Survey email best practices

Sending survey invitations via email is a very effective way of getting responses... assuming your email doesn't get blocked for being suspicious or spam-like. Most spam filters are reputation based, and use scoring systems to determine how likely your mail is to be spam, so your best bet is to follow the guidelines listed below.

Number one more important thing to preventing your mail from getting blocked as spam...

  • Only send email to people who have agreed to receive email from you.

This is particularly important, and if you send out email which results in excessive complaints then you will get blocked both by the providers you are sending to, and us internally via disabling your email priviledges. Kind of like detention but a bit more serious.

The other things to watch out for, in no particular order:

  • Personalize your emails! Make sure your recipients know who they're getting mail from.
  • Make sure your survey email message concisely describes why a recipient is getting this survey.
  • Include more text, and fewer link and images.
  • Spelling errors, lots of capital letters, exclamation marks, and classic spammy words like "buy now, "free", "money", "win" and really anything relating to prizes in the subject line are a major no-no.
  • You should avoid putting links in your email - we will strip them out too.

If you are sending a lot of email to address inside an organization - you can help yourself out even further by having your spam filter modified to whitelist our domains.

Lastly, if you're still having problems with email you can always use the Survey Link and distribute your survey through your own email client or through a dedicated email service like MailChimp. You can use an email macro - ?se=*|EMAIL|* - to have the same tracking of survey response to respondent. For example:

https://getfoureyes.com/s/b100?se=test@example.com