will look in all the various email clients. We also do more detailed spam filtering tests, where we run the content through 10 to 12 spam filtering applications, report back to you at least four from each, so that will possibly help you find two more of the problem lines that need attention and then, of course, we’re going to validate your HTML and spelling.

So now, once you’ve gone through these tests, you’re happy with the checklist, bottom left, you can send the survey now or you can schedule delivery. Now even if I’m ready to send the survey now, I’m always going to schedule deliveries, so I’ll choose that option and I’ll choose schedule and I’m just going to schedule this to go at 2:00 p.m. today. Then I’ll click Schedule - and the reason why I suggest this, folks, is just simply you may hit Send and then realize you forgot to make a change or, perhaps you referenced the wrong survey in your campaign, etc. By scheduling, you always give yourself a little room for error, so I always like to schedule so as I go to the cup machine, and if I remember if forgot something I have some time to fix it.

Now once I’ve scheduled this email campaign, I can create a new campaign or we can go back to our campaign’s dashboard and so then, that takes us back to the Campaigns area. The Survey Test is the campaign that we’ve just scheduled to send, but I now want to just quickly show you guys - once you’ve sent the message - the type of stats that we can provide you.

So looking at my Fall Special Survey to the far right, note there’s a View Report button, so we’re going to go ahead and click that at this time, so click View Report and I’ll give this a quick moment to refresh for you folks. Now there are multiple areas or sections to the report we provide you folks, and they’re all reflected through the links located in the upper left hand corner of my account here.

So looking to this area, we see that there’s a General Summary, which is where we are now. We can also provide you specific insight to unsubscribed bounces and abuse complaints insight, should you need that. There’s also subscriber activity - which Mario’s going to talk a little bit about, how through the survey results themselves you can identity a subscriber, should you enable that feature. On our end, you can also - based on open and click activity - view who looked at the online survey, and then perhaps follow up on whether or not they actually filled it out, so that’s what the subscriber activity information’s for.

Continuing down the web survey page, here I just want to point out that you do have a General Overview. The overview is reflected through the pie graph just below these links. So this is insight into opens, bounces, clicks - where we give you total numbers, percentages - and then also industry averages, so you can see potentially how well your online survey’s doing in comparison to your peers, as far as seeing folks actually receiving and opening. Click map, just if you’re curious, under click map, we actually take a screen shot of your campaign and overlay quick stats to it, so you can see what links are generating what traffic for you guys. So we can see there’s our screen shot. Performance advice are just simply trends that we noticed, good, bad or otherwise, so we post these here for you to review.

Then the final link and what I really wanted to quickly show you guys: social stats. Now social stats - remember a moment ago folks, I told you that if you allowed us to tweet or post to Facebook, a survey, there was some additional data we could collect? Well, this is what that information looks like. So just scroll the page. First, we see Twitter activity. So if I tweeted my survey, I can see that the survey generated six tweets and five re-tweets. I can also see underneath those stats specifically who was managing the tweets, when and what was said through them. Continue down this social page here, if I posted my survey to Facebook, here I can see my Facebook activity. So I can see who liked the survey specifically, again, who they are, their influence, what their rating was in social media circles, etcs. Also, member rating will tell me how active they are in my list that I managed in MailChimp. So, some interesting social insight.

Continuing down this, we also provide comments. So if somebody commented on your survey through their Facebook account, you can see the general sentiment of the comment and what was said and when. And then finally, too, if we’re using what we call an EPRL shortener to post into social environment, we can then tell you where in the world people came from to interact with that URL, as well as top referrals that influenced the steps that we’ve collected through the Facebook and Twitter posts.

So, folks, that in a nutshell is the process you’d want to go through to build the campaign, and then general insight into the steps that we provide you guys. So with that, I’m going to pass the mic back over to Mario.

Reviewing Online Survey Results within SurveyGizmo

Mario: Thanks so much, Dan, that was a really exciting. What we’re clicking into here is the main overview and one of the responses that we’ve collected. If you remember, we actually had the subscriber stats not anonymous, but actually set to pass as subscriber info over to SurveyGizmo. Sign, view and see the response here and this first one was rating Mario and they’re saying the service is great, they’ve got all the normal survey stats in here.

Now in the details tab, that allows us to see some additional information. You see the IP address, the user agent, otherwise known as their browser, and the key here is this new URL available called mc_emailaddress (MC, of course, for MailChimp). We can see the subscriber that’s filled this out was mario@sgizmo.com. Well this is funny, why would mario@sgizmo.com give Mario a really good rating? That’s crazy. But, the key is you can link that data in. And the data’s not only available here - it’s also available as part of your survey reporting.

Head over to the Reports tab - so here we have a quick look at the reports tab, we only have one survey response and we can see how this one particular question ended up. We can go ahead and see it in an export.

