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Selecting Respondents

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    When distributing email invitations to a survey, you may choose either to use predefined emails, set up in the Survey in the email object (go to Invitation and Reminder Emails for more information), or you can set up an email directly in the Emailing wizard.

    Note: You may override the respondents’ emails with emails from another column. For example instead of sending out reminders to those who have not answered the survey, the same link may be sent to another email address, for example the respondent’s manager. The survey emails can also be forwarded to a person, for example the survey manager, in order to notify him/her that the survey has been sent out. The link to the survey will not be included in the forwarded email. No specific set names need to be given to columns with forward and override addresses.

    Note: The noOfEmailsSent column will only show the number of emails sent to the respondents in the ‘email’ column.

    To access the email wizard:

    1. Go to the Respondents > Emailing menu command.

      2. The Selection Criteria page opens - . Here you define which respondents are to be sent emails, how many emails are to be sent in a batch etc.

      Figure 1 - The Selection Criteria page

      Note that the selection criteria displayed on this page will vary depending on the column names of the respondent file. All System fields and User fields will be presented under Selection criteria. Selections in the "text" fields must be made using SQL.

    2. Make the appropriate settings in the various fields.
    3. Click Next.

    Step 2 in the wizard, Creating the Email, opens.

    Selection Criteria

    Below are described the fields and properties available on the Selection Criteria page.

    • Max no of records – Limits the number of emails sent in a single batch email. This in effect means that you can stage a large email job through Authoring by setting up a recurring task that sends out a limited number of emails every hour until all respondents that match the remaining search criteria have received an email (for example by using max records and NoOfEmailsSent to break an email job for 50,000 emails into 5 tasks of 10,000 each).

    For example, you may have 50,000 respondents in the respondent database where NumberOfEmailsSent equals 0.

    • You set Max number of records to 10,000
    • You set NumberOfEmailsSent to =0
    • You set this task to recurr every hour.

    The result:
    Iteration 1 - Search will find 50,000 people, but send only to the TOP 10,000 people.
    Iteration 2 - Search will find 40,000 people, but send only to the TOP 10,000 people.
    Iteration 3 - Search will find 30,000 people, but send only to the TOP 10,000 people.
    Iteration 4 - Search will find 20,000 people, but send only to the TOP 10,000 people.
    Iteration 5 - Search will find 10,000 people, and send to the TOP 10,000 people.

    • Randomize order - when not checked, the respondents are selected ordered by respid. This means the first-loaded respondents will always be selected first. When this box is checked, the respondents are ordered by the internal Sid value. This is useful if you filter the list of respondents with the intention that only a subset should be mailed.
    • Respondent status – Chooses respondents based on the status of the interview, see below.
    • No selection – All respondents will receive the email.
    • Not answered – All respondents who have not yet entered the survey.
    • Complete – All respondents who have completed the survey. (Useful for sending “Thank you” e-mails).
    • Incomplete – All respondents who have started answering the survey, but have not yet completed it.
    • Screened – All respondents who have the “Screened” status (go to Stop-Nodes for more information).
    • Quota full – All respondents who have been stopped due to a full quota (go to Stop-Nodes for more information)
    • Error - All respondents who have been stopped due to an error in the Survey.
    • Number of emails sent – The number of e-mails sent to a respondent is recorded for each respondent, and can be used as a selection criterion.

    Other fields:e.g. “email” – The wizard displays all fields from the respondent list that may be used in selection. Type in criteria as appropriate to select the required respondents.

    Note: The noOfEmailsSent column will only show the number of emails sent to the respondents in the ‘email’ column.

    To make the selection abilities as flexible as possible, the selection criteria must be input in the Structured Query Language (SQL) syntax known from relational database queries.

    Examples

    Using Gender:

    If the respondent data includes gender as a background variable, with codes ‘M’ and ‘F’ for male and female respondents, respectively, then the e-mail wizard will list gender as one of the available selection criteria. To select only male respondents, enter:

    = ’M’

    in the gender input field.

    Selection based on a set of values is accomplished using the IN keyword. For example, select both male and female respondents using the criteria:

    IN (’M’, ’F’)

    in the gender input field.

    Selecting respondents who have already received more than 2 e-mails can be accomplished by entering:

    > 2

    in the noOfEmailsSent input field.

    All standard SQL keywords and operators can be used, such as BETWEEN, <, <=, >, >=, <>, AND, OR, LIKE etc. For example, if the respondent list includes name as a background variable, to find all respondents whose names start with ‘B’ enter:

    LIKE ’B%’

    Date fields:

    Note: Sending emails is simpler from Survey Designer, so consider switching to Survey Designer. Refer to the Survey Designer documentation for details of the procedures.

