Personalizing your Surveys

Please Note:This is a tutorial for SurveyGizmo 2.0 users. We will be updating this for SurveyGizmo 3.0 users ASAP

If you’re looking for a way to increase your survey completion rate by 10-20% (and who isn’t?!), one relatively simple technique is to personalize your survey. SurveyGizmo lets you personalize surveys in a couple of ways: by passing information to the survey through a personalized URL, and by taking question values (aka answers) and putting them into subsequent questions.

Here is a common example: You can personalize the text of a survey to greet respondents by name. For example, http://s-j7aum-118.sgizmo.com/?first_name=Christian passes the url variable “first_name” into the survey with the value “Christian.”

For those of you who are not familiar with the term, “url variables” are pieces of information passed to web pages in the web address. It’s very common for marketers to use this capability when sending email invitations to a survey.

Personalizing Your Survey from a URL Variable

A 3-part tutorial on passing url strings into SurveyGizmo is now available.

In order to personalize a survey, you need to create personalized survey URLs. No, this doesn’t mean you need to manually create a survey URL for Tom, another survey URL for Harry, another survey URL for — you get the picture. Instead, you do this with what is known as merge codes. Even if you don’t know what a merge code is, the process is quick and easy. If your email program supports sending personalized email messages (and most do), then it will also support personalized URLs.

The exact process will vary, depending upon your email service provider (ESP), but in general the steps go like this (our example is for ExactTarget customers; you may want to check with your ESP for its exact merge codes):

1. Put the link for the survey into your email body, followed by /? (this is important!).
2. Then, add the name of your field, such as fname, and equal sign to the end of the URL.
3. Then, add the merge code for that profile attribute after the equal sign.

Tip: You can add more fields by separating them with an ampersand.

What you end up with is something like this: http://s-j7aum-118.sgizmo.com/?fname=%%First_Name%% (just an example)

When you send out that email to your list, the %%First_Name%% will be replaced by the first name of the subscriber. Remember, other email service providers have a slightly different merge code system, but almost all of them can do this.

Okay, great, so now each respondent has a personalized survey URL. But you haven’t yet personalized the survey itself. Continuing in this example, we are going to create a personalized welcome message on the first page:

1. From the survey editor, click “Add Text/Image.”
2. On the next page, choose the radio button “Add Descriptive Text.”
3. In the text box that appears, enter something like: “Welcome to your survey [%%GET_fname].
4. Make sure you’ve chosen the right place for the greeting by selecting the desired location from the Insert drop-down menu.
5. Click Add Image/Description.

Now when a person clicks on their invitation link in the email message, their first name will be passed to the survey and the survey will greet them by name.

As “gimmicky” is this sounds — our stats show it can improve your survey completion rate by 10-20%!

Customizing Questions Based on Other Questions

This one is fun. Every single question in SurveyGizmo has its own Merge Code (code that merges information from one place into another).

You have probably seen ‘merge code helpers’ all through our application. These are drop down lists that show all the questions from previous pages in the survey. Selecting one of these questions will show you that question’s unique merge code.

So when would you use question value merging?Let’s say you have a survey and on the first page you ask for the name of a sales person or sales rep that the respondent has been in contact with. On the following pages you can merge the value they typed into the question titles and options. This is far better than simply repeating “the sales person you typed on question one of this survey” everywhere, and again it improves your completion rate!

Here’s how. In our example, question 1 is “What is the name of your sales rep?” and question 5 is “Does (sales rep name) return your calls quickly?”

1. In the Survey Editor, click the Edit icon for question 5.

2. From the Merge Helper drop down menu, select question 1.

3. Copy that code and paste into the spot “sales rep name” in question 5.

That’s it!

In case you’re curious, here’s a little insight into our merge codes; the format is a little different from URL merge codes.

The format for question merge codes is: [%%##:description (Default: text)%%]

The default part of a merge code is completely optional. But it’s useful if you are merging an optional question.

The description part of the merge code is just to make the code more readable. Usually it is the first 20 characters of the question title.

The ##: part is very important. That’s the ID of the question and you shouldn’t mess with that.

Special Merge Codes

There are several special merge codes, most having to do with the survey template itself. You can learn more about them by reading our tutorial on designing survey templates.