So, for instance, if we wanted to create an export, we go click in CSV or Excel, say I’d like to create this export. Once you’ve created the export to see those results, you get all the different things, including all the different questions. But, as you can see, one of the fields that are available is your variable MC Email Address. Now maybe you don’t need the MC unique identifier, you can uncheck that. It’ll be excluded, it won’t be included in your export, so it just gets grayed out for you. Then you can go over to run the report, go grab your export by exporting now and getting your CSV file, open it with any spreadsheet program, or you can go ahead and preview the report and this gives you kind of a quick snapshot of what it might look like.

So as I scroll over here, you’ll see that one of the columns is labeled “URL Variable: mc_emailaddress” and here’s that subscriber email. So this is great if you send out to a bunch of people and you want to know who’s taking it - then you can maybe take that list of those who filled out and exclude them from maybe a follow-up campaign you run because they’re already filled it out, so you maybe want to re-incentivize and get the other individuals to take it again. So it’s not a new campaign. So it gives you a lot of different options.

Now the last area that is really relevant to work in is when you’re looking at a summary report. So you come in here, we’ve actually created one already. We’re going into the summary report to see these results. And you can see any of these results that are compiled together, right? So you see not only an individual, based on that individual subscriber, but you can also see this as a whole so you can really see all the results together. Just touching the tip of the iceberg, but we can compile and dig into those results you’re getting from the online survey and then already have that information pulled in from MailChimp.

So, before we go into question and answer, I want to reiterate some of the strengths in using both services. First, I’m going to speak on the generality and then I’m going to actually pass to Dan to speak for a second, but SurveyGizmo focuses on online surveys, web forms, quizzes and polls, right? This is where we’re experts. We go ahead and collect the data, analyze it, that whole interaction, including exporting it, sending it out, automating that. All of that is on the survey side.

On the MailChimp side, they’re email experts. And I’ll let Dan speak to that for a moment.

Dan: Yeah, our focus is primarily on bulk email delivery. So, therefore, we’re going to have a different delivery infrastructure. Also, the data that we collect from a stats perspective is going to be based on activity with an inbox. Clicks, opens, etc. And then also as we demonstrated, there’s also some additional social stuff that we can provide you data-wise that complements the information that SurveyGizmo’s collected for your folks.

As Mario said, our focus is primarily bulk email delivery and these guys are the survey experts.

Mario: So, it’s a great complement to work together. If you’re maintaining a regular list of subscribers through MailChimp that you’re constantly interacting with and you’re working with, this is a prime opportunity for you to hit the same people with requests for their feedback. They’re valuable, they’re interested in what you have to say. So they’re great resources to tap for getting feedback whether it be your customer service or about your product, and possibly something you might launch in the future. So it’s a really great way to integrate the two services - different purposes, but they work beautifully together.

Questions & Answers

And we only have a few questions here, so I’m going to go ahead and run through these really quick. One was actually a quick comment, this is just for, Dan’s benefit: the TimeWarp feature. They really, really liked the TimeWarp feature. I’m going to have to say, quick question: what’s the biggest strength you’d say of the TimeWarp feature - like what’s the benefit of having it doing it in the local time zone?

Dan: Generally, one of the biggest uses we see that for is for daily senders, where perhaps they’re sending a promotion that’s very time sensitive, etc., and they’ll do some sort of special rollout where it’s accessible through a region. So, for example, you wouldn’t want to launch a promotion where everyone in New York would only be able to benefit from it. You want to be able to stake out the opportunity, so that folks on California, for example, come on line and can access that.

So, it’s basically an opportunity for you to promote something that’s very time-sensitive in a way that I would suggest is fair then to all the subscribers. And also, too - I should mention it’s just a cool opportunity to then specifically control when content hits the inbox from a cleaning standpoint. So, for example, historically they say don’t send a campaign at 9:00 a.m., because the message is caught with all the volume that came into the inbox from the night before. That gives you then an opportunity to give everyone a chance to clear out their messaging and potentially get a message in to them at a peak time when they’d be able to view it.

So, it’s those types of controls that the geo-location feature offers you folks. And I should mention, too, the way that works is that it actually follows or it stays current based on the last campaign activity. So let’s say I am someone in Georgia that reads your content regularly and then I move to Washington State, well MailChimp will then recognize after two or three campaigns that my IP address or my region or location has changed, it will update my status for you.

So not only is it a cool way to get content into someone’s account in a very timely manner, but it also is a smart system that keeps up with people’s movements when they move to a different time zone.

Mario: Okay, great. Actually I’ll follow up with one more quick question from, on the MailChimp side, from Diane who says:

How do I insert a RVSV button in my mail campaign?

Do you know what that is?

Dan: An RVSV button? I’m not familiar with that.

