Create a survey

Surveys are an easy way to gather useful information from your contacts. For your contacts to fill in your survey, you can link it to your message or you can use a web version of the survey to share the link or place it on your website. All the data that can be filled in in your surveys can be found your survey reports. This article will take you through the steps of creating a survey and all the survey settings which would be applied to your survey.

Create a survey

1. To create a new survey, go to Forms > Surveys section of your account. Here you will be able to see all the surveys you have already created, ordered by category.

   

2. Click on Create new survey, then enter a name for the survey, select a category and click on Save. 

   

3. At the top of the survey you can provide an intro text. You can format it with the text editor or the HTML Editor. You can also choose whether the survey would be anonymous or not by ticking off the checkbox.
   

   

Survey fields 

If your survey is not anonymous, you can Activate the identification fields you want to include. Check the box Required if the field would be required to be filled in. You can also connect a field to the database by checking the Use database box and select the corresponding field in the drop-down list. That way, the selected survey fields would be prefilled with the information you have in the Flexmail database. Check the box Edit when you wish to overwrite the existing data in the database with the data entered in this field.

Add a question to a survey 

To start assembling your survey, prepare your questions with Add a question and select the question type and related options for each one.

For each question, you can add an explanation in the Remark field. E.g. you can add the explanation "Multiple answers possible" to multiple choice questions. You can also indicate whether it is required or not and you can format the questions and remarks with an HTML editor.

Question types

There are 9 possible question types you will be able to choose between:

• Small text field
• Large text field
• Multiple choice (max. 1 answer possible)
• Multiple choice + small text field (max. 1 answer possible)
• Multiple choice + larger text field (max. 1 answer possible)
• Multiple choice (1 or more answers possible)
• Multiple choice + small text field (1 or more answers possible)
• Multiple choice + large text field (1 or more answers possible)
• Question matrix

The different question types offer different options

For all question types containing a large text field you can set the maximum number of rows allowed. 

For all question types containing a small text field you can also set an example value and validations, but only if the question is marked as Required. Click on Select a filter and choose the one you need. Flexmail will only accept an answer that complies with the filter. You can fill in an example value in the Preview box which will be shown to your contacts before they input their answer. If you choose My own filter you can set your own filter.

For all multiple choice question types you can add more answers by clicking Add an answer.

For all multiple choice questions containing a small or a large text field, you will need to enter a Label for the text field. This label will be the selectable answer for the text field. 

E.g. you can enter the label "Other". Your contact will be able to select it as an option and write their own answer in the provided text field. 

You can use a question matrix to combine all questions that have the same answer possibilities. You can indicate whether one or more answers can be selected per option.

This is how a question matrix would look like:

Add a page to a survey

You can spread around your questions on different pages with Add a page. If you click on [Edit help] at the beginning of a page, you can add an explanation for the whole page and format it with an HTML editor. 

Close a survey 

At the bottom of the survey you can indicate what should happen when the recipient clicks on the Send button in the survey.

• Option 1: A text is shown on the screen. You can edit this text with the text editor or the HTML Editor.
• Option 2: The users will be redirected to a landing page. Select one of your landing pages.
• Option 3: The users will be redirected to a website. You can insert the URL of the website you want them to be redirected to.

Preview and Save

If you feel like you are almost finished, go ahead and Preview your survey. Just navigate to the top right corner and click on Preview. The visualisation of the survey will appear in a new tab in your browser. 

If you are happy with your design, now scroll all the way down and click Save one last time to make sure you are saving the final version. Ideally, you want to Save your survey after every significant change you do to your survey.

Survey settings

After you have finished designing your survey, you can further customise its style by clicking on the gear icon next to the finished survey and selecting  Edit survey settings.

Colors

In the first section, you can select the language of your survey, which will be applied to the fixed elements, like the send button of the survey. You can also specify the font, font size and the colors of the different elements in your survey or you can upload a CSS file with your custom style settings.

Banner

In the next section, you can upload a banner which will be displayed at the top of the survey and select its alignment. The banner you upload will be automatically adjusted to the size of the survey.

Close

In the next section, you can activate the closing function of the survey. You can specify a date and time after which the survey will no longer be available. You can also enter a text which will be displayed after the survey is closed.

Notification

In the last section of the survey settings, you can indicate if you would like to receive a notification email after a survey has been filled in.

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