Making a Quick Questionnaire With Links
From EtelligentWiki
Creating an Etelligent Survey is not the only way you can ask your recipients questions; Etelligent's Link Action functionality is perfect for asking simple yes/no type questions. This technique of using hyperlinks, unlike a form, can be embedded inside an email and thus yield higher response rates (because recipients can answer your question in a single click).
This tutorial shows you how to create such functionality in your email.
Contents |
Setting Up Your Questions
In this tutorial we will create an email asking what day (if any) recipients would like to attend our Customer Day. There will be three possible answers: January 10th, February 2nd, or Unable To Attend.
Adding Question Fields to Your Database
Your links need to save your recipients' responses back to their contact record in the Etelligent database. Depending on the nature of the question you wish to ask, you may need to add one or more database fields. Of course, it's quite possible to point your Link Actions back to existing database fields.
Note: To add new fields to your Etelligent database, you should use the Manage Contact Fields screen.
In this example, we are creating a field which will record recipients' preference for attending our open day. For this we will create one new field in our database; a text field that we will call CustDay2009 (remember, database fields in Etelligent cannot contain spaces, but you could use an underscore).
Creating Confirmation Web Pages
Obviously we need to take our recipients somewhere when they click our links. This need not be anything complex, a simple web page for each answer with text confirming their choice would suffice. You Campaign may now look something like this:
Adding Links to Your Email
For this example we have made a very simple email with three text links in it. Of course, you could make a much more designed questionnaire by creating graphical buttons for your answers.
You should now add your links -- be they on text or graphics -- to your web pages.
Adding Actions to Your Links
Now that we have our links ready, hop into Link Management and find them.
Click the Edit link next to the link you wish to add your action to; you will then see the following menu:
From here you should click Modify Contact Information. This will then step you through a simple wizard:
- Choose the database field you wish to update; in our case, we choose CustDay2009.
- Next we choose to Replace the value.
- Finally, we must type in the text that we wish add. The text you add here could form the basis of Filters, so make sure you use something meaningful.
Once you have completed the Add Link Action wizard, you should have an Action something like the one below:
Now repeat this process for each of the links in your questionnaire.
Note: Before sending this email to a live list you should send out several testers, click the links, then use the Contact Search feature to be sure that data is being recorded correctly.
Conclusion
This technique is perfect for simple questionnaires (yes/no questions), but, as we've seen in this tutorial, it can also be used to collect more complex information. You could also extend the functionality by having the links trigger the sending of confirmation emails or the sending of alert emails to your staff.
