You can increase your survey completion rate by pre-filling in some of the answers in your surveys.

You can pre-populate any field in a survey in ResponseSuite and then choose to either show or hide that field. For example, you email a survey to your list and when they click to take the survey you pre-fill in their email address and city so you don't have to ask for that information again. Maybe even hide those two fields so they can't change them.

It's a lot less technical to do than you might think, in ResponseSuite and using a technical-sounding thing called 'Passing Parameters'. A parameter is just something that's added to the web address (URL) that ResponseSuite can see and then bring into an answer field.

That sounds a bit technical too, doesn't it. Luckily while it sounds tricky, we've made it simple in ResponseSuite. Here's how you do it:

Step 1 - Name The Parameter
In the builder, select the question you'd like to pre-populate and click the Cogs to open up the Settings.

Now in the Parameter field type in a name for that field, e.g. 'email'.

Step 2 - Add The Parameter To Your Sharing Link

Once you have finished creating your survey add a ? followed by the name of your parameter = to the end:

e.g https://yoursubdomain.responsesuite.com/q/1234567?email=

If you want to have the same information for every person who fills out the survey through this link you can then add that to the end of the URL. For example, if you want to know which of your campaigns brought this person to the survey you could create a parameter called 'campaign'. In this case you could type 'campaign=newsubscriber', the whole url would be: https://yoursubdomain.responsesuite.com/q/1234567?campaign=newsubscriber and in your survey results your answer to that question would be 'newsubscriber'. This is particularly useful when you drive people to the same survey from multiple sources, ads and campaigns. 

Step 3 - Merge In Your Contact's Information

If you want to merge in individuals' details, such as their email address without them having to re-type it, grab the merge code from your email marketing system and add it to the very end of the url you've created. 

E.g https://yoursubdomain.responsesuite.com/q/1234567?email=%EMAIL%

Now you have told your survey to populate the field you've called 'email' with '%EMAIL%' which your email marketing system will replace with each person's email address.

Optional Step 4 - Add More Parameters

To add more than one parameter simply type an '&' and repeat.

E.g. https://yoursubdomain.responsesuite.com/q/1234567?email=%EMAIL%&firstname=%FNAME%

Optional Step 5 - Hide Fields

You might not want to show their email address (or other info) on the page as it could look cluttered. You can switch any question to 'hidden' in the settings on each question by clicking the Cog.

Note on required and hidden fields:

If you make a field required and also hidden but no parameter is received for some reason, we will automatically un hide the question. This will save your survey from showing an error.

Embedded Surveys

If your surveys are embedded on your own pages, we've worked some magic so you can still pass these parameters in. There's 2 different ways to do it - most of the time you'll do it this common way, but if you're a bit more technical you might want to add the parameters to the Javascript Embed Code.