Mario: No, maybe it’s an RSVP that they’re trying to go towards, it just got really jumbled. I thought maybe it might be, we’re all thinking it might be an RSVP.

Dan: Well, really an RSVP process is going to be a link to some sort of data collection form. So you’re simply going to just place a link in your message as you would a traditional HTML link. Are you familiar with how to do that? I could show you in real time here, if need be.

Mario: Yeah, I think realistically, you can create not only web surveys, but also create an online form to fill out and you can publish it the same way that we’re using the same methodology for all those other email campaigns if you wanted to send that RSVP format, build it in the survey, you want to send that out through a MailChimp campaign. The methodology’s the same, it’s just the content on the web survey or web form side that’s going to be a little different.

Dan: Fundamentally, you’re creating an online form with a link and so whether it’s for RSVP collection or web-based survey data collection, it’s simply an HTML link in your document.

Mario: Okay, so last few questions, so we have - since we’re running a really long time here - so asking you,

As a web designer, can you run various client surveys on their behalf and keep them separate?

So, that’s specific to SurveyGizmo. Absolutely, I mean, you can run the different surveys. You don’t have to give any one of your clients a log in to SurveyGizmo - you can actually push a link to them to review the results that you’ve created, so you create a survey report and share that link with them. So you’re not required to give them a log in, so only you see all the results in your account. Now if you need to, our enterprise account does allow you to create multiple logins within the account and then section them off, so you could say that a certain person can only log in and see the results for this particular survey. So there are possibilities of doing that. Absolutely.

If you get new info from your survey, can you easily load this back to the MailChimp database?

So we don’t have an automatic push from the SurveyGizmo side to push that back to MailChimp, that integration doesn’t go that far, just yet. But, of course, you can always export any data as a CSV file, and secondary to that, of course, if I’m not mistaken, Dan, MailChimp is super easy as far as uploading CSVs and adding that data back in to update with your contacts, with say, secondary custom fields. Is that correct?

Dan: Correct, yeah, you can upload a CSV tab delimited text file or you can also just copy and paste directly from Excel. Either of those methods will work.

Mario: That’s great. And the last, so there’s another question regarding re-segmenting the list, once again, you’re going to have to do a little bit of manual work with exporting the CSV and sending a reminder out, whereas in an automatic integration as far as creating a segment automatically with those survey results.

The last question is not directly related to integration, but I think it’s a great tip to toss out. If, Dan, you have any input on it, I’m going to make this the last question. Leslie asked,

Maybe I missed this, but when did you say that the best time is to send a newsletter or a survey?

I’m going to speak on the survey side - it really depends on your audience - but on the email side, is there a best practice you’ve found?

Dan: No, I have to agree with you, Mario, it really depends on what you’re sending. Just from our insight, business type correspondence generally does best earlier in the week, Tuesday, Wednesday, outside of mornings, so, again, you don’t want to send a note when folks are still trying to catch up their inbox from the night before. Entertainment and restaurant content generally does better towards the middle, late week and with commerce it really all depends.

Now if you are curious about what would be the best time zones for your subscriber base, we do offer an A/B split testing campaign type that will allow you to split your list and create two different times to test against. Perhaps send part of the group content on, say, Tuesday at noon and then the other part of the group Thursday at one, and you can then based on the A/B split testing results see which one got a better open click rate and then based on that, start to fine tune when you would send content to your audience. But the simple answer, though, there is no golden response - you just have to kind of test things a little bit to see what works best for your subscriber base.

Mario: Great, thanks for the feedback, Dan, and we do have one last thing and then we’re going to wrap up here: there is a tutorial in the SurveyGizmo page that includes all the instructions on setting up the SurveyGizmo-MailChimp integration and talks about the different things you can do and how to build that and set everything up, so there is a tutorial in the tutorial section. And this webinar is being recorded and will actually be available as a full HD video - you’ll get an email within 24 hours letting you know where to go (which is the webinar sign up page where we have that video), also any of the C slides are actually excluded, because there’s not much content there, but the video can be available and we’re repeating this webinar later this afternoon.

If you do have any additional questions, here’s a quick tutorial link if you want to jot that down real quick or just head over to the tutorials page and get to that tutorial. You can email support with any questions you have and on the MailChimp side, there are a ton of additional webinars, just like we do and you can head to MailChimp.com/webinar to get more information about those that are coming up. If you have a question about the webinar or a follow up that just struck you about this integration that’s on that MailChimp side, you can send it over to webinar@MailChimp.com and I’m sure Dan and the team over there, which are fantastic, will get you taken care of.

Thank you so much, everybody. Once again, my name is Mario Lurig, I’m with SurveyGizmo and on the line we have Dan Kurzius with MailChimp. I hope you have a great day and thanks for hanging in there, even through the follies.

Dan: Thank you, folks, I appreciate your attendance today.

Mario: You have a great day, everybody.