    Say for example you want to use CreatedDate as a criteria for selecting the respondents that are to receive emails. Note that the data in the field must be in the format ‘MM/DD/YYYY’. To select all respondents created after 10th of August 2020, Enter:

    >=’8/10/2020’

    If you have a question with a date format and you want to include that question in your emailing criteria, you can for example have a criteria such as:

    =0 AND datediff(day,q1, getdate()) = 0

    where q1 is the ID of the question you wish to use in your criteria.

    A similar formula can be based on CreatedDate by replacing the above AND datediff(day,q1, getdate()) = 0 with

    AND DATEDIFF("day",'YYYY-MM-DD',CreatedDate)>0

    Note that if you combine criteria, they will be combined by AND.

    • In the Preview Options field, you can specify the maximum number of respondents that will be displayed in the preview list in step 2 of the e-mail wizard. This is merely a precaution when working with large sets of respondents.

    Fixed Sender Domain and Email Delivery Report

    All Forsta SaaS customers have access to the Fixed Sender Domain and Email Delivery Report functionality. This functionality reduces the risk of emails being treated as spam, and gives users the option to see the status of sent emails through the Email Delivery Report (go to Email Delivery Report for more information).

    This means that if you are working in the SaaS environment, you will by default have either the “@us.confirmit.com” or the “@euro.confirmit.com” sender domain in the From field when you send emails via Respondents > Emailing. You can manually override this fixed sender domain by typing another sender domain into the Email, but you should be aware that in these cases 1) incomplete Email Delivery Reports will be generated, and 2) the emails are more likely to be interpreted as spam by recipient servers because the sender email domain will not match the sender server domain.

    When using the default fixed sender domains “@us.confirmit.com” or “@euro.confirmit.com”, you can still receive feedback from respondents when they reply to your email. To receive reply mails, you will have to specify a valid email address in the Reply to field.

    Note that "Out of Office" replies will always be sent to the From address according to the emailing standard.

    Note: Customers using Forsta SaaS Environments who have specified their own fixed sender domains, will keep these domains.
    On-Premise clients must license the Premium Emailing add-on to access this functionality. On-Premise clients should contact their Account Manager for further information.
    This functionality will not work in Lotus Notes; only the email address will be displayed.

    Mail Merging Functionality

    Information from all columns in the respondent table can be included in the body text of the email. To merge a background data field into the body text, for instance the respondents’ email address, write:

    ^email^

    referring to the uploaded email column ( it must be written exactly as the column label).

    It is possible to display the link to the survey within the email text by simply referring to it as follows:

    ^slink^

    or

    ^secureslink^

    for secure links.

    This will be http or https depending on the survey setting.

    • Ensure that ^slink^ and ^secureslink^ are not used as background data.
    • The references ^slink^ and ^secureslink^ should always be written on a separate line to ensure the link is never broken over two lines - if this occurs the link will not function.

    Note: On-Premise Customers must configure the site to support HTTPS to enable the ^secureslink^ option.

    The primitive ^surl^ can be used if you wish to resolve only to the url itself; it will not be contained within html tags as a link etc. This primitive allows you to create for example a clickable image link. If the survey setting “Enforce https access to survey” is enabled the ^surl^ link will begin https, otherwise it will be http.

    The primitive ^slinkquerystring^ returns only the querystring part of the survey URL (after the ? character), without the hostname/domain. This allows the user to add the hostname/domain part of the address separately, thereby allowing more dynamic URLs to be constructed. This would be useful for example when the user want's to send a survey from several domains (different clients) while using just one invitation email template.

    So if the full survey URL is https://survey.euro.confirmit.com/wix/p12345678.aspx?__sid__=Bx6Y1u_5T9qh......NdU652cryDl2A2

    Then ^slinkquerystring^ will return __sid__=Bx6Y1u_5T9qh......NdU652cryDl2A2

    Avoiding Unnecessary Respondent Inquiries

    To avoid unnecessary failure messages and inquiries from respondents when running limited Web-surveys, Forsta strongly recommends that you include the following information in the e-mail body text:

    • Read the following before you enter the survey!
    • In the event you cannot access the survey by simply clicking on the link, cut (copy) – and – paste the link into the Internet address window. Make sure it is on one single line and without any spaces.
    • Navigate forwards and backwards in the survey by clicking on the >> and << buttons, or just >> if the back button is disabled. Do not use the browser's “Back” and “Forward” buttons as your answers may not then be saved!
    • If you are not able to move on to the next page, you may have forgotten to answer all the questions on the page. Look for an error message.
    • Use the link in the e-mail message when you wish to continue responding to the survey after a pause. Do not bookmark the survey page!
    • The link is unique to you! Do not send it to other respondents.

    If you are including the unique links to the survey at the bottom of the email message by checking the Include link flag, ensure that the mouse cursor is at the beginning of a new line. You will then prevent the link to the survey merging with the body of your email message.

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