Link Surveys — Copying, Testing & Appending

In this article:

• About Link distribution for Surveys.
• Copying and distributing your survey link.
• Testing your survey Link.
• About capturing and appending email addresses — video overview.
  1. Ask for emails and demographic details.
  2. Append email addresses to the end of the survey link.

Suggested next articles: 

• Web Surveys 1 — Creating, Configuring & Enabling the Widget
• Web Surveys 2 — Launching Survey Widgets on your Website

About Link distribution for Surveys

The Link platform is the most versatile and widely used form of Surveys' distribution. Your link is created the instant your survey is published. You'll also be taken to the "Distributions" page. 

Simply select "Copy link" and start distributing your survey link. Email it, post it, message it, Slack it — use it wherever and whenever you wish!

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Copying and distributing your survey link

There are three convenient places to copy a survey link. Either:

1

Click "Copy link" → from the Link Distributions tile

2

From a Survey card → click the copy survey icon

3

From a Results page → click the "Copy survey link"

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Testing your survey Link

To test your link:

1

Copy your link as explained above → (ex. from the link Distributions tile)

2

Paste it into any browser window

3

Enjoy your survey!

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About capturing and appending email addresses — video overview

Responses in Delighted Surveys are anonymous, unless you capture email addresses and other identifying demographic information, giving yourself the ability to close the loop with your respondents.

Before we dive in deeper, view this insanely helpful 3-minute video.

To summarize the video above, you can:

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1. Ask for emails and demographic details

The Demographic category of the Recommended questions library is one of our most useful sections. And, as luck would have it, the question requesting a participant's email address is at the top of the list!

To add a request for a respondent's email:

1

Click Add another question

2

Select Recommended questions

3

Pick your Recommended category → ex. Demographic

4

Choose your question → ex. “What is your email address?”

5

Click Save question → and you're done!

Move the question to the beginning of your survey if it’s keenly important for people to provide their emails, or to the end of the survey if it’s less important. Also, don’t hesitate to add additional Recommended questions and learn more about your respondents.

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2. Append email addresses to the end of the survey link

If you already have email address lists (ex. in Salesforce, another CRM, a third-party emailer, or a spreadsheet), append them to the end of your survey link and send them out! 

The survey link combined with the email query string will look like this:

https://surveys.delighted.com/c/u/bkLBZxmT?email=ellie@delighted.com

Don't let this scare you! While appending is bit more complicated than simply adding an email address question, it's not as hard as it seems.

To simplify, lets break the string into parts:

How to append email addresses to survey URLs — the details!

To append the email address, add ?email=address@domain.com to the end of your base URL or survey link.

For example, if your survey link is https://surveys.delighted.com/c/u/bkLBZxmT, and the respondent’s email is ellie@delighted.com, then the correct link to send to capture their email would be:

https://surveys.delighted.com/c/u/bkLBZxmT?email=ellie@delighted.com

If the email has special characters in it, like a + symbol, you’ll need to encode those characters to capture the email. Use any online URL encoder (like urlencoder.org) to get the correct format. For example, ellie+newemail@delighted.com will become:

ellie%2Bnewemail@delighted.com

If you’re sending one link to each person and can manually add their emails to the link, then you’re all set! If you want to create one link and dynamically adjust the email based on who it’s sending to, keep reading...

Appending email addresses to a survey link using dynamic variables

In the platform you’re using to send out your survey link (ex. CRM or email management platform), there will likely be a way for you to reference details about the respondent, the ticket/email itself, and more! 

These may be called dynamic variables, liquid variables, or something else. These variables allow you to reference that data using a special key. The key will be replaced with the associated information (i.e., email address) when you actually send out the email.

Dynamic variables often look like {{customer.email}} or {user_email} — but you’ll need to check out your email platform’s support resources to get the exact variable.

Once you’ve got that variable, append it to the end of the link in the same way: ?email={{ customer.email }}

Using our previous survey URL, the appended string will look like:

https://surveys.delighted.com/c/u/bkLBZxmT?email={{ customer.email }}

Can I pass any other properties by appending to the link?

Right now, Surveys only supports capturing email addresses through the link. Let us know if you have another use case you’d like to see supported, and we’ll keep you in the loop on upcoming changes!

My respondents are seeing an error message. What’s going on?

If your respondents are seeing the following error message, the email that was passed with the URL was invalid. Correcting the email's formatting or the query string's syntax will allow them to access the survey.

Will my respondents see that we are passing their emails in the URL?

Nope! As soon as the link is clicked, the URL will be encoded and hidden, so it won’t be obvious to the survey-taker that their email is being captured.

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