Frequently Asked Questions

Question: Last week, we enabled suppression settings for our firm to 120 days, as we aim not to contact a client more than 2x/year.

We have multiple internal project managers who may work on different projects with the same client manager, so we are sensitive to how often they are contacted.

As we learn through this, if a new survey is sent (invitation suppressed) within that 120-day window, how does the recipient know it is available for response? We encourage staff to contact the respondent in advance so they know the survey is coming. If they do not have an old email with a link to a prior survey, how can the sender give them access to the survey?

We’ve also received feedback from a client they have not received the email; we’ve verified their address is correct and they requested it to be resent. How do they receive the survey?

Response: We’ve found response rates are maximized when clients are touched 4 – 6 times per year. The concern about survey fatigue is largely overhyped based on poorly designed and timed consumer style surveys. However, when clients are getting timely, relevant requests for feedback from the professional serving them, about an active project, clients don’t get fatigued. You can safely set that to 60 days and avert much of the problem.

In terms of knowing there’s a survey to complete – well, that’s part of the challenge. If you don’t send an invitation, there’s no way for the client to know there’s something to respond to. It’s a Catch-22. If you do a coordinated push on the same day, and a client gets, say, 6 surveys, ONE of them will have an email sent. And, since they’re sent as a batch all at once, by the time the client gets the link and clicks, they’ll see the 6 surveys in their queue. From there, they can easily decide to complete one or multiple surveys. After completing the first, they’re taken back to a page where they see the additional projects and they can continue to complete surveys as they wish. That’s really what the suppression was designed for – this specific use case of doing, say, a monthly batch send of surveys.

However, if PM’s are sending ad-hoc, the first one out the door will be delivered, and any subsequent surveys will not have emails sent. If the client responds to the first survey quickly (before the others are sent) the client won’t know that new surveys have been added to the survey queue. As such, there’s no real way to alert the client to additional surveys. Reducing the survey suppression window to 30, 45, or 60 days will reduce but not eliminate this challenge.

There are ways to extract the URL for each survey to then send to the clients – but it’s a lot of manual work and the net result is you’re still emailing the client again. You’re better off just letting CFT send the invitations and skipping the manual work.

Finally, in terms of delivery, there are a variety of reasons why an email may not be delivered to clients, many of which are outside your or our control. We do have some things we could do to improve delivery rates (DKIM is something we could add to assist, beyond the SPF record you have today). There’s a modest one-time cost to implement this.

In summary, if you want to send multiple surveys to clients, but only deliver one email, I’d suggest synchronizing your efforts. If you want the PM’s to still do this ad hoc, you could request that everyone schedule the survey to have a delivery date of, say, November 14 (or December 4th if November is too soon). That gives everyone a deadline but assures all the surveys are delivered in one batch. This way, each client only gets 1 email, but once clicked, they see all the available surveys they could complete.