Adhoc mailings¶
Introduction¶
In dotData there are two ways to invite people to your questionnaire:
Let the system select people from your panel¶
A panel is a private list of people that you control. Using the selection system you can let the system make a selection of available email addresses based on the criteria you define.
This method of inviting people is described elsewhere.
Note
dotData does not offer a generic panel but supports building your own. For more information see panel management
Upload a list of email addresses¶
General guidelines and warnings¶
Warning
You are responsible for the content and recipients of the mails you send. Should mails be inappropriate or should we receive notifications of SPAM, dotData holds the right to block further mails. Please do not use the system to send unsollicited mails to people who did not explicitely opt-in to receive your mails.
To limit the risk of SPAM filters recognizing your mail as SPAM, you can take the following steps:
Use a descriptive subjects, don’t use capitals-only or exclamation marks
Make sure the content of your mail does not contain any words that might be typical to spam (eg ‘rich quick’)
Create a proper spf record in the DNS of the sender-domain. This is a simple but somewhat technical step that is best carried by somebody who is responsible for the (sub-) domain from which you are sending the mails. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sender_Policy_Framework for more details.
Inviting people by uploading a list of email addresses¶
The steps to invite people to your questionnaire as follows:
Go to the ‘mailing’ module
You can now create a new mailing by clicking the ‘new’ button
By clicking on any of the names of existing mailings you can review and change the properties of that mailing
By clicking on the ‘scheduled’ column, you can upload and schedule mails. You can upload an excel file with email addresses or a tab-delimited file. It is possible to include up to 10 extra columns. These columns (for instance a reference ID, name or segmentation value) become available within the questionnaire once the respondent starts.
Mails are scheduled in batches you define, so called ‘blasts’. You can upload multiple blasts into one mail definition.
Warning
You are advised to first test the mail to your own email address. After that, it is advisable to do a test-blast with a limited number of respondents. This way, should your mail have any problem or be unclear to respondents in any way, you can still make corrections before you send the mail to the majority of respondents.
Connection to your panel¶
Using the mailing module you can upload any list of email addresses. Should you have a panel in the system, any email addresses are matched against people in your panel automatically.
In your mail definition you can indicate whether you want panel member to be excluded from the mailing (for instance when you are recruiting for your panel), or if in contrast you only want people from your panel to be invited. If you want the system to select people from your panel, it’s better to use the selection module. In the selection module you don’t need to upload email addresses, but the system makes a selection of eligible respondents in your panel, based on criteria you provide.
Inserting the link to the questionnaire¶
Typically the mailing module is used to invite people to participate in your study. You could insert a generic link, which is the ‘open’ link to your questionnaire and which is the same for everybody. However, if you want to track exactly which recipients clicked in the mail, or if you want to upload extra per-respondent information that you want available in the questionnaire you can let the system create a link that is unique to each respondent. The syntax for this is as follows:
[# SurveyLink('MyProjectID') #]
Availability of extra columns¶
In the mail text¶
Extra columns are available in the mail text using the ExtraInfoX variables. For instance using the following code:
Dear [# ExtraInfo1 #],
you can upload the name of the respondent and have it available in the text of the mail.
In the questionnare¶
Extra columns are available in the questionnaire using the following code:
AdhocMailingColumn(n)
where n is the column number, for instance using this code:
Welcome [# AdhocMailingColumn(1) #]
you can upload the name of the respondent and have this name available in the text of the questionnaire
People who already finished your survey¶
In your mail definition you can tell the system not to invite people people who already finished the questionnaire. This way you don’t need to manually filter these people out of your file.
Deduplication¶
Should you upload a file that contains double email addresses, these are automatically de-duped within a blast. A blast is one uploaded file of email addresses. If you want to mail the same person twice for whatever reason, you can upload their address in a separate blast.
Overviews¶
Once you have uploaded a file, the ‘blast’ becomes available in the list. You open it by clicking on the ‘Scheduled for’ date. Once you open a blast you can see the following overviews:
blast.csv: this is the file with an overview of the data you originally uploaded. A column is added for the generated participationid, if any, that was assigned to this respondent, and one for the participations condition (‘Q’ for qualified)
log.csv: this file contains a log of the import process. It shows you which rows in your data file are rejected and how many rows in total were imported.
Bounce module¶
- dotData can set up a service that monitors bounces. Bounces are mails that are either undeliverable or automatic replies to delivered mails. When you give dotData access to the mail account where the bounces arrive, it will try to read the incoming mails and scan for two types of bounces:
soft bounces: these are typical out-of-office replies and ‘Thank you for your mail’. These bounces do not indicate with certainty that the mail was not deliverable
hard bounces: these are typically mails containing the word ‘undeliverable’ and status codes such as ‘mailbox not found’. A hard bounce leads to an automatic unsubscribe of the member, if the email address is connected to a member in your panel
- Note that recognizing bounces is not an exact science. Many undeliverable mails just end up in the void without any notification. The system scans for keywords and phrases indicating a bounce status. Examples are:
“does not work here any more”
“this mail box does not exist”
“undeliverable”
When a mail is recognized as either a hard bounce or a soft bounce, the system will move the mails to the special folders. This means that any ‘real’ mails stay in your inbox (eg questions and remarks from people about your questionnaire) for you to handle.
Note
A bounce checker is not automatically set up. To set up a bounce checker, please contact our support team or your vendor.